A Sunday planning ritual that sets up a good week.
A weekly planning session is one of the highest-leverage habits you can build. Done in 20–30 minutes on Sunday evening (or whenever your week begins), it produces a week that's oriented rather than reactive — one where the most important things actually happen, rather than getting crowded out by whatever shows up.
An effective weekly review has three components: looking back (what happened last week? what did and didn't get done, and why?), looking ahead (what's happening this week? what are the non-negotiables? what are the big-ticket tasks?), and planning forward (where specifically are the important tasks going to happen in the calendar?). That last step is the one most people skip — they identify what needs to happen but don't assign it a time slot, which means it's competing with everything else for attention.
The weekly plan doesn't need to be elaborate. A list of three to five priorities for the week, with two or three specific time blocks assigned to the most important ones, is sufficient. The goal isn't a perfect schedule — it's a framework that keeps you oriented toward what matters when the week gets busy, which it will.