Give your weekly planning ritual a rain date

If your regular planning time won't work, choose a back-up time that will

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
tip is to give your weekly planning ritual a rain date.
If you know that your chosen time is at least

(00:25):
sometimes taken away from you, figure out when else will
work as a backup so you don't go into the
next week not knowing what is going on. Longtime listeners
know that I think that every busy person needs a
dedicated weekly planning time. This is when you think about

(00:45):
what is most important over the next one hundred and
sixty eight hours, what responsibilities you have, and any logistics
you need to figure out. By doing this week after week,
we can calm the chaos and make time for what matters.
Listeners will also know that I advocate doing this later

(01:06):
in the week looking forward to the next week. Friday
tends to be a good time for many people as
it is a slower day By the afternoon. Many people
have limited energy for starting something new, but you might
be willing to think about what future you should be doing.
By turning what might be unproductive time into planning time,

(01:28):
you can make these minutes far more useful. However, I
have had a lot of people mention that while sometimes
Friday afternoon works, sometimes work has been very busy and
Friday afternoon becomes slammed with things that have to happen
before everyone leaves for the weekend. In some cases, people
truly run out of steam by Friday afternoon, and as

(01:50):
one person put it, sometimes they look at their planner
and just think, I don't want to If this happens
week after week, you need to choose a different time
for planning. Maybe it's something like seven am on Friday,
when you are fresh and the emergencies have yet to arise,
or maybe it's Thursday. I have started doing my weekly

(02:13):
planning on Thursday mornings for this precise reason. I tend
to have more control over this time than sometimes I
do on Friday afternoon. But if your regular time usually works,
it's just sometimes it doesn't. Then you need to follow
the example of people who plan outdoor events. Sometimes, if

(02:33):
you are invited to an outdoor party, you will see
on the invitation that there is a rain date for
another time. The organizers don't know for sure that it
is going to rain, but they know that it might rain.
Is not exactly an unforeseen problem in the great outdoors.
So by setting a second back up time for the event,

(02:56):
they increase the chances of the event happening, even if
not at the time they originally planned. If your regular
weekly planning ritual time sometimes gets taken away from you,
then you need to set a rain date for it
as well. Maybe you plan to plan Friday afternoon, but
if you see the afternoon as going to be busy,

(03:19):
you deliberately do this earlier in the day Friday or
on Thursday. Because yes, a rain date can be before
the original event if you know it is going to rain.
If the rain takes you by surprise, then you might
need to do Saturday morning. This is less ideal. It's
not during business hours, so it's a little harder to

(03:39):
make appointments and reach people if you need to, and well,
it's your weekend. I like doing planning during work hours
because for the most part, it is work, even if
I also plan my personal life simultaneously. You can always
do Sunday afternoon or evening too, if you see there's
some open time. Then lots of people already do their

(04:00):
weekly planning on Sunday evening. I think there are some
problems with this time as it doesn't get rid of
the Sunday scaries which stem from not knowing what's coming
up Monday, but it can work too. In any case,
planning is important. I know my weekly planning ritual is
how I managed to feel on top of things at

(04:22):
least somewhat in my life and how I feel I
can keep moving forward toward my goals, even with the
complexity that kids and such tend to generate. Skipping planning
for a week would make me feel pretty nervous. So
if time A isn't available, what is time be? On
a recent week, I was running around during my usual

(04:44):
Thursday time slot, but I could see that I had
about thirty minutes I would be sitting in a coffee
shop waiting between meetings, so I picked that as my
rain date planning time. The planning got done, and the
next week went more or less as it should. In

(05:04):
the meantime, This is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's
to making the most of our time. Thanks for listening
to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback,

(05:25):
you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts
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