Full Focus Planner by Michael Hyatt - how to plan your days & weeks to achieve your biggest goals

Hi everyone, my name is Matt and welcome back to my channel. In this episode, I'm going to be showing you Michael Hyatt's new Full Focus Planner. There are 7 new colors and 3 styles out today. I know you're going to love this planner. I have a full, in-depth, deep review on every part, every page of this planner. I think you're really going to like it. It's very structured.. It gives you the things that you need to know about winning the day at work and in life. I love how they put together the daily pages, the weekly previews, and I love how they made space not just for the morning ritual, which, you know, we've talked about gets all the love, but also the evening ritual, a workday shutdown ritual. I think both of these are incredibly valuable and underappreciated in a very fast-paced world, especially with so many people working from home like myself. Again, the Full Focus Planner version 4 releases today in 7 colors and 3 new styles. If you want to pick up a new one, I'd highly recommend it. Just click the link in the description below. Full disclosure, it is an affiliate link, which means I get a little cut with no additional cost to you. End disclosure. You're really going to like this planner if you want a systematized, structured, goal-centric planner to help you achieve what you want most in life. So I'm going to show you why you're going to love it right now. The Black Executive Full Focus Planner 4th Edition. It has a lovely leather cover and these beautiful geometric end pages that I really like. I'm going to go through each section of this planner with you starting at the beginning, which is a great place to start. Normal stuff: name, email, phone, year, quarter. You'll see more about that as we go through it. But you can see the tagline for it: Plan your year. Design your days. Achieve your biggest goals. Now I will say from the beginning, this is meant to be done in quarterly format. So everything in here is designed for the quarter. So when it says plan your year, you would need 4 of these to do so. Then we have the Getting Started pages here. I do like, and Self Journal was like this as well, there is a start guide and also video coaching, online guidebook, private community. So I like how they have this. I think more planners, especially structured planners like this, should have more of an online component to at least walk you through how to use it if you didn't have me. That is an online guidebook and the community aspect, which is very, a very active online community for Full Focus. Next, I just want to give you a quick look at the contents. It's broken into 3 sections: planning, execution, and reference. I like all of these. The bulk of this is in the execution of the daily pages. The weekly preview is interspersed with those daily pages. I'll show you that as we go through it. And then quarterly previews/reviews. Starts out with a very nice quote from Michael: "To accomplish our goals, we must distill our dreams into daily actions." I love this quote and something that I definitely pay attention to in my life and something that I know all of us have talked about on this channel a number of times in a number of videos, that we have to take the things that we want to do in the long term, what we dream about, and distill it down into daily action. So definitely on point with what we want to be communicating and doing in this channel as well. So when you think about your annual goals, think about that at the beginning of the year, and then you can write them down in this. Now I haven't, to be honest, I haven't looked at the video coaching. So I don't know if I would write down like goal number 1 here, and then I have 3 lines for it. And it's due in say Q4. Launch course due in Q4. So I could do that, I could add more details, but this whole first page is for your annual goals. So I would have done this. I'm not 100% sure if I'm supposed to— like, if I was doing this in Q3, which this is Q3 of 2019, am I supposed to be taking what I would have put in Q1 and migrating it over here? That part is a little fuzzy to me, but I do like that it has a place right at the beginning and not gonna rip it out. A little shout out to the old self journal. This is one of the most important sections. It goes into goal details. There are 10 of these pages and it talks about your goal summary, write your SMART goal. It gives you a little spot to say if it's an achievement goal or a habit goal. Zoom in a little bit here for you. The key motivations, the next steps, and then your reward. And then down here is the streak tracker. So if it is a habit goal that you've put right here, then this is something for month 1, month 2, month 3, again, back to that quarterly system of looking and saying, this is when I've exercised or when I've journaled or when I've read. So a few different, a few different ways to track right here. Now when I look at these, especially these top 3 sections, these top 3 summaries right here. The goal summary to me is what I want to do. Key motivations is why it matters to me. And then the next steps is how to start and how to do it. So list the first few actions you need to reach your goal. So I really like these goal detail pages. Again, there are 10 of these that I think are really great for, again, doing what Remember on one page being able to see for a goal what Michael's saying, to accomplish our goals, to distill the dreams into daily actions. That's the beginning of this right here. So this is the goal, these are the details. Again, there are 10 of these pages. Going forward now, we have the monthly calendar. And so this could be any month that you want. So say, write down October 2019 is coming up. I could write that in, add in all of the different days right here and just fill that out. There is a part right here for major projects. I guess I should list those here, but again, that's a little vague to me as well. And I have a little note right here that I'm going to come back to in reference to big rocks, but I'm going to come back to that when I get to the referring section on page 282. But monthly calendar, pretty straightforward. Self-explanatory except for, except for this major projects. And again, I guess I could just write it down, but that's not a whole lot of space if it's something that is supposed to be major. So going through these again, going back to the quarterly system, so there are 3 months right here, 1, 2, 3. Now we have the rolling quarters, and what I could do here, again, this is all about quarters. So Q4 2019, October, November, December. I could then also put down just as a way to look forward forward, I could say that I'm looking at Q1 2020. And as you'd expect, January, February, March. And probably all I would do here is just make little notes, like if I know something is coming up, like maybe it's a birthday, whatever, a major project that I have due or some, or a launch that I have, something like that. But it's just a way to look ahead in a very big picture general way. So there are 4 pages for those. You can look ahead, say, 1 year, Q1, Q2, Q3 of 2020. Now I really like this section. This is the daily rituals part of the planner. And the reason that I love this, and we've talked about this a lot on the channel, is that I think rituals and routines are very undervalued. A lot of energy and content for rituals and routines that exist pretty much all pay attention to the morning ritual, to the morning routine. This is pretty, you know, self-explanatory, which they write down each item in your ritual, whether that is like have coffee, write, read, allotted time for it, total time, and then very similar things. So the workday startup ritual right here. Same thing, write down each item, the order that it's in, and the allotted time, total time. The ones that I want you to pay more attention to that I loved, loved seeing in the Full Focus Planner are the workday shutdown ritual and the evening ritual. So like I said, a lot of content, a lot of writing goes towards the morning ritual, you know, morning routine, and I think that especially for people who say work from home or have a side hustle or anything like that, both of which are me, is that for me, shutting down the workday is really important because like my commute is just walking down the stairs. And you may think that's really great, but if I don't have like a shutdown routine, a shutdown ritual, then I keep thinking about the work that I still have left in my planner and on my brain. And then the same thing for the evening ritual. The evening ritual I have found is actually more important or just as important as the morning ritual because If I don't have a good evening the night before and I don't go to bed at a reasonable hour, it's going to be really hard for me to consistently wake up and have a good morning routine. And if I'm not having a good morning routine, then I'm not going to feel like I have— I'm not going to feel like I can have a good night, a good evening. So both of these definitely play together, the morning routine ritual and the evening ritual. But I think especially for people who, if you're wanting to start a good morning ritual, make sure you have a good evening ritual in place first, because if you go to bed at a reasonable hour, you wake up, you have some energy, then it's going to be a lot easier to do this morning ritual. Okay, this ideal week. This is the only spread for your ideal week, and I think it's a great concept because it's a benchmark plan to return to. So you see Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, all the way through, starting at 5, going through— starting at 5 AM, going through 9 PM. And what this is, again, it's the ideal way that your week would look. And even though there are obviously there are times already filled in here down to the half hour. If you have, if you wake up a little bit later and that, you know, you're just not an early bird, that's fine. Maybe stay up a little later. I would maybe just cross out these and put in your own times. So either way will work. But thinking about it as a concept of the ideal week, like when do you, when do you want to, when do you work, when do you have free time, when do you want to focus on the extra things that you want to do or the moments that matter for you, whether it's family members, other relationships, a side hustle, exercise, reading, journaling, whatever it might be. Create this ideal week and that way anytime for me, like if I'm stressed out or overwhelmed, this is something that I can return to, the ideal week, the thing that I want to be doing. So I'm like, gosh, what do I need to do? What should I go back to? What, what am I doing wrong? I just come look at this ideal week, I'm like, oh my gosh, you know, I'm doing all these things that to me are not ideal and what I shouldn't be doing. So when you look at a daily page, you know, starts Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, so on and so forth. And what I like right here is that from the beginning, first thing, the daily big 3. List your 3 most important tasks. So I could write those down right here, 1, 2, 3. And I'm focusing on these because what John and Michael and Megan and Marissa were telling me at the office is that this is the proven number of tasks that most people, the ideal number of doable tasks in a day in terms of big, important, move you forward in the goals that you have. Now, it still has place, space right here for stuff you got to do. So other tasks.. But once you know, like, what those 3 important tasks are, put those down here. If you have other ones, see if you can put them in other tasks, or you could move one over. Just, you know, go ahead and migrate it right away over to Tuesday or to that next day. So we have our daily big 3 tasks, the other tasks, the stuff you got to do, and then a daily agenda. So 5 through 9, basically. So look at Be like 5 up here, and then 8 finishing would take you to 9 right here. Note also, let me zoom in here for you, that there are a couple of keys similar to Bullet Journaling or any other planner of like check mark for done, forward slash for waiting for, circle for delegate, defer, delete. And then over here, to-do, delegate, important, question. Like, do I need to work with someone else on this? The— on the daily pages, there is also an entire page for notes. I think that's a lot of space for notes, and I don't know personally if I would use it all. And that's something that I would stress out about or like feel bad about, is not using all the space for notes. But it is something that I really like. If— and you can see, you may not be able to see it, but there's a little like clock icon here. And so if I was like in a meeting or something, it could be like, say, 9:30 a.m., talking about churn. And I could have my notes in here. So it is something that I could keep everything that I need for a day just in the Full Focus Planner. So this is the daily page. Again, Daily Big 3, other tasks, daily agenda, and then the notes. Oh, one other thing. Let me show this to you. You gotta zoom in a little bit. Right here, and I do like this, circles for checking off your rituals. So, morning ritual, workday startup, shutdown, and then evening. So, if I did the morning ritual and then workday startup, but then, oops, but then I failed to do shutdown and evening, that's something I could come back and pay attention to. So this is the daily page. We go through all this again Monday through Saturday into Sunday. Now we have the weekly preview. And so what I like about this, and I think this is very underutilized for a lot of people when it comes to planning productivity, is reviewing the week in the past and previewing the week in the future. To me, the best time to do this is probably going to be either Friday at the end of the day as a part of your workweek shutdown, or Sunday evening. A lot of people do it on Monday morning. And occasionally I will do that as well. But I do find that Monday has enough problems of its own for me to try and think back over the weekend to like what happened in the past week and looking, going through these steps. So my biggest wins, list 3 to 5 major accomplishments, after-action review, refer to my last weekly big 3. I really like this, like, how far did you get on each of these 3 things, all the way down to completion percentage, which is totally subjective, but a good and okay thing to include. And then it's looking at and saying like, okay, and we've talked about this in our own weekly review videos in the past. So what worked, what didn't, what will you keep, improve, start or stop doing? So all of these are really good questions to think about. When you're going through the weekly review, looking at the upcoming week as a preview. Step 3 is to do a list sweep. So look at your tasks from the past week and think about like which are deferred, which are delegated. I would also add in like deleted in here. So maybe you just don't move them over if they would be deleted. But add any Big 3 or other tasks you didn't complete. Add unassigned tasks that may have come up in the notes. And then same thing with the notes, add any assignments or action items to your Task Manager. Now the Task Manager is just looking at it from a Monday, you know, these tasks right here. One thing that I would say is as you're going through and deferring or delegating, even with the daily notes, adding assignments to the next week I would try and avoid, like, really think about your prioritization and what you want to do on Monday, and see if you can just defer, even go ahead and defer out to Tuesday or Wednesday, and be pretty ruthless with especially deferring. Think about where you can delegate and how important that thing is if you didn't get to it all week. Alright, step 4 is the weekly overview. Upcoming, list important events, deadlines, and tasks in the coming week. Can use the weekly page. It's a solid at-a-glance page right here on the next, just for Monday through Saturday, Sunday. Then step 5, what are the 3 objectives to advance your goals and projects this week? This should inform the daily big 3. And so if you've watched my videos for a little while, you'll realize that this is related to like the quarter, the month, the week, the day, for planning out goals. Talked about that in several videos, including the 2019 planning video. Step 6 is the self-care planner brainstorm. Schedule your rejuvenation. So sleep, eat, move, connect, relax. So I do like that Full Focus has a place here for thinking about how you're taking care of yourself, because that in many planners is underutilized and just kind of flat-out ignored. The rest of the Full Focus Planner is the daily pages, are the daily pages interspersed with the weekly review. So I'm just going to go ahead and skip all the way through to page 282, which is the quarterly preview and review. So you're basically doing the same thing that you did with the weekly review into the quarter. So what were your biggest wins? How far did you get after action? Percentage complete. What worked and what didn't? There is more space for these. So what will you keep doing, improve, start, and stop? Remember, in the weekly review, it's just basically this right here, and you have a whole page for those questions in the quarter. Then continuing to go through, life plan review.. And there's some details on that right here. And then annual goal review. So going back to the annual goals, again, if you're stringing several of these full focus planners together, then you'd have a continual list of your annual goals. And then I do like this right here: in your new planner, indicate which goals will get your quarterly focus. Limit yourself to 2 to 3 per quarter. I really like this because oftentimes, myself included, we tend to overcommit. Monthly Calendar Review. This was one of the things that I was kind of confused by. It says, "Schedule next quarter's big rocks." There's not— I missed, I totally missed that on the first look at the month. And if we go all the way back to the Monthly Calendar, this is where I was like, I don't see anything for the big rocks. And maybe that's the major projects right here, and maybe I'm just supposed to put them in. This was something that was a little vague to to me. Write in the following items focusing on the big rocks. Then if you want, do the same for the rolling quarters. But then ideal week review, going back to it, tweak your ideal week based on your experience from the past quarter, daily rituals, and then new daily pages. So that is the bulk of the Full Focus Planner. And then there are just more pages for notes. There's some, uh, not dot grid but more like square grid for sketches, handful of pages for that, not many. The index at the back of Full Focus, additional resources, so plan your life, scale your business, all these things. And then to these end pages and bonus, a nice little envelope, expandable envelope right here. Now that we've been through the entire Full Focus Planner, I want to just show you the other styles and colors that they have in the new release. So Like I said at the beginning, 7 colors overall. There is the Executive in black leather, the oatmeal and navy blue. I hope I'm getting the color right on these 2 Classic editions. The same planner on the inside, so don't worry about anything like that internally. Everything is the same. You can see it didn't have the same end pages as the Executive, and it doesn't have the leather cover. These 4 beautiful Full Focus planners comprise the Bold collection designed by Megan Hyatt Miller, who is the COO of Michael Hyatt and Company. And again, everything is the same internally except for the end pages. And let me just— I'll go through and I'll show you those one by one. In terms of colors, there is the Olive, Poppy, Eggplant, and French Blue. So let me open these up one by one and just show you the end pages. They are really beautiful and still have, you know, still have the band on the outside, but really cool, like, beautiful end pages. Probably the best looking ones that I've seen for a planner like this. So if you want your planner to pop a little bit more, definitely consider the Bold line. You can also see that it has a two-tone print, so a gold gold headings and bold sections in the planner. But that's the main difference for all of these in the Bold line. This is the Eggplant color, then the Poppy, and finally the Olive right here. But altogether, this is what you're seeing. They just came out today, the brand new styles and lines for the Full Focus Planner. Full Focus Planner is one of my favorites when it comes to structured goal-focused journals because it gives you very clear steps along the path of the goals that you want to achieve. So it's a great guide. There was a lot of thought and a lot of care and a lot of iteration that has gone into this planner over the last few years. So if you're interested, definitely recommend you pulling the trigger and trying this out for the last few months. Of 2019 going into 2020. See if it can be the boost that you need to reach the goals that you have going into the new year. And again, there is a link right at the— right in the description of the video below, and it is an affiliate link, but just to give you a heads up on that. If you have any questions about the Full Focus Planner, if you want to know anything about it that I didn't cover in this massive review, please go ahead and drop your your questions in the comments below. And be on the lookout next week. I'm going to be sharing an interview with John Meece from the Michael Hyatt Team. We talk more about the intention and the work that went into creating the Full Focus Planner, and we also dive into working offline, analog productivity tips, and also like how it impacts the relationships that we have, our families, and everything that we do in work in a very quickly changing environment. So be on the lookout for that. John's a good friend of mine, and I would love to share it with you. So thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next video. Bye.