Plan Your Week With Me! Business Planning for Solopreneurs

Running a business, being a mom, being a wife, a partner, a caretaker. There is a lot you've got to do on any given week. But the one thing I feel I've gotten pretty good with over the last seven years of doing all this and running a business is setting up a routine each week that allows me to only work six hours a day, allowing me to get the kids on the school bus by 8:30 and get them off at 3:30. The other thing that's super important for me during this time is giving myself time to work out three to four times a week while still incrementally growing my business every year. Let me walk you through what my weekly planning routine looks like. Hey there, my name is Trina. If you are brand new to my channel and I'm dedicated to helping solo entrepreneurs get to consistent 10k months in their business without falling victim to the hustle Culture Planning My week honestly starts on Sunday. I like to sit down Sunday morning with my full focus Planner and start going through the weekly preview exercise. Now this wouldn't have been possible prior years, but at least within the last two years my kids have gotten older. So Sunday mornings have been a lot more chill and allows me the time to do this. So if you're a mom, a solo entrepreneur with little kids and you're like, how can you do this when the kids are running around like crazy? I totally know where you're at right now and trust me, it does get better. And you're just gonna have to find a time that's going to work for you. Maybe it's after you put the kids down, or maybe it's getting up in the morning and doing it. I know neither one of those sou as great as, you know, doing it during the day, but I really had to fluctuate and change this routine as my kids got older. Another reason I like to do this on Sundays is because Fridays I like to try to end my days as quick as possible. And if I don't have any tasks from the rest of the week falling into Friday, which I talked about in my last episode on how I plan my month, I can take Fridays off. And we all want to take Fridays off. And so that's why I prefer Sundays. Saturdays are a total disaster here. There's either soccer practice, gymnastics games, basketball, who knows what's going on on Saturdays. So thus why I choose Sunday mornings. Now actually, before I pull out the full focus planner, there is one thing I do first and that is plan my meals for the week. Listen, if you're a business owner, especially if you're a solo entrepreneur making so many decisions and every single day you don't want to have to make a decision at the end of your day on what you and your family are going to eat. This is why I do this first thing Sunday morning is because I don't want to have to think about what dinners are going to be that coming week. Sunday is also the day that my husband goes to the grocery store. So if I can get the meal plan prepared and know what we're going to eat, he knows exactly what we need to get at the grocery store. Now here's my little secret for meal planning. I only plan about three, maybe four meals meals a week. And we just double that recipe because look, I'm not cooking every night and neither is he. So if each of us take turns cooking and we make enough for leftovers, we only have to cook three, maybe four nights a week. And I'm gonna tell you, this has helped not only us eat healthier, not rely on going to get takeout, but has relieved so much stress on figuring out what's for dinner. Then once I know what's gonna be for dinner that week, I I can write the grocery list. Now I can move on to my full Focus planner. And if you listen to my video about my monthly planning routine that I did in the last episode, I do some similar things here in the weekly planning routine as well, like reflect on the last week. Why this is important is because again, in that monthly planning routine video that I shared, I tell you how important it is to think about wins you had during the month. And sometimes it can get hard at the end of the month to think about the wins you had at the beginning of the month. So if you're just writing down a win every single week, you're going to be able to look back at the end of the month and see all the wins that you accomplished every single week. And this is just a huge positivity and a confidence booster when it comes to the end of the month. I'm going to tell you now from experience, if you don't take time to even celebrate small wins and constantly fixate on the things you didn't do, speaking from somebody who's done this, it is just going to cause you to fall into this gunk 24 hours a day, seven days a week, thinking that you're never going to get there, you're never going to be good enough, you're never going to be smart enough, and it really will affect the way your business grows because you're constantly going to be second guessing yourself. But when you can look at the things you did achieve, that really changes your perspective. And you're like, yeah, yeah, I got this, I'm good. And it is so key to think about these things every single week. I'm telling you from somebody who's been a solo entrepreneur with a newborn and a 2 year old at home, how easy it can be to fall in the idea of never thinking I'm getting anything done. You've got to celebrate what you are getting done. Then I take a look at what I set out to achieve this last week. And this is where my monthly planning routine helps as well. But if I didn't get my big three done, so I usually have three big tasks that I break out throughout the five days of the week. If I didn't get those done, I really want to reflect on why did I end up taking a call that I didn't schedule that week? Did something take longer than expected? If you really start to analyze why you aren't getting something done, if something's taking longer, if you're making exceptions and taking calls when you shouldn't be taking calls, you really need to flag that now because this is going to affect your decisions and how you plan moving forward. This is why it's so important to take the time to not only reflect monthly, but also reflect weekly to make the changes. So again, you're focusing on the things in your business that are going to move the needle, that are going to get you to 10k months, that then allows you to reflect on what did and didn't work this last week. Because again, you have to make changes if something isn't working. I know we can get comfortable in our routine and just doing the same thing day in and day out. I love a routine. Without a routine, like, I can't survive if the routine isn't getting you the results that you want. You have to make a change and figure out what it is that needs to be changed. So that's why it's so important every single week that you take a look at what is and isn't working. Because at the end of the month, if you wait to do this, you may not have the data to realize, oh, this came up two out of the four weeks. Right? Because by the end of the month, I don't know about you, I can't remember the week before, let alone the first week of the month. So this allows me to reflect on what I want to keep from this week that did well. What I want to remove from this week that didn't do so well, and what I want to stop doing. Going through this exercise in the past has allowed me to finally wake up to the things that I was doing over and over and over again that I hated. That I literally would write in my full focus planner every single week the things I wanted to stop doing, but I never stopped doing it because I got into that comfortable routine until finally, enough times I've done this. I'm like, ah, it's time. I have to take the time to figure out how to fix this and stop doing this. One example for me was I hated having to follow up on agency leads. It's not that I didn't love the agency leads, it's just that I had to do all these extra steps that took me about 30 minutes to do, and that would take away from what I'd already planned to do that day or that week. And so I realized, okay, what can I do to fix this? It's a great thing that leads are coming in, but if I'm not responding to them quickly, they may not stay warm, right? The best way to get in touch with them as soon as they come in. And so I knew I had to take the time to figure out an SOP and a process so that as soon as we got a lead, they were hearing back from us within an hour to max. I didn't want that to be actually me because it could have came in anytime during the day while I'm eating dinner, while I'm recording YouTube videos, while I'm having a team meeting. I couldn't just stop what I was doing to reply, but I wanted to give those clients that high level service that we pride ourselves on in our YouTube agency. So I had to officially say, okay, I need to make a task in my to do list for my week to figure out how to streamline and systematize this. The next thing that I do is I pull out my journal. And this is a journal that I write in multiple times a week. But on Sunday, this is my weekly brain dump exercise. And I think about all the things coming up this week, whether it's kids stuff, whether it's work stuff, whether it's personal things, whether it's planning things that I need to do, anything that I need to get done this week, I dump it into that journal. Now, in January, I did an exercise on journaling because I was never really a journaling person, but I committed myself to journaling every single day. In January. And what I found was it was incredibly helpful to clear my brain and kind of get the fog out of my head. But after journaling for 31 days, I realized I don't need to necessarily journal every single day. So the routine that I have found that's worked well for me is doing like this brain dump every Sunday, doing an actual journal session Monday morning because you got those Monday scaries, you got the Monday overwhelm of that, you know, to do list. So for me to journal Monday morning, kind of all that overwhelming worries away, and then also journaling on Friday, kind of just reflecting on how things went. If there's anything still stuck in my head about work, I'm getting it all out on paper so I can start the weekend without taking work with me. That is what I've really found for journaling works for me. So the beginning of the week I work on getting all of my to do's out. So with coffee in hand, I just start writing. I'm also looking at our family calendar that is in the kitchen. I'm also double checking with my husband. Do we have anything coming up? Is he going to be working late any particular days? And I'm getting that jotted down as well. Now in my monthly planning video, I talk about how I theme my weeks and how every other week for me is a content creation week, meaning I'm creating some type of content, usually YouTube videos or Reels, or I'm creating new content for my clients inside of my coaching program 10k on replay. So if I'm going into a content creation week, some of my to dos may be to make sure my camera is charged, make sure my camera cars are cleared off, script YouTube videos come up with thumbnail ideas, film YouTube videos get the B roll right. All of these content creation tasks are usually going to be what's on my to do list, then on the opposite week. So let's say content creation is week one and week three. During those week two and week four, I'm usually thinking about the other projects that I'm working on. So one particular project we're working on in the beginning of this year is creating processes and SOPs so we can look at what can we automate so I can take work off of my team members so they can focus on bigger picture strategies for our clients and really leveling up our client experience with us. Another project that I had as well at the beginning of the year was creating and releasing Going Video, a brand new mini course that I created that teaches you how to get started with video content. So there's a lot of different tasks in a project like that, like creating the sales page, creating the checkout page, creating the upsell, creating the onboarding email sequence, creating the promotional content, actually filming the videos, creating the workbooks and worksheets. Right, that's something that's going to take multiple, multiple weeks, but they're not happening multiple weeks in a row. So I have to be able to plan in advance for that and know, you know, couple months. Some of those off weeks of not creating content are going to be dedicated to that. So it is important to understand my monthly planning routine as well. But that's what I batch on those weeks two and weeks for those other projects that are moving my business forward. So once I have everything dumped down on here again, similar to the monthly planning, I like to group together like tasks. Now I don't necessarily use a highlighter for this process because the to do list should be less than your monthly to do list. But I really like this page in the full focus planner where I can start adding my tasks in these daily blocks. So one of the first things that I will do is look at my Google Calendar, which I live and die by, and I show you how I do it in this video right here. But I will put the times that I have calls scheduled so I can start to see how many hours are already booked for me for that particular day. Day. Then I'll start adding tasks in. If it is a day where I know I'm on calls from like 12 to 3, I'll probably only focus on two tasks that day. Now if I don't have any calls that day or I may have one call that day, I may be able to get three things done. I generally do a lot of my work in the hours of 9:30 to 11:30 and save all my calls for the afternoon. And so if there aren't any calls, I might be able to get a little bit more work done. But I'm not going to over commit myself. If you're ever watching my videos and you're wondering what is that going on back there? That is a comforter that I have laid on my tile floor to make this audio better. So fun fact, a quick little tip on how to make your videos better. Throw a comforter on hardwood floor to get better audio. Sorry, that was really bothering me. Now once I have this all mapped out on this page and I have mapped out what my family needs to get done this week as well, I start to figure out what's my big three for this week going to be what are the three most important things in your week you need to get done that is going to move the trajectory of your business. Or it could be a total family thing that you need to get done. Like if you literally need to book dentist appointments for everybody in the house because they haven't been for a year, that can be a big three as well. On a content week for me, this big three could be anything from record for YouTube videos, film 12 reels, new slide deck for 10k on replay lesson now on a project week, this could be anything from getting 25 signups to our 10k on replay open house because we know we're promoting that. And a lot of things I'm doing behind the scenes is getting people to sign up for that open house, pitching five podcasts, or researching five speaking engagements to pitch. This could also be outlining a new course or setting up a new lead magnet that may need to be broken down into smaller chunks because there's a lot to do with that. You could be, you know, create your concept for your lead magnet and have it outlined. I'm not going to be able to have my concept created. Outline it. Create the lead magnet, create the sales page, set up the funnel, and create an onboarding sequence for that lead magnet all in once. So you can start to see how really generalizing what your big three is could be stressing you out. So you really need to get specific here. What piece of the project are you dedicated to getting done this week? Then you can really see if you've over committed yourself. The other thing that I want to add here is if you aren't sure how long your tasks are going to take because again, you are a solo entrepreneur, you're doing this all on your own, right? I encourage you to track your time. Now this was a pain in the butt when I first did it, but I'm going to tell you it's going to help you estimate what you can realistically get done every day. Every week, Every month, Every quarter. So that you don't feel like a total failure at the end of the week. End of the month, end of the quarter, end of the year. I would use something like Toggle if possible. You can also use your phone and just start your timer every time you start working on a project and keeping track. An Excel spreadsheet. But once you know how long it takes you to script a YouTube video, record a YouTube video, write a sales page, write an email sequence, right, Then you're going to Be able to better prepare and say, oh, I need to write an email sequence for a new product or I need to write sales emails. I know if I'm creating five emails, that's probably going to take me four to five hours. I'm only working on these projects two hours a day. That's going to take me about three days of my time. So once you can really understand that timepiece, then you'll be able to effectively start putting the amount of tasks that you can really get done each week. When I'm done with all of that, then I got to get it into the computer, so to speak. So then I set up Google Calendar and Asana. Let me show you how I do that. This is my quarterly at a Glance board inside of Asana. And I'm going to talk more about this board when I release the video, how I plan my quarter. But when I go in every single week, I have this little part right here where I create my Q1 tasks. So you can see, particularly for January, those tasks that I had associated with a project. So the first week of January was a project week for me and I was creating all these going video assets. Right? Then if we jump, if we look at the date, the 9th, this is where the content creation week came into play. So you can see that I was, you know, recording reels, process to record reels, all of those things done. Where the week of the night you can see Also in the 10th, I'm recording YouTube videos. Again, we're continuing to look at the week of the 9th, right. And I'm recording extra B roll here. I have moved things around as well. That's what I love about this. I can move them around on the checklist here in Asana. Then when we move on into the following week, which would have been, you know, week three of January, we're focusing on meeting with the team to clean up SOPs. So that is how the process is going. Now, when I wrap up my Sunday planning session here in Asana, I like to come in here and decide, okay, are these things doable? So I don't have February mapped out as I record this, because I'm recording this right before I leave for a conference, but I have that blocked out in here. But let's say I come back from the conference and I start planning things out. When I come back from my conference, it's going to be a content creation week. So I'm going to add in here script for YouTube videos and that's going to be assigned to me and that's going to be more than likely what I'm doing on the 13th. I do come home on the 9th, so I will have the 10th to catch up on work stuff. But I'm going to need to script four videos definitely by the 13th. I'm also going to need to make sure that I'm filming these videos too. So I need to make sure that is blocked off. So I'm going here and assigning it to me. Then I will probably give myself an extra day here on the 14th. It's also Valentine's Day, but I would give myself this extra day and commit myself to having makeup on that Wednesday. The other thing I'm going to double check is I'm going to go to my calendar and look at this week and see am I expected to be on camera at any point in time this week as well, because I want to align those up. So right now the calendar is pretty open, even though it doesn't look like it. I'm a part of a couple different coaching programs, so there are different things on here that are a part of those programs. But you can see my focus time is all blocked right here. I have these times open for calls, which are probably more than likely when I get back filled with hot seats with my 10k on replay clients because we are opening hot seats here in February for them. But again, I don't see any major things here on my calendar. Oh, I do see. Okay, that Friday the kids are off. I think they have like a. I don't know, a break of some sort. But I see that the kids are off that day. So I'm probably gonna want to look here at February 17th. You know, how can I minimize what I'm working on? So I'm not working the 17th since the kids will be home. Also, I see that my husband will be home, so I know he has it covered, But I don't want everyone to be home and not me. So this is how I'm utilizing my Google and my asana. One other thing that you could do as well is you could keep track of your tasks right inside of here. So you could add within your Google Calendar if you wanted to. For this particular focus time, you could add script YouTube videos. Okay. So you just need to look at your Google Calendar. You don't even need asana. But I personally like to go to my tasks and don't look at my red. I'm a little bit behind. I like to go to my tasks and then see. Okay, okay, this is the date I'm working this. This is the date I'm working this, and then I can check these off. So that's how I start to link my asana and my Google calendar together. I'm going to tell you, this gets so much easier once you start using my monthly planning routine and you know what your month looks like. So if you didn't watch that video yet, make sure you watch it right now. It's on your screen. Just click on it and I'm going to tell you, once you got that mapped out, planning your weeks is going to take you less than 30 minutes, and then you're going to really feel much more productive and more confident in your business every single week.