Utkarsh Amitabh walks through a weekly planning routine: spend 30 minutes reflecting on the past week, set one major goal with subgoals, block meeting-free days for deep work, and separate urgent from important tasks. He stresses measuring progress at week's end and protecting physical and mental self-care.
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Happy Monday, everyone. I'm Utgar, here to give you some tips and ideas of starting your week. The weekend is just behind us. Hopefully you had a rejuvenating time connecting with your friends and family, digitally or otherwise. And now you have a next adventure of seven more days of advanced productivity, creativity, and everything else that gives you autonomy, mastery and purpose. Three core elements of meaningful work. When you're starting your week, or at least before you start your week, it's always helpful to spend some time reflecting on the week gone by in the last seven days. What were some things that you did well? Who energized you? Who were the kind of people you spent time with that boosted your creativity or gave you new ideas to think about? What were some things that you could have done differently? Without reflecting on the past, it's very difficult to recreate a better future. So every time I start my Monday, I block half an hour on my calendar to really do a deep dive of the week gone by. This is over and above the daily reflection that I do, because when it comes to daily reflection, we often think of the immediate stuff that happened on that day. But with the benefit of time, with the seven days that have gone by, we should consider reflecting on what we did well, what we could have done better, and also figure out areas where new ideas could originate, where we could have looked at a moment of inspiration and perhaps translated into an article, an idea, or a blog, or anything that might pique your fancy. Once you've done this reflection, it's important to set one major goal for the week. We can always flood our calendar with lots of tasks and activities, but every week needs to have one major overarching goal, and once you have that ready, you can break it down and have sub goals for it. You can obviously have to attend to the urgent things that are going on in your calendar, but please keep in mind that urgent and important are very different concepts. So you should look at the important overarching thing that you want to accomplish this week and then measure your progress at the end of the week based on whether you met your goal, exceeded it, or fell short of it, and whatever would be the reason, I think you should go a step further in understanding. What did you do that enabled you to overshoot your goal, meet the goal, or what is it that stopped you from achieving your targets? While we think about the various ways in the structure our week, especially by the middle, we tend to be bamboozled with all kinds of requests and all kinds of new information being thrown at us. But it is at those times we need to really stick it out and make sure that while we attend to all the storms and firefighting, we don't lose sight of the goal that we set. And if you consistently notice that you're not being able to meet your weekly goal, the big overarching goal, perhaps you're not doing a great job of setting the goal in the first place. So there is some reflection that you need to do on that front. And once you have set the major goal for the week, try and look at the difference days that you have in mind. What are some meeting free days that you want to keep? What are some days that you want to keep, especially for deep work, say writing or ideating new ideas. So I try and keep a couple of days in my calendar where I take minimal calls, don't meet too many people, digitally or otherwise, and spend that time focused on, you know, creating network capital fellowships, creating content, creating curriculum, working with my team, giving them feedback on how we're doing as a company, how they are doing as professionals. And this sort of routine helps me carve or get more done every day and more done every week. So it's actually fairly simple. Reflect on the week gone by, set one major goal for the week, and make sure that you're keeping some days which are meeting free and dedicated to deep work. In the midst of all of this, make sure that you're keeping time for rejuvenation, recreation, take time out for physical activities, because to make the most out of the week, you need to be at your energetic best. You need to bring your best and do whatever you need to do to take care of your mental health, physical health, be there for your community and all of that, but you also need to be there for yourself. Please don't forget that self care at a time like this is really important because all of us are going on dealing with wide range of emotions and are dealing with a lot of professional personal changes that might be coming. And some of these changes could be very good, but we need to process that information and create a new normal for ourselves on network capital. It's our mission to always help you with the tools, techniques, mental models, community content, etc. So that you can build your category of one. And hopefully when you start your week with something really manageable, something really tangible and specific, you will, once you arrive at the weekend, feel that, yes, did I or didn't I meet? And once you repeat this process enough times, it'll become second nature. You will automatically learn to differentiate between urgent and important. You will develop a strong understanding of how you work and who you work best with. And you will be able to bring your best every single day. I hope this was useful and you consider subscribing to us on NetworkCapital TV. It's a labor of love made possible through subscribers like all of you, and we are there to help you at every step. Take care. Talk to you soon.
