Transcription
Maybe you've come to a point in your life where you realize, "Hey, my life is out of whack. My schedule is crazy." And so, what do you do? You go and buy yourself a planner, and you go through this cycle of buying planners, using them for a week, and then forgetting about them for the rest of the year. Well, it doesn't have to be that way. I'm going to show you the exact process I use to plan my week to maximize my productivity, and more importantly, to make sure I'm stewarding my time well.
Hey, my name is Reagan Rose. I talk about personal productivity from a Christian perspective. And one of the most important parts of productivity is time management, or as I prefer to call it, time stewardship. Because after all, it is not my time, it's God's time. So I just want to make sure I am using it well. And while there are plenty of tools and planners and apps that you can use to manage your time, what's really most important is how you use them, or at least that you use them. And just buying a planner or downloading an app or a template, that is not going to change your life. So what I want to do here is show you exactly how I do this, how I plan my week for maximum productivity.
Pray for your week. Recently, I was reading this book, it's called "True Spirituality," and it's by Francis Schaeffer. And there was a quote right at the end of the book that really, really struck me. He says this: "If I woke up tomorrow morning and found that all that the Bible teaches concerning prayer and the Holy Spirit were removed, what difference would it make in practice from the way that I'm functioning today? The simple, tragic fact is that in much of the church, there would be no difference whatsoever." We function as though the supernatural were not there.
Oh man, that hit me like a ton of bricks. There's so many Christians out there who we're trying to learn, "How do I get more done? How do I maximize my time? How do I be more productive?" But we're learning it from secular sources. And the tips and tricks, they, they're helpful. You know, keeping a planner, that's great. All these different ways to manage your time is wonderful. But if we forget about the supernatural power supply that we have, we're not truly planning like Christians. We're not doing productivity like Christians. And I think very often, we address our planning, our time management, even scheduling our week, as though we don't believe in the power of prayer. And so, if your goal is to glorify God with your week, then your planning needs to begin with asking for His help in prayer. Commit your plans to the Lord. And it doesn't have to be fancy either. Just like a child asking his father for help, you just start the week with, "Lord, I want to please You this week. I want to serve others, uh, in Your name. Please just give me the wisdom, give me the power, give me the focus to glorify You this week."
Define an ideal week. So, do you remember back in school when your schedule was sort of set for you? You didn't have to think about when to go to class, or when to do your homework, or when to practice your sports. It was just set for you. You just had to show up. And your parents kind of breathing down your neck, saying, "Did you finish that yet? Did you do this?" You didn't really need to manage your time. And this happens even early in our careers, too. You have a boss, you, you punch in, you kind of have someone watching over you all the time. And so scheduling, planning your week, it's not that important. But as you get older, your schedule sort of falls more and more into your own power, right? In college, there's nobody breathing down your neck to remind you to study. And as you advance in your career, there's fewer and fewer people telling you what to do and when. This is why planning becomes necessary. And this sounds really nice, "Oh, I have freedom in my schedule." But freedom can be paralyzing sometimes. It's a matter, though, of just recognizing, "If I don't set the schedule, no one else will." It's taking responsibility. And a big part of leading a God-honoring life is taking responsibility for it. You know, being a good steward of this life means having some agency, you know, to order your life in such a way that the right things get done when they need to get done. You have to take responsibility for the week ahead. How am I going to invest this time? And one way I have found really helpful to steward my weeks better is to design an ideal week schedule. An ideal week schedule simply tells me the following: What are the themes for each day? What are, like, the main thing I'm going to work on? My work blocks, right? So I have a block for writing, a block set aside for my priority projects, and a block for administration, admin to-do lists, uh, all that kind of stuff. And having this document simply answers the question for me: "What should I be doing right now?"
Schedule your priorities. There is a difference between hard work and productivity, right? It's not the same thing. You can work really, really hard on something but not actually ever get something important done. And if you've ever had this experience where you come away from a really hard week of work and you think to yourself, "Man, I am exhausted, but I have no idea what I actually did this week." Well, then you know what I mean. And typically, the reason you feel this way is because, you know, even though you did a lot, you didn't do what was most important. You may have a huge stack of accomplished tasks, but none of them were the stuff you should have been doing. None of them really mattered. They weren't the priority. And if you want to work on your priorities, you have to plan for when you're going to work on them. So this is where you sort of put that ideal week schedule into action. When you're planning your week, what you're doing is you're picking, "What are the priorities for this week?" and you're just plugging them into the corresponding block of time you set for yourself. "This is my priority project. I'm going to work on this on Monday from this time to this time." But by mapping your tasks to a set schedule, you enable yourself to get the most important stuff done. Now, and I know the objections to this. A lot of people say, "Yeah, I'm going to create this schedule. I'm going to say I'm going to do this on that date, but then I'm not actually going to do it." Well, let me try to help you with some mindset here. You have to treat your schedule like an appointment. As if there were someone else there. You don't just ghost someone for coffee when you had an appointment to do it. Why are you ghosting yourself? And it was Jesus who said, "Let your yes be yes and your no be no." And he was making the point there about not making oaths, right? Like, "I swear I will do this." Instead, he was saying, "Be a person of your word. Don't make an oath because you're somebody who simply does what they say they're going to do. You have integrity." Even with commitments that I've made to myself, I want to be the kind of person that when I say I'm working on this on Wednesday at this time, I am actually going to do it. I want to see keeping appointments with myself as an issue of integrity. As an issue of being a person of my word. If you think about it that way, it adds weight to it. It, it lets you know, "Hey, I don't have the option of just wiggling out of this stuff and changing it because it's just me." Because it's not just you. I don't want to train myself to be a person who doesn't follow through on what I said I was going to do, even if the only person I said it to was myself.
The weekly shutdown. How you end your week is as important as how you begin it, and it sets you up for success in the next week as well. So I used to work right up to the buzzer on Friday afternoons. I would try to squeeze in the last little bit of productivity right before the clock struck 5. And whatever I didn't finish, well, I'll deal with that next week. And so what happened was, I'd be stopping in the middle of projects, stopping in the middle of tasks, and just leave a mess for myself the next week. And when I would roll in to look at what I had left off the next week, or sometimes weeks later, I would have no idea where to pick it up because I didn't shut it down. I didn't close out what I was doing. And I had a bunch of just half-finished, half-done things, and I couldn't remember where I started or what I should do next on them. What I've learned to do instead is practice a weekly shutdown, or some people call this a weekly review. And here's all you do: You just stop working early on the last day of the week. Now, if you work in an office, I'm not saying just walk out and say, "See you, boss, it's a half day for me, Reagan told me to." Now, what I mean by stopping early is you cut off working on your projects or whatever your main work stuff is at about lunchtime. And that way, you can spend the rest of the day, the afternoon, working on shutting down, preparing for the week to come. So what do you do? Well, you wrap up undone projects. If you can't finish them, you leave yourself some breadcrumbs, right? Leave yourself at a good spot where you can pick up on it next time you need to work on that without being confused about where you left things. Tidy up, right? Clean up. If you work in an office, clean up your desk, or clean up your home, whatever it is. Tidy up. Get things ready so that it's not a huge mess you're bringing with you into the weekend. Look ahead at the coming week. Anticipate what are the priorities going to be? What are the limits on my time, right? Appointments, meetings, um, things I have to do with my family, all of that stuff. Look ahead and be cognizant of that so you can plan accordingly. Give thanks for another week, right? Just as at the beginning of the week we prayed for the week ahead, now it's the end of the week. We thank the Lord for the week that just passed. Thank Him for what you were able to accomplish. Repent of the places where you fell short. And just praise God that you get to be alive and you get to serve Him and steward your life. And when it's all done, you turn everything off. You close it all out. And you say, "I'm done for the day." And what this does is, in addition to helping you stay productive, the weekly shutdown also lets you enter the weekend with your mind sort of like, like a clean slate. You weren't carrying all those open loops you had of undone work or half-finished projects. You don't have those all in your head for the weekend. And then you can actually use the weekend to, you know, rest well.
I hope those tips have been helpful for you as you are seeking to steward your week well for God's glory. I have linked to a couple of free resources in the description. There is my ideal week planner, which is like a Google Sheet you can download, and also my morning routine planner guide, which you might find useful as well. I also have a course called "Optimize Your Week" that you can check out. That helps you go super deep into this process of planning a weekly routine for yourself. You can get that, there's a link in the description, or it's also available if you become a member of our Redeeming Productivity Academy, where you can also get all my other courses, hang out with me on office hours calls, and much more. And by doing that, you also help support the channel. So check those things out. It's all in the description. And if you want more productivity from a Christian worldview, go ahead and subscribe, and Lord willing, I will see you next week.