Weekly Objective Planning

Description

Making plans boosts productivity and allows you to easily track your progress in order to make better plans in the future. Learning to plan well is an invaluable skill as it can be applied to many areas of life.

Benefits

• Improves productivity [1], [2], [3], [4].
• Can help you attain your objectives more easily. For example, making plans for adopting healthy eating habits makes you more likely to succeed [2].
• May improve self-efficacy if you accomplish your objectives.

Why it works

• Plans that you’ve made stay on your mind, making you psychologically prepared to go through with them [1].
• The de-motivational effects of obstacles between you and your goals are minimized through planning ways to overcome them [1].
• Ironically, people tend not to plan the things they are most motivated to do. They often mistakenly believe the strength of their motivation alone is enough to reach the goal. In this way, making plans about your most valued goals can be very beneficial, as it combats the tendency to underplan when it comes to our strongest motivations [1], [3].
• People also tend to want instant gratification, following plans makes an eventual benefit clear to us, even if we don’t get it right away [3].

Side Effects

You may feel worse about not completing a goal if you have concrete plans to achieve it. But don’t worry, just try again next week or make the plan more realistic.

Rating

Key Habit

Notes

• Telling someone about your plans adds social pressure to completing your goal. This can be beneficial if you are already internally motivated.
• People typically overestimate what they can do over a longer period of time. For example, it's easier to plan for an hour than it is for a day and it is easier to plan for a day than it is for a week. So don’t be too ambitious in your planning so that you don’t set yourself up for failure. 
• Identify your most important objective for the week. And make sure that it takes priority in what you are doing.