#198 Stop Abandoning Your Weekly Plan by Tuesday

If you’ve ever felt like your weekly plans collapse under client emergencies, procrastination, or overwhelm, this episode is for you. I break down the ALIVE Method, the exact weekly planning routine that helps me run two businesses, homeschool two kids, and still only work 4 days a week.

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Link to Music Credits
Track: Positive Motivation
Author: AShamaluevMusic (ASM)
Publisher: CD Baby (IPI 700570289)

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Chapters

• 0:48 Time management is a losing battle
• 3:40 A = Align your week with your bigger goal
• 5:18 L = Life first
• 6:33 I = Identify the win
• 7:45 V = Vital few (essential tasks that drive results)
• 8:43 E = Expand with margin and white space
• 9:39 The weekly review

Transcript

Welcome to the Effortless CEO podcast, the only show that teaches South African business owners how to improve their operations and design a business that can run without them. If you're interested in leading your team more effectively, creating more operational efficiency, delivering with excellence while getting some of your life back, then you're in the right place. Here's your host, strategic intervention coach and operations specialist, Ilonka Ras.

Over the last decade, I have experimented with every strategy you can imagine for managing my time. The Pomodoro technique, time blocking, Eat the Frog, timers, color coded calendars, productivity apps, you name it, I've tried it. When we think about productivity, we typically think about doing more faster. But that's really just a recipe for burnout. You can sprint through and tick off endless to-do lists for months.

and still not be any closer to the life or business you really want. And this is because action does not always equal progress. I've built two businesses while homeschooling two of our three kids, and I only work four days a week. I've coached dozens of business owners through the exact same challenges that we all experience as business owners, feeling maxed out, overwhelmed, and stuck in firefighting mode.

And I've seen what actually works and what doesn't as it relates to managing our time. Here's what I've learned. You can have the most beautifully planned week down to the hour, but if you don't take into account that you are a human, that you will feel overwhelmed, that you will procrastinate on those hard or not so fun tasks, or that unexpected client emergencies will pop up more often than you would like to admit,

That plan won't last past Tuesday. And honestly, what is the point of a perfect plan if you can't stick to it? Planning isn't actually the hard part. The real challenge is following through when it gets uncomfortable, which is why the plan you create has to be sustainable. Secondly, humans are wired for instant gratification. You can have the best plan in the world, but when it's time to actually do the thing that you planned on doing, you won't always feel like it. That's why I believe trying to manage time is a losing battle. Time moves forward, no matter what we do or think about the fact. Everything takes time. The real skill is learning to manage the discomfort that comes with sticking to and honoring our commitments. Think about it. It's the same reason we say we're going to eat a salad, but then pizza shows up.

and the little devil on our shoulder is like, who? It's the classic battle. Feature you once the healthy choice, but present you once whatever feels good right now. Taking back control of your schedule isn't about squeezing in more. It's about investing your energy and attention into the things that actually matter most to you and following through on your commitments, even when you don't feel like it in the moment.

And this is why I created the Alive method, a simple 10-minute weekly routine that helps you design your week so that it supports both your life and your business, protects your energy, and keeps you focused on what actually moves the needle towards your goals. Let's dive into it. It's Monday morning. You sit down with a cup of coffee, you open a fresh page or an app, and you dump every single thing you can think of onto a to-do list.

Convinced that you are going to get all of this done before dinner. Now that's exactly what I used to do. And here's what would happen. By the end of the day, the list wasn't finished. Tuesday came, I was copying half of Monday's tasks over, added the new ones that magically popped up overnight, and the cycle would just repeat itself every day. I was always chasing the list, but never feeling caught up. I'd end the day feeling behind, frustrated, and guilty for not doing more.

The first step in the Alive method flips that cycle. Instead of starting with a daily list, you align your week with your bigger goal. I keep my 90-day goal front and center, literally written at the top of my planner, so it becomes the filter for every decision I make for the week ahead. Starting with the bigger picture means that you're less likely to fall off the bus and say yes to what feels comfortable in the moment.

Instead, you will be more intentional and strategic about what actually makes it onto your calendar. Planning in advance also reduces decision fatigue. Research shows that our brains have limited amounts of decision-making energy every day. If you are planning day by day, you drain that energy on constant micro decisions.

But when you align your week in advance, you reduce decision fatigue and free up the mental bandwidth to actually follow through on the thing that you should be doing. Did you know that entrepreneurs are three times more likely to burn out than employees? And you know why? It's because rest is always the last thing on our minds. We say things like, I'll take a break when the project is done. I'll rest when things slow down. But the truth is, things never slow down. Business,

is never done. There is always another goal, another project, another fire to put out. That's why the second step in the Alive method is life first. Before you add a single piece of work, block out your rest, your workouts, your family times, your vacations. You started your business for freedom and autonomy over your time. Yet very few business owners actually have that time freedom. And it's because they are not prioritizing it.

Rest isn't a reward you earn after the work is done. Rest is how you stay in the game. Performance psychologist Jim Lower stated best, he says, energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance. So protecting rest isn't lazy, it's strategy. It's how you keep your energy high enough to continue showing up for the work and the people that are important to you. Every business owner I work with wants to enjoy productive weeks.

The problem is, hardly anyone stops to define what a productive week actually is. That's why the I in the ALIVE method stands for identify outcomes. Now, before you jump into all of your meetings and tasks, stop and ask yourself, what does a productive week look like for me this week? It has to be measurable. You need to be able to get to Friday and say, yes, I made progress on this thing, or yes, I completed this thing. And instead of picking three or five things,

Just take one outcome, because making consistent progress on one thing that matters will move you much further than trying to keep a hundred balls in the air, not finishing anything. Sometimes that outcome will be finishing something small, like sending a proposal. Other times, it's a step forward towards something bigger, like completing the first draft of a new system or recording two modules of that new course that you're launching. The point is that you define the win

before the week begins. That one outcome becomes your anchor for the week so that you're not just reacting to whatever shows up. You've heard that 80 % of your results come from 20 % of your actions, the 80-20 rule. The problem is most of us spend our weeks buried in the wrong 80%. That's why the next step in the Alive method stands for Vital Few. Once you've identified your one outcome for the week, your next step is to identify the essential actions, the Vital Few.

that you need to take to accomplish that outcome. Once you've identified your vital few, you need to prioritize time to get them done. Personally, I like to set aside a two hour focus block every day just for these activities. I switch off my phone during my focus time so that I'm not distracted or tempted to get sucked into the TikTok scroll hole. When you give your energy to the vital few, the trivial many will lose their grip on your calendar.

and you will finally start making visible progress instead of just looking busy. The key to sticking to your plan is making peace with the fact that you cannot plan for everything. Life, well life, there will be distractions, you will procrastinate and nothing has gone wrong when this happens. Instead of fighting the inevitable, we are going to make space for it because if you cram your schedule back to back with no buffer,

The first unexpected event will push you straight into urgency mode. And once you're there, the whole plan will unravel. The E in the ALIVE method stands for expand. And this is where you build 20 to 30 % of white space, buffer time, into your schedule. This is the breathing room that will keep your plan alive. Studies from the University of California show that it takes approximately 23 minutes to refocus after just one interruption.

Leaving room in your schedule lowers the cost of those inevitable distractions. So that's the alive method. But to really end the week strong and have productive weeks consistently, there is one more thing you need to do. And that is the weekly review. One of the most valuable lessons I've learned from my coach and mentor, Stacey Bayman, is this. You cannot improve what you don't evaluate. That's why at the end of every week, I take just a few minutes to reflect

And I asked myself the following three very simple questions. What worked? What didn't work? And what am I going to do differently next week? When you take the time to review, you start spotting patterns. What's working? What's draining you? And where you need to adjust. And week by week, you're tweaking and refining until you land on a rhythm that works for you, your business, and your life. This way of planning and approaching my week has helped me to be

more intentional with where I invest my energy and my attention. At the end of the day, being intentional is really what it's all about. But it starts with small, consistent choices and actively designing your ideal week. The work that I do with my clients is centered around building a business that works for you. A business that is simple, doable, and that fits into your life. A business that is easy to troubleshoot,

and doesn't feel like it's taking over your life. Inside my private coaching program, we work together for 12 months to build a business that works for you. And if you are ready to do this work, you can head over to the link in the show notes to apply to work with me. I can't wait to meet you and to get started. Let's go. Thank you so much for tuning into this week's episode. I will chat to you again next week.