Designing Your Life | Best Year Ever Workshop
Keep reading this post to learn:
What priorities are and how you define them
How to create priorities that are in alignment with your goals
How to build a weekly outline and schedule that honors your priorities
This blog post is a part of our Best Year Ever Workshop! If you haven’t read last week’s blog post (or listened to the podcast episode), make sure to do that before you read this one because content builds off each other and we don’t want you to feel lost! 🤗
Once you’re clear on your vision (what we talked about last week), you can define what priorities support it. Think of your priorities as your action steps to make your vision a reality.
Your priorities are what you want to show up best for in this season of your life - your non-negotiables.
A little tip: less is more when it comes to priorities because if everything is important, nothing is important. Part of defining your priorities is regularly auditing and decluttering your priority list. As your season of life changes, your priorities will shift to match.
How you spend your time reveals what your priorities are right now. Ask yourself, “Does how I spend my time match up with what I say my priorities are?”
Intentionally defining your priorities helps you fill your days with things that actually matter to you.
When we aren’t clear on what our priorities are, that’s when we run into the issue of overcommitting, overextending, and spreading ourselves too thin – which leaves us feeling like we are running on E no matter what we do.
I’ll tell you straight up, defining your priorities takes practice and can be difficult if you’ve never done it. When you’re so used to looking at everything on an even playing field, thinking that you HAVE to do everything all the time, that becomes your normal and it feels uncomfortable to say no, delegate, and set boundaries.
But you have to take ownership of your life and make the necessary changes to not feel like you’re spread so thin or I can guarantee that you will crash and burn. And no one wins when that happens.
In the Hustle Sanely Lifestyle course (told ya, I’ll never shut up about it, lol) I teach a 4-step process to help you define your priorities:
01: Define your non-negotiables based on your season (what’s happening in your life and your goals).
02: Design routines that support your non-negotiables.
03: Identify and remedy major stressors (aka roadblocks or things preventing you from showing up for your non-negotiables).
04: Create boundaries, make them known, and stick to them.
How to Define Your Priorities
Behind the Quarter 1 tab in your Peacefully Productive Planner, there is an exercise called “Define Your Priorities.”
There are 4 boxes on the page broken into these categories:
– Daily
– Weekly
– Monthly
– Occasionally
To help determine priorities for a season, think about your goals/intentions and ask yourself, “What things do I need to do daily, weekly, monthly, and occasionally to show up well for what matters most to me in this season?”
Obviously, I can’t tell you what your priorities are but I’m happy to give you some examples:
Let’s say one of your goals is to establish healthy financial habits by tracking your daily spending, creating and honoring a monthly budget, and holding yourself accountable by regularly checking in with your spouse. Your priority chart might have the following things on it:
– Daily: Track spending in my spending app
– Weekly: Have a money check-in meeting with my spouse
– Monthly: Review the budget from the previous month
– Occasionally: Update the budget to account for any changes
Okay, let’s chat about creating a weekly outline that reflects your priorities.
How you spend your time is how you spend your life so we have to make sure that our routines and schedules align with our vision and priorities.
Use your routines and schedule to empower you to be the best steward of your time and energy. Know that you are allowed to shift and change your schedule and routines from season to season and even from day to day based on your energy and your priorities. You have so much agency over your life. Even if someone else is in charge of your work schedule, even if a lot of your time is shared with your family, you still have agency over your life… you are the ultimate decider, the gatekeeper of your schedule so start acting like it!
Wanna know one of my favorite peaceful productivity tools? A WEEKLY OUTLINE 📣
A weekly outline is basically a blueprint of an ideal week in your life – it’s the bones that make up your schedule. I love having my weekly outline because I can look at it and see how I’m spending my time in a typical week so that my priorities are getting my best energy.
A weekly outline is my productivity secret weapon and I really don’t know how people live without one, lol.
Having my weekly outline saves me SO much brain power because I’m not starting from scratch when I sit down to do my Weekly Prep Meeting each week. I already know where all of my recurring tasks and events are on my schedule thanks to my weekly outline.
There are 3 steps to follow to help you craft a weekly outline:
01: Plug in your scheduled responsibilities in a typical week.
Think about things that are fixed like work hours, kids’ practices, church services, etc.
02: Plug in your non-negotiable priorities and any supporting habits.
You figured most of these out during the Key 3 exercise – now it’s time to plug them into your week. Some examples of non-negotiables could be: your weekly money check-in meeting, a weekly date with your partner, your workout classes, daily family walks, etc.
03: Plug in any other of your typical weekly routines.
Think about meal prep routines, morning routines, evening routines, Weekly Prep Meetings, Home Reset Routines, etc.
Once you have all of these plugged into your weekly outline, you can easily see the flow of a typical week in your life.
ut remember, our schedules and routines are tools, not chains – this weekly outline is a guide, not an anchor. I highly doubt that you’ll ever have a week that goes perfectly according to the weekly outline you created because life happens… your kid gets sick and needs to stay home from school for 2 days, your dog gets out and you spend 2 hours looking for him around the neighborhood, etc.
I always say that it’s so much easier to pivot in a crisis (big or small) when you already have a plan in place and that is what your weekly outline is!
Anytime I talk about a weekly outline, I almost always get someone who says “all of my weeks look different” – okay, that’s valid! So create multiple weekly outlines. Like one for the weeks you work days and one for the weeks you work nights. Or create a daily outline if that works better for you – create a day off outline and a work day outline.
I encourage you to think outside of the box if you have to – you are a smart, capable, flexible woman. You can take the principles of what I’m saying here and adjust them to make them work for you. I know you can! There’s no such thing as a perfect weekly outline so stop getting hung up on that and do what you need to do to support yourself well.
Exercises to Help With Creating Your Weekly Outline:
01: Key 4: Create your routines and schedule
Also behind the quarter 1 tab in your planner, there is an exercise where you can create new routines for your season if you need them. The exercise has a space for you to write the routine name, the frequency (daily, weekly, monthly, or other), when you’re gonna do the routine, and then space to write out the activities that make up the routine.
In the Hustle Sanely Lifestyle course, I teach a 5-step process for designing routines for your season:
01: Identify the parts of your day/week that feel chaotic or clunky.
02: Decide how you want that part of your day to feel - set the intention.
03: Call out the roadblocks that are keeping you from having your desired routine.
04: Brainstorm a solution to the roadblocks.
05: Set yourself up for success by implementing the solution via habits.
So you can use those 5 steps to help you brainstorm routines to support you in your season and then take those newly created routines and pop them in your weekly outline.
02: Seasonal Weekly Outline Templates and Example
Behind the quarter 1 tab in your planner, there is a template for you to create your weekly outline following the steps we just went over. And because I know our schedules change as our lives ebb and flow, there is actually a fresh weekly outline template for each quarter in your planner!
Annnnd because I know the Hustle Sanely community loves a concrete example, if you look behind the “5 Keys” tab in your PPP, there is an example weekly outline to guide you!
And here’s one for you to look at now, too:
That concludes Part 01 of the Best Year Ever Workshop! Don’t forget that part 2 of the BYE workshop is happening soon! ⬇️
PART 02: Attend a live co-working session on Zoom*:
When: Nov 20 @ 12-1 PM EST
What: We’ll get together on Zoom with our mics off to work on our Yearly Vision Meeting + Q1 Check-In Meeting exercises (these are in the PPP) - vibey lofi music will be playing, ofc!
*a link was sent out to my email list but if you didn’t receive it — email the team and they can set you up!
PART 03: Attend a live hot seat group coaching session on Instagram:
When: Nov 21 @ 12-1 PM EST
What: I’ll be live on my @jessmmassey Instagram to coach you through anything you get stuck on or need support with regarding the exercises. The replay will be available 🫶🏼
MAKE SURE TO JOIN US FOR THE ENTIRE WORKSHOP:
Loved this blog post? Tune into the full podcast episode below!
