Day 7: Review, and Plan One Week

Take a few minutes to review your second week. Look through your journal. Write about your accomplishments and what you still need to work on. Did you:

• Brainstorm goals, dreams, and exciting ideas for the next month of your life, and write about what your best month would look like?

• Choose goals, activities, and ideas - at least one for each priority, and no more than about 20, total - that you can do this next month to move you in the direction of your most important reasons for living?

• Start a separate Inspiration Page for any goals and ideas that simply don't fit into this season of your year, or your life?

• Go on a vision walk to access your deeper, intuitive mind - your inner guide - and look at your month from the mountain top?

• Pick a theme word or phrase to describe your month ahead and distill it down to its essence?

• Make a Month Map, arranging your goals in an order that helps you picture your month ahead as a whole? (optional)

• Organize your next month goals into a priority grid, outlining your long term, complex, task-driven projects into small chunks?

Plan One Week

You now have a (maybe) realistic plan for what you want to focus on in the next month, and today you will make a schedule for just your next week of priorities, or at least the ones you plotted out this week. 

Do not turn this into simply another To Do list: This is a special list of only your priority activities. If you can find time each day for your priorities, you will begin to feel more confident, hopeful, fulfilled, and lifted up.

From now on, you will look at your Month Priority Grid each week, and make a schedule for your next week of priorities. You will need a planner book, or a calendar, or a reminders app.

I do my schedule in 3 steps, on 3 mornings (I'll remind you of these steps for the next couple of weeks):

Next Week Schedule in 3-Steps: 

1. Thursday - Adjust your Priority grid for the month: Check off what you have completed, add new items you have thought of, and move anything down lower that no longer fits.

2. Friday - Block in your schedule for the next week: Add events and blocks of time for your priority categories (such as an hour for committee work on Tuesday and Thursday).

3. Saturday- Fill in the details: Schedule a daily time for all of your daily priorities, like exercising; choose days and times for the one-day tasks like sending that birthday card; and schedule in the chunks of those big task-driven projects. 

Summary

Plotting one moon at a time is an organizational habit; you use your Base Map - your core values and priorities - to make a Month Map and a Priority Grid, and plan the best course for your next month.

Going forward, you will:

• Choose your top action goals and make a Month Map - monthly, at the end of each month, at the new moon (traditionally a time for new beginnings), or whichever week makes sense to you;
• Organize your goals into a Priority Grid - monthly, at the end of each month, at the new moon or whichever week makes sense to you;
• Make a schedule for the next week - weekly, at the end of each week.

Week 3 Needs:

* Your journal notebook

* Priority Grid