Productivity Time Management - How to Plan the PERFECT Week!

1. Introduction: Over the past 12 months, in order to scale my online businesses, it's been very important to me to be more structured and focused with how I use my time. I'm a full-time online content creator with over 1.5 million views on YouTube and thousands of students taking my online courses in this Skillshare class, I will share with you some simple techniques that will allow you to be more efficient and effective with your time. Being productive is pretty easy. It's all about preparation and execution. So if you want to learn how to plan your perfect week and begin achieving your goals, then join me here on Skillshare. 2. Targets and Goals: So today it is Sunday and I like to take this particular day every single week to plan exactly what I'm going to be doing next week. So I know as soon as Monday morning hits roughly what my targets are for this particular week. And now do all of my planning on my iPad using an app called GoodNotes five. Now you can do the exact same thing on a piece of paper. That's what I have done for the past 12 months, but more recently, I've gotten more paperless and it being using these iPads because it's just a little bit easier having everything on one device before you can go ahead and actually plan your week in each hub, an idea of what you want to achieve within that week. So this will coincide with whatever you sort of goals and targets are that you may have set for the particular year or this particular month. So for me to actually know what I need to do with my particular week. At the start of 2021, I took the opportunity to set some goals and targets for the entire year because this is going to allow you to focus on how I best need to spend my time with him, my actual online business, which is creating online courses, YuJa videos, all that type stuff completely full time. So these are just some of the goals that I set down, the YouTube USE targets, so I want to get 2 million views on YouTube at the moment, I've got 1.4 million. And then here we've got the Skillshare classes. I want to release a total of 22 Skillshare classes, of which I've released ten, and obviously this will hopefully be the 11th by the time it is released. If you haven't already, I highly recommend to set some goals and targets. And I don't use this as a motivational type thing. I simply use it as a progression tracking to know where I started at the beginning of the Earth and how the progress is going in concluding towards the end. And that allows me to focus on which areas aren't growing quick enough. So just maybe I'm not getting enough views on YouTube and maybe not releasing enough Skillshare classes. And that just means I can focus on that time when I plan my week. So obviously these are some of the goals that I want to achieve collectively with the entire year. But let's focus on the weekly targets that will actually help me get towards those and break it down. So I now want to focus on the week of July 26th, 2021. 3. Daily Priority List: This method that I now want to share with you, I've probably been using for the past 12 months as my preferred method of choice because it gives you a lot of flexibility with your actual week. Because, you know, we can block out our week like per hour. We're gonna do this between ten to 12. But in reality, that never truly happens because something they will crop up some phone call or come through, you have to do some email, something will happen, that will mean your entire schedule has been completely derailed. So a more realistic way to plan your week is in a sort of to-do list fashion. Now to do this traditionally don't really get a high completion rate. But the way that I like to do my to-do list does help me keep it more manageable. So with this particular list technique, we're going to focus on our week on a day-by-day basis. So right now it's Sunday. We are going to write our list for Monday only. So there's a few things I need to do. I need to complete a YouTube video for a particular brand of my music channels. So we need to complete the boss cube to demo videos. We need to complete that. So that needs to be and that needs to be edited. And it also needs to be film to film some of the talking heads, so we need to edit that. And also first off, we need to film so we can put boss cube 2 film making. So that is the two most important things I need to do tomorrow. And I also need to write the script for a video on my tech YouTube channel. So I need to write the script for a TV review. So I need to do TV video script writing. Now I believe this technique is called the rule of three, where you're literally just write down three things that need to do for that particular day and then that's what you can do. Me personally have more than three things I need to do. So I traditionally like to write down everything that I need to kinda get done that unreal. It's realistically I'm not going to get done. And then I like to prioritize them. So these are realistically the three things that I definitely need to get done on Monday. But let's push the envelope with a few things. I'm probably not going to get done. So let's say a tech video on each, do an iPad at review video on a particular app and stuff like that. So iPad review video, that's something else that I could get done if, if I've got some free time as well as obviously editing that. So editing and maybe uploading it, trying to get it out the same day, plus upload. So now we've got five things that I could do on this particular day. Now realistically, we're not going to get these done. So what I like to do is I like to actually prioritize what is important and needs done first. So we've got to get our red pen and go. This is essential because obviously I need to send that off. And also we've got the script right in for this, which is not as important, but we can do it next and then these are green, meaning they're not really that important. But if I get them done, that is a bonus. So I've prioritized them as soon as I look at this list, I know exactly what I'm doing. Then obviously you could write even more things on here and start coloring, coloring the men and more important things that need to be on like maybe some emails, whatever it is. And then at the end of the day on Monday, once you've completed your work or tried to complete it, you'll then go ahead and go right. I completed the boss cube. I completed that as well. And I never got this done, but I actually completely D's instead due to the amount of time I had left and then you would progress onto Tuesday. So now on Tuesday, you would go, right. I need to do that TV review video. That would continue over. So that would TV review. And then whatever else we need to do on Tuesday might be emails. We might have a Zoom meeting or whatever else, Zoom meeting, etc. So Tuesday my end up looking like this. We need to do that. Tv review, email, Zoom meeting. And then I might, for my particular case, film Skillshare class, then need to edit that class and then finally uploaded, create a thumbnail or that type of stuff. So then let's say on Tuesday, we prioritize things. Obviously this is essential because we didn't get it done yesterday. These might be important as well. So you know, colonies in the Zoom meeting might be essential because you'd obviously don't want to miss that. And then the Skillshare class could sort of fall in that bracket of the good if we got it done Word it could easily be done later on in the week. And then throughout your day, you would go ahead and go right. We film that, got done. We did those. And I did film the Skillshare class, but I never got to edit and upload it. So then you would go through the Wednesday and it will go right. First thing we need to do is edit this Skillshare class and upload this Skillshare class. So that was an introduction to using a technique that I like to call the daily priority list. So basically at the end of the day you write down all of the things you need to do for the next day, prioritize them with a color code and then tick them off as you do them during the day. And then whatever you don't get done, transfers over to the next day plus anything extra that needs to be done. It just allows you to have a focused mind as soon as you start the day and then you just go through ticking things off and it's quite exciting as you complete that list. 4. Time Blocking: The next technique I want to show you is something called time blocking. Now this is more of a hardcore technique that people use where you allocate a particular amount of time to a certain tasks. So you break down everything into particular hour blocks across your day so you roughly know exactly what you're going to be doing. This is very similar to a school timetable. Obviously, when we were all at school, we had our particular one hour slot for biology, chemistry, English, maths, and we knew exactly where we need to be at a certain time. And then everything ended it for five o'clock, whatever time you school coast, some people really enjoy having the strict structure. And as I became progressively more busy with my multiple YouTube channels as Skillshare and everything doing. This has been the only way that I've been able to ensure I do the things at the right time without procrastinating and wasting time. So the way you create the time blocks within your calendar is by using an extension of the technique I previously just showed you. You create the bullet point list of the things you need to achieve. Then you allocate the amount of time you believe it will take to achieve that task. So for me, for example, because I've edited over like 300 YouTube videos at this point, I now know that it roughly takes me between four to five hours to edit a YouTube video to the particular standard that I want it to be at. So I know when I need to edit something to allocate roughly four hours to do that task. So there are two ways that I actually track my schedule Fall I'm doing within a week. So we're going to build out this Google Calendar here, and we're going to time block it and plan out my entire week from Monday all the way through to sort of Friday, Saturday region. Now, in order for you to grasp exactly what my week sort of entails, I have a secondary document that shows you my upload schedule across my two different YouTube channels. And with Skillshare, here I have got a Google Sheets document that shows you my sort of content planner and everything I have uploaded throughout 2021, so all the way through to January up to right now in July. This is every single video I have released on my music channel, my new tech channel that I only launched down here. And obviously Skillshare as well in these blue boxes. Now these are color-coded for me so I know exactly what the are not going to break those down for you within this video because it's not really relevant. But you can see this is roughly how busy my week is on a normal week, I upload currently three tech videos along with one music video on a Thursday. This gives you a better perspective of how busy my week is and how important it is to actually plan. Because I do everything I do the planning, researching, scripting, filming, the editing, uploading, thumbnail design, absolutely everything replying to comments, replying to emails as much as I can because I get way too many, but this is everything I have done. So I need to structure my week in a way that accommodates for me to do all of those things just on my YouTube channel. I am then also trying to create a Skillshare class roughly every one to two weeks. I'm being a little bit optimistic here and I'm saying one every single week. But normally what ends up happening is I end up doing them roughly every two weeks. So I also need to allocate time to plan, prepare, and film skillshare class. Now the awesome particular techniques that I normally use such as bulk filming, bulk editing, bulk planning that allows me to just focus on one task at a time that we'll talk about within the next lesson. But let's actually just go ahead and plan this week with some of the things I've gotta do because I'm kind of a bit overwhelmed at the moment and I've got a lot of stuff over hanging from previous weeks that can lead to catch up on. 5. Example of a Week Using Time Blocking: So this is what your week could look like if you were to use the time blocking method. If we take a look at Monday, you can see the schedule for Monday and the tasks involved pretty much echo that bullet point list that we created in the previous video. That daily priority list was far quicker to create because it was just a simple bullet point list that you could take off. And this was a more time-consuming process, you could say. So it wasn't really that productive, but it does give you a solid structure and outline that's going to be quite strict and regimented to follow on Monday. So I now know when I wake up at 730 in the morning, get prepared and come over to the studio. I know exactly what I need to do straight away. So we're going to be filming, scripting that boss video for my music channel will then have dinner roughly at one PM. Go ahead and begin on the tech video that we're going to try and turn around on the same day. So we're going to go ahead film that, maybe do a bit of rough scripting and finish off the script. Then straight into editing already got all the product shots film from previous videos, so that shouldn't be too time-consuming. And then finally we go to export and upload that. And I could finally have some food. And Tuesday is going to be a continuation of the work I've done on Monday. So we're going to edit this footage that we filmed here and use all of the footage that I filmed a few weeks ago outside to finish off that video and then go ahead and have dinner. And then our start on my next Tech Channel video, which will be a TV review. Now you may have noticed that I've changed the priority of these two videos from my list that I made in the previous video, I decided to go ahead and do the tech video, same day turnaround, and then do the TV review video the following day, ready for the upload on Wednesday. Now Wednesday is a little bit of an awkward want them to plan and prepare for. I have no idea what the web is going to be like. The news feed is very inaccurate. I don't know if there's going to be red hot and sunny like it is right now, or whether it's going to be pouring it down. I live in the UK, in the Lake District where it rains very frequently. So this may potentially get cancelled. So what I've done instead is I've planned to film this particular review that will be outside, but I've also put an alternative here if it is raining, I'll just go ahead and script right for all of my videos next week and maybe into the following weeks as well for some potential causes. And then the video that we filmed yesterday will go live at 01:00 PM. Bang on time. Have dinner a little bit later because I'm anticipating I might be outside in probably going to get laid back and then I'm not too sure yet what I'll be doing in the afternoon. This is where the cracks begin to show with the time blocking method. You have no idea how your entire week is going to play out. You can kinda roughly guess how Monday and Tuesday are going to go because they are the nearest days. But anything beyond that point, anything could literally happen. You can have a certain zoom call. You need to have somebody email meeting, someone gets cancelled, something pops up and you product gets announced. So that becomes a priority. So as the week begins to mature, it becomes really hard to be, right? I'm going to be doing this at this exact moment, and we're going to be doing that at this exact moment. So there's going to be a few gaps here that will probably change on Tuesday evening when I have a clearer picture of what's going to be happening. So for now I'm going to leave this empty because if it is raining and this gets cancelled, I will potentially move the filming of this course to here instead and sort of flip my day around. Now on Thursday I have a driving lessons in the morning, prism Trenton and to drive and that takes up a lot of time. So that's complete write-off. And also because it consumes a lot of concentration, I'm usually quite jaded when I come back for brief periods. So I usually take an extended lunch of about an hour and a half and then I'll crack on with whatever else I need to do my music video. We'll then go live for my music product review on 5PM, which is what we scheduled over here and edit it so is finished earlier on in the week. And then finally on Friday, we have again a bit of a gap. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to be doing Friday morning. So I've left the free because I have a feeling something might crop up that I'll need to do and then head back and have dinner. Soft began to try out this new routine on a Friday where I reply to all of my e-mails and contact brands on a Friday afternoon. So it's a really easy task for me to do when I'm a little bit tired and jaded towards the latter stage of mice, busy week do not filming and stuff. And I can just send out products that I need to request all those different types of things. And then by the time it's Monday and Tuesday comes around, they're coming back into the office. They can reply to me and then they just start to filter through throughout the week. And then I can reply to them again On Friday, and then it just repeats. That cycle works really well. I usually finish a little bit earlier on a Friday around four PM, then I'll chill out, go see my dad or something and and my video will go live at five PM. That's the plan here. And I'll go ahead and have tea. Sometimes I do work late on a Friday because I've not gotten all of this done, any spills just the way it is. But if it's an ideal week, that's what happens normally in the evening. I topic research between sort of 630 APM, dead easy. I just actually sit and watch YouTube, watch stuff that's working, figure out why someone's videos like popping off or not, and whether it's worth me doing something similar. So it helped grow my channel in the right direction. On Saturday, I just focus on a single task which is bulk video editing, as all of the productivity masters say, if you focus on a single task, that is, you get into a state of flow and you can do it efficiently. So on a Saturday because I'm again disturbed by anyone because no one else is working. So there's no e-mails or sudden Zoom calls. I need to have our intranet that I just solely focus on editing all of the videos. Some of them can be quite boring because the courses as well. So I just get that done out the way on a nice, easy Saturday. And finally we have Sunday. Now I usually take this day off or have a half-day right now it's there. I'm using it to oversee film this Skillshare course. But very frequently I'll just do something really casual like watching TV or whatever, and just write my YouTube scripts so they're ready for the following week. That means I have a little bit more of an official week this week we've planned here isn't very efficient. But in the next video, I want to show you how we can streamline this. 6. Single Tasking: In the previous video, I showed you how I use the time blocking method to plan and prepare a realistic week with in my life, this was a very inefficient week that I showcased as I was catching up on a lot of work that was overdue. So we'll be jumping between multiple different tasks within a day. I now want to show you a method called single tasking that lets you prioritize one task at a time and complete them all in bulk. This is what a we could look like if you focus on a single task per day. Obviously, I have the huge benefit of this being my full-time job. So I can dictate the structure of my day and dedicate a single task per day to do things in bulk and make it more efficient. But you can take this same principle even if you have a job. So you'd say you work nine to five, you could have a single task focus evening. So, uh, Monday evening, you may be focused on researching things for your business, research in YouTube videos, choose their evenings, you then go ahead and fill in those videos. Wednesday evening, you then just solely focusing on editing that video. Then finally on Thursday can go ahead and release that video. And then you can do whatever for the remainder research script, whatever. So this is a type of structure that I'm going to be taking on Monday. I'm going to primarily focus on bulk filming videos. So this just means I sit down at his desk and I just read all of my different scripts, all my different video plans, and I just get them all films. So this would mean instead of just filming one video and then going to edit it and then uploading it and trying to do on the same day, I just film, film, film, film, film. And I maybe end up filming like 67 videos in one session. I can then go ahead and dump all of that footage onto my computer at the end of the day. But most importantly, you'll see that I have my tea way sooner, so actually finish all of my work hours earlier. Now normally my days don't finish to like 99, 30 PM. I'm usually still working editing, doing something that I'm trying to do. And that's because I usually have the structure of film edit, upload and try to get the video out for the deadline. And I've set myself IE Monday upload, Wednesday upload, whatever it is. But in the past when I've been really ahead of my work, I've taken this single task approach, same again on Tuesday, I can dedicate this day to video editing only, so I just sit adding videos from ten AM all the way through to four PM. This will just be editing the talking head segments like you're seeing right now. I can then watch them all through and take notes on what product shots I need to add. Do I need to add a drone shot? Do I need to add a slider shot and gimbal shot of the product I'm talking about. And at which point then once I've taken all of those notes, I can go ahead and film all of the shots for the featured products. And because we're going to be doing this in a single session, it's going to be extremely efficient. I only need to set up the gimbal wants, put the camera on it, film or 10 different products with the gimbal, put it away that I can get the slider out, film all of the different shots with the slider, put it away and whatever else I need to do some shots for the thumbnails, photographs, et cetera. And once again, you can see I'm finishing my day way sooner and properly achieving more as well now for wet and say I've left these blank ones again because as I said earlier, the time blocking method is kind of difficult to predict how your week is going to mature. Some of these tasks may end up being done on Wednesday because something crops up. So I always like to leave space for flexibility where needed. And then finally, the last stage of the week, we've got Thursday driving lessons, as mentioned, extended dinner. And then we've got scripting and planning of all of my courses, so they're ready to go for the filming sessions on Monday. 7. More Skillshare Classes Coming Soon!: I do hope that this quick Skillshare class has really shown you how easy it is to plan and prepare for the perfect week. These simple techniques that you'd be more efficient, productive, and effective with your time. If you enjoyed this course, make sure you following me here on Skillshare to see my latest courses when I upload them in the future. But as always, I'd be BEM Roland's thank you so much for watching, and I will see you in the next one.