Module 9 · Planning & doing · Lesson 3 of 7

Priorities, weeks and days

Choose what matters this week, then what matters today — in that order.

8 min read · Free — no account needed to read

The idea

Prioritising means deciding what matters most before deciding what to do. Without it, the day fills with whatever is loudest — messages, requests, small urgent tasks — and the important but quiet work never gets its turn.

Weekly planning looks at the bigger picture: what are the two or three most important things to move forward this week? When will I do them? What commitments are already fixed? Daily planning is smaller: given this week’s priorities, what are the few things that matter today, and when will I do them?

Doing it in that order matters. A day planned without a week behind it tends to be reactive. A week planned without days tends to stay a wish. The two together connect your goals to your actual hours.

Why it matters

People who plan a week at a time tend to protect time for what matters, rather than fitting it into whatever is left over. A short daily plan then makes each day less of a negotiation.

See it happen

Nadia starts each workday by opening her email. By lunchtime she has answered forty messages and has not touched the report due Friday.

The first read

Clearing messages first feels responsible and gets small things off her plate before the bigger work.

With this idea

On Sunday evening she writes her three priorities for the week, including the report, and blocks Tuesday and Wednesday mornings for it. Each morning she writes today’s three things before opening email. The report is done Wednesday.

What changed

She set priorities for the week first, then planned each day from them.

Easy to get wrong

• Planning a week with more priorities than it can hold. Three is often plenty.
• Planning every minute of a day. Leave room for the unexpected — it always arrives.

Different perspectives

Reasonable people disagree here. None of these is presented as the final word.

Important before urgent

Sorting by importance and urgency helps people protect the important-but-not-urgent work that urgent requests otherwise crowd out.

Hard to sort in practice

Critics note that urgency and importance are often unclear or shift during the day, and that many people — carers, shift workers — have little control over their urgent tasks.

What this rests on

Practical wisdom. A widely used way of working. Useful to try — not a scientific law.

• The urgent–important matrix (associated with Eisenhower; popularised by Stephen Covey, 1989) — Sorting tasks by whether they are urgent and whether they are important, so important-but-not-urgent work is not always crowded out.

Try it: Three for the week, three for the day

1. Write the three things that matter most to move forward this week.
2. Write when you will work on each.
3. Tomorrow morning, before anything else, write today’s three things.

Reflect

• What important thing keeps losing to urgent things in your week?
• What would a week look like if it started with your priorities instead of your inbox?

Use it in the coming days

On one day this week, plan the week’s three priorities, and put each on your schedule at a time you will protect.

Where to do it: My Schedule

The schedule is where a week’s priorities get protected hours.