I'm actually really proud of myself for getting this set up together because if you're imagining
a tripod right now it's actually a lot more janky than that I got a laundry basket and a bunch of
boxes I use twine a candle speaking of Instagram you should go to at the bliss bean because I have
a story highlight where I basically summarized my weekly planning process so if you watch this
video and then you just want a reminder of what I talked about that's a pretty good like recap
of what I'm gonna cover I actually wanted to start out by recommending that if you do try
and set up like a weekly planning routine that you write the whole thing out I have my weekly
planning process right in here I just open up to this page whenever I'm doing my weekly planning
cuz I've got it mostly memorized but it's just a good reminder I think just having it like numbered
step-by-step makes it a lot more manageable and less intimidating so you don't have to copy this
exactly like what I do but once you watch this video just figure out what steps you want to
incorporate into your own planning routine and create your own okay so as you can see
the first step is to skim through the week's journal entries all right here we go so this
is my journal I journal every morning and evening during my morning and evening routines I probably
write for like 15 to 20 minutes at a time when I journal I just write about my day whatever's
on my mind in the morning I'll write three things that I'm excited about for that day and then in
the evening I do three winds so things that I was proud of that day and then three things that I was
grateful for and one improvement that I can make for the next day I think this is a page that I can
share I don't want to just flip open to a random page because I don't know what's gonna be on there
so basically I read through all of these entries and I take a highlighter and I just highlight
whatever looks important so that includes big accomplishments that happened ideas that I came
up with lessons that I learned or - dues that I forgot to put into my planner so for example
it's like here I got to blog post done in one day and I was pretty dang proud of that
so I just highlight that and then once I've gone through the entire week kind of skimmed through
my journal entries and highlighted everything that's important I will pull out my planner and
open to the current week so not the week that I'm planning but basically the previous week and I do
what I call things that went well and things that could have gone better I'm always trying to be an
optimist I don't want to write things that went bad cuz that's just kind of bummer and so then
I make a little list of what well that week and what could have gone better and I try to focus
on things that I can personally influence and so if something bad happened that I really had
no control over I try not to write that down because I want to focus on things that I can
improve on next week so I'll just start in this process to show you some examples of what I might
write down so some examples would be across two things off my summer bucket list I established
regular practice of Spanish and then starting to learn Korean oh I set up a fiver account to
start selling my calligraphy intent wink wink you should check me out on there what else I had two
sleepovers so I had a good time with my friends I wrote two blog posts and made one and a half
videos I would probably write more but I'm just gonna skip ahead to the second one to save some
time some things that could have gone better are doing my bedtime routine more often so I normally
try to work in 25 minutes Chung's call Pomodoro's if you haven't heard about the pomodoro technique
you should check out my study tips video so I didn't use those a lot this week and that just
kind of distracted me because I would get tired but I wouldn't take a break and that just made
me work kind of inefficiently so for next week I definitely want to try and use more Pomodoro's I'm
going to say return to a normal sleeping schedule because of those two sleepovers it's through my
sleeping schedule completely out of whack and I did not feel great by the end of the second one
yeah so as I mentioned I would normally write a lot more but you get the idea these posters I
just take them and I stick them into the previous week's layout but I also do one more thing with
things could have gone better posted I go to my weekly brain dump and I just realized I finished
my journal so I go to my journal and I set up a brain dump and I just write brain dump week of and
whatever today's date is week of 6/17 I basically just transfer what's on here into my brain dump so
sometimes I can make a task out of it for example if I had said that I wanted to improve on making
more homemade breakfasts I might put a task on a certain day that says like make a smoothie Bowl
today but for things like this which are like use more Pomodoro's I can't really turn that into a
task but I'll just write that into my weekly layout as a general reminder not necessarily
something that's scheduled for a specific day all right so I'll just stick that into my weekly
layout and the next step is I take out the pages because that makes it a lot easier to write on
them and I just spread them out like that and I just flip to my monthly layout and I check
out what events I have happening so that I can put them into my weekly layout so normally when school
is going on I have a crap ton of events happening but now that it's summer I would say most of like
what I spend my days doing is more self-guided so I only have a couple events so I have two
photoshoots happening this week as well as some birthdays that's what it means when I just have
the name written down that's a person's birthday and I'll indicate that it's a birthday later by
the color that I highlighted when I write down my events I like to just stick them into the column
so I don't have like a separate section for events and to-do's they just all go in one column in the
order that I think of them basically and I really like that because some days have a lot of events
and not a lot of like singular to-do's but other days have a ton of to-do's and no events I always
have enough space for everything because there's no like division between the space for events and
the space for to-do's I also really like this weekly layout just because I can see all of my
days at once and very easily like transfer tasks between them because that's how my mind works
I think in terms of little tasks rather than big project I would say for example if I have an event
happening on Friday like during the school year if I'm organizing a volunteering event I need to send
a reminder the night before so I would just fill that in right there and the reminder and the event
would be right next to each other which just makes it a lot easier to remember to write that in and
to remember to do it also if there are things that I am NOT able to get done on a certain day it's
super easy to just transfer them right to the next column instead of having to you know flip pages to
do that okay so now that I have my events in the next step is to work on my brain dump let's pull
that back out basically my brain dump is the place to write down anything and everything that I need
to do or that's on my mind before I schedule it into my week so the first thing I'll do is I refer
to my monthly goals and that comes right after my June calendar my goals for this month were to
put up a total of eight blog posts and videos to complete the gap year challenge which is basically
like a 30 day email challenge from boots and all I'll include a link in the description because I
think it's super useful where they basically guide you through some of the big steps of planning a
gap year and then another goal was to earn 500 dollars because trying to save up money for this
gap year I also take a quick look at the other things I have in here so like the habit I wanted
to focus on was meditation but I don't really feel like I need to put that in my planner I'm working
on a lynda.com course that's about Adobe Premiere and the two books that I wanted to read this month
were to all the boys I've loved before which I already finished and then also tribe of mentors
by Tim Ferriss basically the three sections I want to focus on when I'm doing my weekly
planning are the goals the course and the book I want to write down some things that I can do
to get closer to these goals and scheduling some time to read this book and work on this course I
go to my brain dump and I just write down work on schedule blog post videos work on cap your
challenge and read these are pretty general but once I'm looking at my week I can break up like
the process for example of making a video into more separate steps next I take a look at what
my life goals are I would say they're more like visions because they're not like measurable things
they're just ways that I would describe my dream life I guess I have things like having my own
business and being able to support myself always making sure to make time for creativity traveling
the world and just following my own path and so it's not like I can just take these goals and
put them into my planner like on Tuesday I will make creativity a key aspect of my life so it's
more like I just look at this and I try to come up with some things that I can do this week that will
bring me closer to this vision that I have of a dream life and I think it's just good to take a
good look at this once a week obviously I always see it whenever I open up my phone but just for
a split second so it's good to just read through it and remind yourself of what it is that you're
working towards the first one is have my own business which I would say I'm already working on
I know that I'm gonna spend time this week working on blog posts and videos as well as starting up
my little calligraphy side hustle thing I don't know the second one creativity I know I'm gonna
be doing photoshoots and making videos so I think that's good the travel one I'm gonna be working on
the gap your challenge so that's good so yeah some weeks like I'll look at this and I'll see that I'm
already basically working towards a lot of these but it was a good reminder okay the next step
is usually where I get the bulk of my brain dump list from at the front of my planner I have this
note card where I've written down the aspects of my life and actually I think I need to add
two things because I recently started doing paid photoshoots and also that calligraphy thing so I
think those are important I have big aspects which basically means like they're very multifaceted and
probably a lot of my tasks on any given week are going to be about them and then the little aspects
or things that are more defined like for my photo business I probably have a few clients at a time
but it's very defined like it's sending a few emails and editing photos doing the photoshoots
themselves it's not super like general so I just used this list as a reminder of what I have going
on in my life because I don't want to forget about an of these for an entire week and so it's good to
just look at it and it sparks my memory as to what I might need to do so I'll just show you a little
bit of what this looks like so this week I got through day 11 of the gap your challenge so for
next week I'm going to say I want to get through 12 through 20 why not these 12 through 20 of the
gap your challenge another category I have this my photo business so I'll say I need to decide on a
location for a certain photoshoot I need to edit photos I need to write thank-you notes so I don't
know the exact days that I'm going to be doing this yet but when I go to my weekly layout I'm
going to be able to look through all of these and fit them into my week another category I
have is my blog and so next week I'm planning on publishing one blog post and two videos write my
journal prompt blog post photograph it publish it I have my weekly planning video which I'm
recording right now yeah I just keep going lately I've been filling out like one and a half pages I
would say but during the school year I would get two and a half to three even so I'm just gonna go
ahead and try to finish up this brain dump now all right I think I'm done so the next step is
trapping my weekly layout and basically scheduling everything that's on my brain dump into my week so
as I mentioned before some of the things on my brain dump are tasks but others are just kind
of reminders and so what I do is at the bottom I leave space to write some reminders also three
things I'm excited for for the week and then on this side I have a little shopping list that I
keep going so those are my three reminders for the week doing my bedtime routine every evening use
more Pomodoro's to stay on task and go to bed early and wake up early the three excited I'm
gonna leave for the end of the planning process and then as I go along I just use a pencil to
cross the things that I've already put into my planner okay all done oh wait not all done okay
now all done now for my favorite part is getting to highlight everything I don't really like to
do a lot of like illustrations or decorations or anything like that in my planner cuz I feel
like it just distracts me a little but I do like to use highlighters not only are they practical
because they help me get like a visual feel of what aspects of my life I am putting my time
towards how they also just look really pretty so I use these zebra mild liners I have a set of 12
of them I believe actually 15 I think these mild liners have as you would probably guess a really
nice mild color and they just look super cute they don't bleed through the paper at all and there's a
lot of different shades I like to take all of them out of the pencil case as I finish with one color
I just put it back in the pencil case for example gray is the color that I use for blog things I'll
just go through and I highlight everything that is related to my blog so sometimes I like to use the
excited section to kind of change my attitude about certain things so for example this week
I've got two photoshoots happening which have me feeling a little bit anxious because these are
going to be my very very first paid photoshoots but I put them in an excited section because I
want to like train myself to view them differently I want to feel excited about them rather than
nervous because it's a cool opportunity and something I'm proud of myself for achieving
like having my first photography clients that's a pretty big deal so I just want to view it in
a positive light rather than a negative one so that's it for my weekly layout now that I have
that I just grabbed my planner and I put the sheets of paper back in so if you're wondering
these rings are the happy planner rings I just ordered these rings on Amazon I believe they have
a large size in a small size so these are two smaller ones I bought an arc hole puncher from
Staples I think and I just cut this out of like an old binder this kind of plasticky material and I
basically put this together myself so the paper I print out once in a while when I'm running out of
paper I print dots onto it and I cut it in half with my paper trimmer and then I punch it one
more quick thing that I wanted to point out was that sometimes I have things where I know that I
want to do them a certain week of the month but I don't know enough of the specifics to know which
day of the week and so I used this column in my monthly layout to write things like that so for
example at the very beginning of July I have my FBA competition and so I know I need to start
definitely practicing that week so I just put that in there because I didn't know which day's I
wanted to practice on but I knew that I wanted to start on that week then when I'm doing my weekly
planning I just quick check this column to see if there's any projects I wanted to work on that week
and I put them into my brain dump okay I think that was it I feel like I've talked about so much
today this entire process that I just went through normally takes me about 45 minutes um on a good
day obviously took a lot longer today because I had to go slow and explain things and also set up
my filming setup so weekly planning is something I do every week like I don't miss it if I for some
reason I'm not able to do it on Sunday I do it on Monday there are certain habits that you just
never miss because they are essential to your life they become essential to your routines sometimes
I don't want to do it because thinking about everything that I have to do especially during
the school year not so much during the summer but thinking about everything that's on my plate
can make me feel a little bit nervous or anxious and even during the process of planning I might
feel like that but once I'm done and I just have everything like laid out it makes me feel so much
better because there's no longer that overwhelming feeling of like I know I have a lot to do this
week but I have no idea when I'm gonna do it or what exactly I need to do and just seeing it like
this all color-coded laid out nice and neat really makes a huge difference so like 45 minutes to have
an organized week I would say that's a pretty good trade-off so that's the end of this video I feel
weird because I didn't like talk straight to the camera this entire video I always like wave the
camera goodbye but I'll just do this I guess let me know if you want to see any more like weekly
plan with knees I know some youtubers do a series where they just sit down every week and show what
their planning process looks like I don't know if it would be interesting with my planner because
I don't like to stickers or illustrations or anything like that it's not boring just
practical I would say but let me know if that is something you would be interested in I'm
also thinking about sharing my monthly planning routine in another video so yeah I just have a
lot of stuff planned and I'm excited to share it all with you I will talk to you soon bye you