How to Plan Your Most Productive Day Ever

About this video

Clark walks through his simple weekly planning system on paper or in a journal. His premise: if you don’t plan your week, other people plan it for you, and being busy (checking email 9 to 5, fiddling with a blog design) is not the same as being productive (producing the actual lesson plan, draft, or deliverable). He also warns not to become rigidly controlled by a to-do list, saying most viewers of self-improvement videos need to loosen up, not tighten up. The system: write the week dates at the top, then brain-dump everything you want or have to do that week, organized by life areas if helpful, without worrying yet about days or feasibility. Star the priorities by asking what the essential 10% is. Below that, write out each workday and drag-and-drop tasks in, putting one Most Important Task — the one thing that alone would make the day productive — at the top of each day, followed by secondary tasks. He expects you will only get about 40% of the dump done, which is fine; the point is choosing the productive work instead of doing the nine easy items and saving the hard tenth for when willpower is lowest. As a next level he shows a typed version with a single weekly ‘one thing’ and days split into three roughly two-hour blocks: a morning holy hour (meditate, read, journal, breakfast), a creative block, and a getting-things-done block for editing and email. Tasks under three minutes should not go on the list at all — just do them.

Key takeaways

• If you don’t plan your week, other people will plan it for you; busy is not productive — judge a day by the real output produced.
• Brain-dump everything for the week first, then star the vital 10% instead of assigning days or worrying about feasibility up front.
• Give each day one Most Important Task: if everything else fails, completing that one thing makes the day count as productive.
• Expect to finish only about 40% of the dump — listing everything is for visibility and choice, and humans otherwise do the easy nine tasks and defer the hard tenth.
• Don’t put sub-three-minute tasks on a to-do list, just do them; optionally structure the day into three ~2-hour blocks — morning routine, creative work, then admin/getting things done.

Episode details: published June 1, 2016 · 14:58 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Clark Kegley’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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