The weekend is an opportune time to prep yourself for success.
For most of us, the work week is so hectic that it’s difficult to stay on course if you haven’t laid the proper groundwork. We want to do our best, but stress quickly catches up with us and soon we find ourselves doing nothing but trying to stay afloat until the weekend.
That’s why planning for the week is so crucial. By taking the time to plan for an amazing week, you can put yourself in a position to win, perform your best and follow through on your long-term goals.
Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.– Paul J. Meyer
To make your week the best it can be, let’s talk about some useful rituals you can add to your weekend. Here are some of the best:
1. Walk in nature or meditate
One of the most important things you can do to prep for an amazing week is recharge from the previous week.
If you continue to push yourself without allowing yourself to rest, you’ll just end up burning yourself out. Plus, while you crash and burn you’ll be running on reduced efficiency, so it’s really a lose-lose all around.
There are a lot of ways you can do this, but two of my favorite ways to recharge are meditation and experiencing nature. Meditation has a lot of great benefits, from reducing stress and sorting mental clutter to increasing focus.
On the other hand, taking a walk in nature has similar benefits and is great for helping us think through tough decisions. Both have their uses, so go with either or whatever else helps you best.
2. Explore a great story
Similar to recharging, you need to do more than just calm the mind and relax the body to reset from the previous week. Reading fiction allows you to step away from the events of the previous week altogether, something we rarely do and are barely capable of without outside influence, something a great story does masterfully.
Reading stories of faraway lands and epic quests is great because it allows us to take our mind off of things entirely and explore our imagination. By doing so, you’re able to not only reset but get your creative juices flowing in advance.
3. Meal prep
After resetting on Saturday, it’s now time to do some more concrete planning for the week ahead. And one of the best ways to save yourself time and headache is to meal plan.
Meal planning can be huge, especially if you find yourself racking your brain over what to eat every day. Mealtime is so often an issue because we’re preoccupied with everything else, we don’t want to be bothered with yet another thing. The result? We end up going with fast food to save ourselves that time and headache.
However, by meal prepping in advance, you can plan out healthy, energizing meals that keep you at peak performance throughout the week on top of saving you time.
4. Plan outfits
Similarly, if you take the time to plan out your outfits for the week, you can save yourself even more time and energy, making the morning easier and more efficient.
Take time to do your laundry on Sundays and hang up your outfits according to the day or simply group outfits and grab whichever you want each morning, either way you’ll save yourself time and hassle and be able to keep your focus on what you have to do for that day as opposed to bothering with minor distractions.
5. Map out a plan
Take time to list out everything you want to accomplish, what you need to do to accomplish those things, and exactly when and what day you’ll do completing those tasks so that everything is planned out to the ‘T’.
Things might change along the way, and that’s okay, having your week planned ahead of time allows you to mitigate damage and, over time, you’ll notice that preplanning makes a big difference when all is said and done with your weekly results.
Just make sure to grade yourself on Friday to see how you did for the week and make adjustments accordingly.
