Experiment Log – 005 | Weekly Planning
This experiment is about weekly planning. My goal is to figure out whether doing so will improve my life in some way. It might look like I'm doing this for productivity gains, but I'm not. That is because my primary motivation for this experiment is to plan out leisure activities for when I have free time.
Do I play video games? If so, what game? Do I read a book? If so, what book? Do I watch a show on Netflix? If so, what show? Do I play board games? If so, what game? Do I play the guitar? Do I do some recreational programming? Do I write a journal entry? Basically, I want to take away those kinds of questions and just have a list that I can look at to determine what I should be doing next.
Prior to this experiment, I never did any weekly planning whatsoever. When I started a bullet journal last year, I followed the basic setup which meant I had some sort of monthly plan (via the Monthly Log) and an idea of what tasks needed to be completed on the current day (via the Daily Log). I did not have any plan for the coming week though. So usually what would happen is, I would get home from work then ask myself, “What should I be doing tonight?” Or when I wake up on Saturday or Sunday morning, I would ask myself, “What should I do today?”
Towards the end of 2019, I started to feel like I wasn't using my free time the best way I could. Also, I felt like I was wasting my weekends only doing things I figured I wanted to do at the spur of the moment.
In one of Cal Newport's books, most likely his Digital Minimalism book, he mentioned taking time to plan out one's leisure activities. I scoffed at this idea last year. I thought, “Wouldn't I be wasting more time planning out my activities, than if I just engage in one right away?” Maybe. But then at the start of this year, I ran into this post from AoM which mentioned planning out your weekends. This lead me to another interesting post about Ernest Hemmingway and weekly planning. Now I'm a little more open minded about it, so I'm giving it a try.
Since I thought of doing this late, most stores no longer sell a weekly planner for 2020. So I'm doing my weekly planning on my bullet journal. I might get a dateless weekly planner later, depending on how I feel about having to do weekly log/spreads on my bullet journal. This experiment started last Sunday (January 5) and will end after a month of weekly planning, on February 3.
For an idea of what my weekly log/spread looks like, check here.
Update:
Experiment Log – 005 Results
Tags: #ExperimentLog #WeeklyPlanning