291. Moving From Anxiety to Peace (Planning 2.0 Pt. 1)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Joel: It’s pretty common knowledge that stopping a habit is harder than replacing the habit. In other words, if you’re doing something that ain’t so good, it’s pretty hard to just stop. It’s a lot easier if you replace it with something better. So what if you replaced anxious, looping and catastrophizing? I don’t have a problem with this.

[00:00:22] I just wanna be clear at the outset with a process that’s actually productive and research backed.

[00:00:35] Welcome to Focus on This, the most productive podcast on the internet. I’m Joel Miller.

[00:00:40] Marissa: And I’m Marissa Hyatt.

[00:00:42] Joel: This is where we remind you of something that you already know. It’s not about getting more things done, it’s about getting the right things done,

[00:00:51] Marissa: both at work and in life. And today we’re talking about planning 1.0, planning 2.0.

[00:00:59] And what all of this has to do with the weekly preview. So we have a guest that we had on the Double Win Podcast that that show. That is Megan Joel’s wife, my sister, and my dad, Michael Hyatt, and they did an episode with an author Elizabeth Stanley. You may have heard of her. You may have listened to that episode.

[00:01:23] If you haven’t, I encourage you to. It was done in October of this past year. But she wrote a book called Widen the Window, and a lot of what we’re gonna talk about today comes from this book, um, encourage you guys to check it out and read it. But she is a researcher and practitioner who studies stress and resilience and the.

[00:01:43] Episode that we did on the Double Win Show is actually called The Biology of Resilience. So check that out. It’s pretty fantastic. But today we’re diving into a topic that she calls Planning 2.0. So this immediately made us think of the Full Focus Planner, especially the weekly preview. And we know many of you are fans of this.

[00:02:08] Literally my favorite part of the full focus planner. But before we get there, we need to talk about what Planning 1.0 is. It’ll probably sound familiar and especially why this is important to any and all of us who might struggle with anxiety, which like Joel, I certainly don. Just kidding. I actually definitely do struggle with anxiety of several different types, most of which is some type of social anxiety or what I call pressure anxiety, where like you’re in a high pressure situation and frankly.

[00:02:42] It’s gotten bad in the last few years. I was not somebody who was an anxious child or struggled with this really ever. I never struggled with anxiety until probably the last three or four years, and it feels like it came in like a freight train. So I’m personally very invested in this topic and very excited to get to talk about this and really to help us move from this place of anxiety and more into peace.

[00:03:08] So let’s talk about what Planning 1.0 is and really how it’s. Insufficient. So one of the things that Stanley distinguishes is between our survival brain, which would be like your impulses, your emotions, your sensation to our thinking brain, which would be things like our thoughts, planning, problem solving.

[00:03:31] Both of them matter. They’re both important. They’re both necessary. Both are really meant to help us, but both get stuck. Planning 1.0 happens when our thinking brain is contingency planning. And if you struggle with any type of anxiety, you know this all too well. So this is where we’re really thinking about the future and trying to plan for the future.

[00:03:55] So it often sounds like what if it all falls apart? How can I make them like me? Or how am I appearing or how are they perceiving me? I have to plan for every possibility. I have to think of all the things and make sure we have a plan for them. And planning 1.0 feels like it works because it gives us a feeling, keyword, feeling of certainty and control.

[00:04:21] And as a busy brain, it can feel productive, right? When we feel busy, when we feel like we’re giving our brain some kind of a job, it feels. Productive, but that’s an illusion, right, Joel?

[00:04:32] Joel: 100%. It’s like a useful, helpful thing to do so far as it goes. Like it would be better to plan for all possibilities than not plan for anything.

[00:04:42] It would be good to think about what might happen if everything falls apart because something is gonna fall apart. So you might be better prepared. However, it often just. Churns on its own energy and it goes nowhere. And it’s largely unhelpful, especially if we don’t do something with it, like take it to the next level, which we’ll talk about in a minute.

[00:05:05] But the reason that it’s fundamentally elusory as to how productive we actually are is that anxiety itself doesn’t actually produce. Mm-hmm. We can feel productive because we’re busy. We’re getting something done. We’re making a list of all the crap that might happen, but that’s not actually gonna get us to where we need to go.

[00:05:28] Marissa: Instead, you know, planning 1.0 as she talks about, keeps us with a quote, narrow window of tolerance, where we’re only okay if we feel like we’re in control. We know this feeling well. We’ve all had some level of experience or situation where we feel like, gosh, if I’m just in control, if I can just control the situation or how this person is perceiving me or, or if something goes wrong, then I’ll be okay.

[00:05:57] The problem is that when our plans get interrupted, it becomes much more stressful, and we know most often the plans do get interrupted. This frankly happened to me this past week at the time of this recording where Nashville was gonna be hit with this really bad ice storm. I wasn’t even conscious to, frankly, how anxious I was feeling.

[00:06:18] I just. Got into action, started planning, started thinking of all the things I needed to get and make sure that I was gonna be okay in the event that my electricity would be out for several days, if not up to a week at the time, is what we thought. Since, has proven to be longer in a lot of circumstances here, and it felt like, okay, if I can just control the situation, then I’m gonna be okay.

[00:06:44] And the truth is that first day that the ice hit and tree limbs started falling, and trees started falling, and it sounded terrifying, frankly, in Nashville’s like bombs going off, was the moment that I realized how anxious I was feeling because it all of a sudden hit me even if I, you know, have all the things planned, so to speak.

[00:07:06] There’s some level of this that is going to be interrupted or different than what I expected, and it’s gonna become much more stressful And, and as we heard unfortunately in so many people’s stories, their electricity did go out for several days, and then things like pipes started bursting and houses become flooded, where most of these people did not plan for an event like that.

[00:07:28] That was not necessarily on our radar. We don’t deal with this. So it was the first time since 1994. That we’ve had a storm to this magnitude, but anxiety really does create this illusion that if we can control this situation, we’re gonna be okay. But it’s not that. So what’s the solution here? What do we do?

[00:07:47] Because it often just feels like we’re just at the whim of the anxiety.

[00:07:52] Joel: Sure. Well, the first thing you need to do, according to Elizabeth Stanley is widen your window for that. I recommend reading the book however. This narrower topic that we’re talking about here. Second, we need to give all that planning energy like a structured outlet, and that’s where fundamentally, that’s where the weekly preview comes in and what the weekly preview helps you do.

[00:08:14] As you first started talking, my mind bounced to this Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega e Gasset, whose name I’m undoubtedly mispronouncing, but he said in one of his books that Life comes at us point blank. And that is like a scary scenario to be in. We all feel it like life is hitting us all the time and it’s hitting us close up.

[00:08:41] There’s no way to avoid it. However, one of the ways that we do avoid some of it or manage some of it is doing something as simple as keeping a list. And when we do that, we’re basically taking all this data that’s coming at us, all this information, all this contingencies, all the everything, and we’re putting it into some form that enables us to take control over it.

[00:09:04] That’s still, however, in planning 1.0 mm-hmm. That’s like maybe the bridge to Planning 2.0, but planning 2.0 takes you beyond that simple list and it helps you do something really important. Which is that it essentially gives the thinking part of your brain a job description. It’s telling you now to filter for what’s important versus what’s not important, and that can look like just something much more useful because ultimately, instead of letting ourselves ruminate on worst case scenarios or worrying and catastrophizing, we enlist our own creative agency to create a flexible plan for the future.

[00:09:47] It sounds like this. Here’s what matters this week, it sounds like, well, here’s what I can control, it sounds like, here’s what I’m going to rest. If you listen to last week’s episode, you know how fundamentally important that is. Here’s what I know. I’ll let go of like, these are the things that once we start applying a level of thinking that goes above and beyond mere catastrophe management.

[00:10:11] The kind of problems that we face. This point, life firing at us at all times. That’s when we get to where we need to go,

[00:10:19] Marissa: you know, for a lot of us. Laying in bed at night, just having those worst case scenarios and catastrophizing all these things, just feeling so overwhelmed and anxious about all the things that could go wrong.

[00:10:35] And what I love about this is, and we’re gonna get into the specifics of like how to actually do this, but as this is really gonna help you. Feel, the actual sense of control that you’re trying to feel in planning 1.0. That is an illusion. You’re actually really getting back in the driver’s seat in this right?

[00:10:54] And I love that because for most of us, we feel like often we’re at the whim of life and we do our best to try to plan. But again, it’s faulty. It’s not rooted in anything that is flexible, that is really putting us back into that driver’s seat. It’s just this total illusion and made up. Possibility could happen or go wrong or what we would do in those events in the future.

[00:11:23] And this really gets us back into the present and helps us create real change and effect on our day-to-day lives. So Joel, let’s talk about what Stanley calls the six principles. What are these? And let’s start walking through these. ’cause I think this is where we can really start applying this planning 2.0.

[00:11:43] Joel: Absolutely. We’re only gonna cover three this week. We’ll pick up the final three next week, so make sure you come back for that episode. The reason for that is we wanna make sure that we give ample time to actually discuss what these mean. So the three that we’re gonna cover today, principle number one, we naturally make better choices when we are inside our window, and that means when we’re regulated, when we’re calm, when we’re actually using that wonderful prefrontal cortex that we have to make considered decisions about what’s going on in our life, in our future.

[00:12:19] The second principle is that we need to practice intentionality. We need to get clear about what we want or what we want to create. The third principle is that if everything is gonna fit into your calendar, you have to make choices. Because when we come at life with the basic statement that I don’t have enough time, the implied object of that sentence is for all the stuff that I want to do.

[00:12:43] And therefore we actually have to use a filter to decide what is actually worth doing. And when we feel overwhelmed or overloaded, or kind of in this. Time scarcity condition where everything is coming at us too fast, we can’t keep up. One of the reasons for that is that we’re simply not making choices.

[00:13:00] And in that planning 1.0 phase, the choice making part of it is, is gone. Like it’s not happening. You can start with a list, but then you gotta start making choices with what goes on the list or what you’re gonna elevate to priority status on that list. And that’s what moves you in to planning 2.0. Just as I was reading that section out of Stanley’s book, I was just reminded how much she must love if she had one, the full focus planner, because that’s what the weekly preview is designed to help you do, is actually to work through.

[00:13:33] That very process.

[00:13:34] Marissa: Yes. Well, and hopefully what we talk about today is we dive into each of these three principles in this episode and the remaining three in next week’s episode. Hopefully this will be really practical and will give you a good foundation for the next time that you do your weekly preview.

[00:13:49] And I can’t stress this enough. If you are using your full focus planner and you’re not using your weekly preview, you are missing out on the most important part of what that planner can help provide you. It is arguably the most foundational piece of that entire planner. I know people who I’ve heard who are like, oh yeah, I use the daily pages every day and do my daily big three, but I don’t have time to do the weekly preview.

[00:14:16] Or I’ve never done it before. And I just wanna say, if you’re doing just your daily big three each day, but you’re not thinking through strategically. How your week is laid out and how that ties back to what you’re really trying to accomplish in your life related to your goals and your other commitments and priorities.

[00:14:35] You’re missing out on the meat and potatoes of the full focus planner. So definitely use your weekly preview and hopefully today’s episode will really help you with it. So let’s dive into principle number one. This is, we naturally make better choices when we are quote, inside our window. So let’s think about this.

[00:14:55] If we think about our window as where we’re calm and regulated, if you’re in that place, you’re likely gonna make better food choices before you’re starving, right? Before you’re in a deficit, you’re gonna make better food choices. This is why they say, don’t go to the grocery store on an empty stomach because you end up grabbing everything and anything because you’re starving, right?

[00:15:16] So. This is important. You’ll make better decisions about what to focus on for the week ahead, or whatever time window you’re looking at when you’re in a calm state, rather than when you’re stressed or feeling rushed or urgent, where everything is urgent. So this is why we want you planning on a weekly basis.

[00:15:35] You can do this either on. A Friday like we do with our double win coaching clients. You can do this over the weekend on a Sunday evening, even Monday morning, but that usually is the window of time that you wanna do this because usually you’re much more calm. You’re in a place of where you’re looking down on the rest of the week versus inside of it where you’re stressed.

[00:15:58] And feeling rushed and kind of thrown all around.

[00:16:01] Joel: You’re not in the thick of it at that point.

[00:16:03] Marissa: Exactly. Which is not a good place to figure out what you should be focusing on at all. So this is why Stanley recommends choosing a point over the weekend, like I just talked about, where you are going to plan your upcoming week.

[00:16:16] So you get to decide what this day, this time is, but I encourage you to put it on your calendar. Make it the same time, the same day, every single week. So you know, that’s my dedicated time to actually plan.

[00:16:28] Joel: That brings us to principle two, that we need to practice intentionality, getting clear about what we want to create, what we want for our future before it’s here, this is something Stanley says.

[00:16:39] Planning 2.0 is about creating a healthy, happy, balanced life, not just succeeding at work. That’s what we would call the double win, right? That you’re winning at work and succeeding at life. So we can give thumbs up, amens, kudos, whatever else we want to that, because that’s like right out of our playbook also.

[00:17:01] But to do that, you need three things. You need a, a holistic vision for your life. Plus you need commitments or goals across multiple areas, areas of your life. Plus you need weekly planning that helps you get there a little bit out of time. This is exactly what the full focus system is actually. So this is like the whole package.

[00:17:23] This is what she’s talking about here. In our language, we would say that the double win requires a vision of flourishing for your life across all the different domains. It requires having some clear commitments or goals that you’re working on, on a reasonable time horizon, like a quarter, for instance.

[00:17:40] And you need weekly checkpoints. You need like. This feedback loop of coming back to those priorities to see how you’re stacking up against them so you can adjust your behavior and your planning. In the meantime, this is actually the secret sauce of the weekly preview. If. You have goals, but don’t actually check to see how you’re doing against them.

[00:18:01] You’re never getting the feedback you need to make progress on them. Mm-hmm. And when you’re not doing it on a short enough time horizon, like a week, what ends up happening is that we kind of drift and life happens. It’s fired at us, point blank to use that phrase again. And so we just respond. We react in the moment we feel overloaded, and we never get that moment to kind of like stick our head above the fray to look down as to what happened in the prior week and what we’re looking for in the upcoming week.

[00:18:32] So we need all those three things to be working together. The weekly preview actually helps you do that very thing.

[00:18:39] Marissa: Well, and I think this fights, you know what a lot of us would call the Sunday scaries where you get to Sunday evening and you start thinking about the week ahead and it’s like, oh my gosh, what am I in for?

[00:18:50] What’s gonna hit me on Monday morning when I log into Slack and end of my email and open my computer? What’s gonna happen? We have this deep sense of dread and anxiety about what’s to come. And again, our planning 1.0 brain will likely go to catastrophizing and thinking of all the things that are gonna go wrong and how we’re gonna show up to a meeting completely unprepared and everything, and we start to get sweaty and nervous and reactive.

[00:19:19] Versus in this place of kind of responsiveness where we can really take a step back and say, Hey, I’ve got some major things that I’m working on this quarter, my goals, and I need to figure out what progress I can make this week on those goals, or what progress I want to make this week on those goals.

[00:19:37] Right. And it gives us a clear sense of focus and direction. I did my weekly preview for this week and it was so incredibly helpful to, I frankly didn’t do it last week. It was so chaotic and I didn’t do it, and I felt it all week. My wifi ended up going out. Talk about things you don’t plan for. Didn’t plan for that planned for the whole electricity go to go out, not just the wifi.

[00:20:01] That was incredibly stressful and frustrating,

[00:20:03] Joel: especially since you kept power most of the time. But your wifi was down,

[00:20:07] Marissa: right? Yes. My wifi was out almost all week, and it was very challenging. I was trying to work from my hotspot on my phone, which was incredibly slow. Eventually, I was able to get out of my house and leave and go to a coworking space.

[00:20:19] It was very frantic, very chaotic. I had no clue which way was up, which way was down, what I needed to be focusing on, what needed to be adjusted. And the truth is, life happens, but if we can create a plan that is reasonable, that is strategic, that helps us get clarity on where our focus and attention needs to go for the week.

[00:20:41] The stress, the anxiety, the freakout suddenly really goes out the window and we all of a sudden realize how flexible we can actually be within that plan, which is what I love about the weekly preview. So if you’re somebody who has gone through, uh, the weekly preview, know this process well. However, you might be somebody who either has never used a full focus planner, you’re not familiar with this process.

[00:21:06] Maybe you just found us on Apple Podcast or Spotify, or a friend sent you this episode. Or maybe you’re somebody who hasn’t done the weekly preview in quite a while. You’ve fallen off the wagon on this. It happens to the best of us, it happens to me. And so let’s walk through a little bit of a refresher of kind of what some of the questions are that you might be asking during this process.

[00:21:28] So first and foremost is what’s working and what’s not. So before we can even determine the plan for the future for the coming week, we need to first go back and reflect on what happened previously so we can adjust our behavior accordingly for the outcomes we’re trying to deliver. So we always start with what’s working and what’s not, and how are we going to shift our behavior moving forward.

[00:21:53] Secondly, we, you know, look at what will center us this week. What is something that will help ground us, help balance us, help stay in that calm regulated state? We need to ask when we will rest. So where is the time that we’re gonna rest and not just literally sleep, that’s not just the only form of rest, but where can we rest, um, and other areas of our days that will really help fuel our energy, just like we talked about in last week’s episode, that will fully fuel our energy.

[00:22:23] And then what will we say no to? Make room for our priorities. So Joel, this is where we start to make those choices. We ask the question what needs to be a no so that I can make room for all the things that I want to say yes to.

[00:22:52] Joel: That takes us directly into principle three If. Everything is gonna fit into your calendar. You’ve gotta make choices. And I did this this week when I was working on my weekly preview on Friday. We have an all team meeting. It’s gonna be a great meeting, but it’s gonna be all day. And what that means is I have 20% less work time this week than I would’ve had on a normal week and 20% less work time.

[00:23:17] Is a lot to lose for me, one of my weekly big three was the team meeting

[00:23:23] Marissa: me too.

[00:23:23] Joel: It made no sense for me to say like, I’m gonna assume that I have the full range of time that I have and I’m gonna include on my weekly big three things that won’t fit. Instead, I had to actually think strategically what’s gonna fit, and then start making decisions about what I was gonna put into this week or punt to the next week.

[00:23:42] So when. Elizabeth Stanley talks about this. She’s really recommending that we prioritize goal related activities. Yeah. And rest. And if you think about what makes a difference in your life. Those are the two primary things when it comes to our productivity, because if we’re focused on our goals, if we’re focused on like these key projects that we have to work on, and per last week’s episode, we’re rested enough to take great advantage of the energy that we have, that’s how we’re gonna be most productive.

[00:24:13] If we don’t do that, if we instead. Just like take everything on our list last week that wasn’t finished, put it on our list for this week and then grab everything that we think might hit this week and stick that on the list too. Pretty soon we’ve got, as Megan, my wife, likes to say, too much jelly for the biscuit.

[00:24:31] There’s no way to digest that, and so what ends up happening is we put ourselves into like panic mode. Automatically and we did it to ourselves.

[00:24:41] Marissa: I think the biggest mistake I see our clients make when we walk through this process together is they’re setting their weekly big three, which are the three most important outcomes or priorities for the week ahead.

[00:24:52] They set those just based on anything and everything. It’s just like, what do I think needs to happen this week? Rather than really being intentional about connecting these back to their goals. So again, that’s a natural filter that can help us prioritize. But if we’re not keeping that viewpoint, if we’re not having that view of those goals on a regular basis, the likelihood that we keep those front and center and keep making progress is really low.

[00:25:21] Joel: It’s a visibility thing. Right?

[00:25:22] Marissa: Exactly. And the weekly preview gives us that stopping point in the week to say, let me go back, review what’s important, review what I said. I was committed to. Creating or delivering or following through with. And then let me figure out what I need to do this week to actually make progress on those things.

[00:25:41] So one of the ways you can figure out your weekly big three is just by asking the question, what are the three most important things I need to get done this week related to my goals? And just to be clear, your goals should include both your professional life and your personal life. It’s often easy for us to think that we’re only talking about work here, but if you have a health related goal or a financial goal or something else that’s personal, we want you to be prioritizing that as well on a weekly basis.

[00:26:11] Joel: Absolutely. I mean, go back up to the top of this very episode. The double win is about winning at work and succeeding at life. And if we’re focused solely on work, we’re gonna short. Shrift everything else. And that’s not only gonna undercut our work in the long run, but it’s also going to ultimately undercut.

[00:26:29] Yeah. Our whole lives, like we have to have those two things in tension with each other, in balance with each other. Doesn’t have to be perfect balance. Nobody can attain that, but what we do have to do is give it the attention. It requires give all those different facets of our life, the attention that they require, so that we’re not, you know, waking up three months from now, having made zero progress on a financial goal or a health goal per your example.

[00:26:53] That really matters to us. Like we wouldn’t set that goal if it didn’t matter.

[00:26:56] Marissa: And I think where this really comes into play too, is like you talked about with the rest side of things, we’ve gotta have a strategy for staying out of survival mode because survival mode is only gonna lead us into burnout.

[00:27:08] Which we’re not gonna be able to fulfill those commitments, be able to follow through with the things that matter, those goals that we’ve set out, uh, whether it’s health related, financially, personally, you know, something relationally or professionally, if we’re in a state of survival. First of all, your brain isn’t functioning in the same way, literally on a fundamental level.

[00:27:29] You’re not gonna be able to make the same level of decisions outside of survival mode that you would in survival mode. You just don’t have the brain function at that point to be able to do it. So rest is our strategy to stay out of survival mode. And we have a place in the weekly preview for this. It’s.

[00:27:46] Wildly underrated also, and it’s even amplified more inside of the Wellness planner. If you’re somebody who, who uses the Wellness planner, we’ve even kind of biggie sized it there. But this is where we really help you kind of anticipate where you may feel tired or exhausted, and we help you plan for that.

[00:28:05] We look at, you know, creating moments of slowness or savoring or connecting. You know, a lot of us think of rest as simply sleep. Rest can look like having really good one-to-one connection or engaging in some kind of social activity that’s rejuvenating. And I like that word rejuvenation, frankly, better than rest because I think it does a better job of encompassing all of these types of rest versus just sleep.

[00:28:32] Joel: For me personally, for instance, I often go on, I schedule a walk with a friend. Try to every week. And in fact I have a standing date with a friend every other Friday we go for a walk and then I fit in other walks with other people, uh, in and around that commitment. But like going out on a walk for me for an hour with a friend is a hugely restorative and rejuvenating thing.

[00:28:56] It gets me outside. I’m connecting with a friend. So I’m deepening that relationship. I’m finding out what’s going on in their life. So it’s like beyond whatever’s going on in mine now, my. Sense of like what’s important gets adjusted just by virtue of being exposed to the concerns of, you know, my friends.

[00:29:15] And all of that I find powerfully rejuvenating. And where I keep track of it is in my weekly preview. And if I notice that I have not connected with friends. In like say the last two or three weeks. I feel that. But then I have this diagnostic of just flipping back in my weekly preview and going, oh, I haven’t reached out to Jeff this week, or, I haven’t talked with Ian this week, or whatever, and that suddenly helps reconnect me to this thing.

[00:29:43] It reminds me of this thing that I need and. Then the very next weekly preview, I jot it down and I like send a text and get it queued up.

[00:29:52] Marissa: I love this part of the weekly preview because it helps you think through, like we’ve already done a lot of the heavy lifting to think through, you know, what worked well, what didn’t work well in the past week.

[00:30:02] We’re adjusting our behavior. We’re looking at things like our goals, our task manager, all that kind of stuff. And this helps us to ask the question like. Within the container of all of that, how do I want to prioritize my rejuvenation? For instance, Joel, you talked about this week we have our annual team meeting.

[00:30:19] Part of that is that we have a lot of team members flying in from out of town to join us, and so they’re gonna be here. You know, the meeting itself is one day. We have a dinner the night before, but a lot of them are coming in a full day ahead of that, which means they’re here for essentially three full days.

[00:30:34] And they want to hang out. They wanna have connection. Right? Right. So I have a lot of outside of work, but work activities this week where I’m going to dinner with people, I’m connecting over lunch or coffee. We’re having extra meetings to really connect. So it’s a pretty intensive week for me on the back half of this week.

[00:30:52] And so one of the things that I considered this week as I was planning out my rest. Was, how can I make sure to kind of counteract the intense side of the week with social activities and work activities, which kind of bleed into one in this scenario? How can I combat that in the front half of the week?

[00:31:11] Again, being mindful of my energy. And so this week I said Monday and Tuesday, I’m not doing any kind of plans with friends. Normally I would be like, oh yeah, I’ll totally go to dinner with somebody or whatnot. And I just know my social battery is gonna be low if I front load the week with more social plans.

[00:31:30] So I had an invitation actually, on Sunday night to go watch the Grammys with some people and I said, you know, I’m gonna have to pass. I’ve got a busy week coming up and I’m gonna have to pass this time, and I just stayed home relaxed. It was much more enjoyable, and that’s gonna help fuel my tank so that by Wednesday when all those social activities start to hit, I’ve got a lot of energy.

[00:31:50] I’m not feeling drained. So I’m kind of considering all of that as part of this process.

[00:31:56] Joel: Yeah, absolutely. I find personally one of the most helpful parts of the weekly preview, especially for this process of going from 1.0 to 2.0. A list just by itself is a good bridge, but it doesn’t go far enough. And what I find is in the weekly preview where there’s the part where you write down your professional stuff that’s coming up, or just the things that are loose in your mind that you need to attend to the professional stuff, and then the personal stuff that’s just out there, you know, you need to be thinking about it.

[00:32:26] You just like take all that data. All that information and start putting it into one place, and then you can start making decisions because I can see that my list is longer than I, than I have time for, and because I can see that the list is longer than what I have time for, I can start making proper grownup, pull my pants on all the way kind of decisions about what’s gonna go on the calendar this week and what’s not.

[00:32:50] What that means is I actually can walk into my week with some confidence about what I can get done. What I’m gonna wait, what I’m gonna intentionally procrastinate or defer to the future. And that gives me just a sense of peace.

[00:33:04] Marissa: And I think that for a lot of us, we’re walking through our weeks feeling like I have to get it all done.

[00:33:08] How am I, you know, the question tends to be like, how am I gonna get it all done? And going through this process like, I mean, literally the title of this episode, we’re taking you from a place of anxiety into a place of peace because all of a sudden. You’re getting back in the driver’s seat, you’re going, no, here’s what’s important this week.

[00:33:26] Here’s what matters. This week, according to following through on my goals, what I’ve already said, I am committed to that I care about, that matters to me. I wanna make continued progress on that, and here’s how I’m going to maintain a sense of rest. And calm and not go back into that place of survival.

[00:33:47] And then you make all those decisions out of that based on that information. Then you get to decide, like me, I’m not gonna go to that Grammy’s party because it doesn’t make sense with the kind of weak and the kind of priorities that I have coming up. I wanna make sure I have. Ample energy and a social battery, a fully charged social battery for my team members who are flying across the country and in some cases from out of the country, that I wanna show up fully there and present with them full of energy, excitement, and if I’m drained because I’ve been doing other social activities all week, that’s out of alignment for what matters to me and what I care about.

[00:34:25] Joel: Yeah. So at the top of the episode I mentioned that it’s hard to replace a bad habit with nothing. Like we need to replace it with a good habit. That’s fundamentally what we’re talking about here today. And let me just mention some people aren’t prone to this. Some people like the way they handle the uncertainty of the future is they just don’t think about it.

[00:34:47] That’s its own problem, and maybe we’ll do an episode about that at some point. I don’t think most of the people listening to this show, however, struggle with just ignoring the future. I think we’re probably the kind of people that are aware of everything coming at us, and because of that, we’re prone to going into worst case scenarios.

[00:35:08] We’re prone to. Like looping on things, we’re prone to all of that. Those habits of mind are not helpful, and so instead of just continuing that forward or saying, you know, Bob Newhart style, stop it. Instead of doing that, we need to replace that bad habit with a good habit. So that planning 1.0, anxiety worrying, worst case scenario kind of.

[00:35:32] Thing that we do, we wanna replace that with this like proactive, flexible, intentional planning, planning 2.0 as Elizabeth Stanley calls it, that enables us to operate from a place of peace because the world is not a peaceful Yeah. Place most of the time. It, it’s crazy making, there’s so much stuff happening and.

[00:35:57] If you’re a high achiever, whether that’s a personality thing or whatever, we’ve opted in to being involved in the world in a way that’s high stress, like we’ve opted in to being in, in the world in a way that is high impact. It leaves bruises. We make dents, we cause problems. Like that’s the kind of people that we’ve chosen to be or we just are.

[00:36:19] I don’t know how that works exactly. I just know that. I don’t go through a lot of times where I just suddenly poke my head up and go, it’s amazing. Nothing happened this week. Like that doesn’t ever occur. And so since it doesn’t occur, and I bet it doesn’t occur for any of you listening, at least I’m willing to wager something on that.

[00:36:40] We have to replace that bad strategy, that bad habit with this very positive, helpful habit. I think you’ll find. The full focus planner gets you more than 50% of the way there. You literally just have to open up to that page and start working through the questions. It’s super straightforward and super helpful.

[00:37:01] Marissa: Yeah, so if you haven’t yet done your weekly preview for this current week that we’re in, it’s likely Monday morning when you’re listening to this episode. Take 20 minutes, 30 minutes, set a timer and complete your weekly preview immediately after this. And I would love for you guys to come inside of the Full Focus Planner community in Facebook and share with us how that process went.

[00:37:25] You can tag me. You can tag Joel. We would love to hear, because I think for a lot of us, it feels daunting. It feels overwhelming to do the weekly preview. I saw people in our full focus planner community. Probably last month or so asking, somebody said, asking for a friend, how long does it take you to complete the weekly preview?

[00:37:45] And I responded and said, 30 minutes. That’s what we do with our double win coaching clients, and I’ve gotten in the habit. I’ve gotten really good at going through it in 30 minutes. My dad commented, said, 30 minutes, but a lot of people said an hour or two hours, and I wanna encourage you, it doesn’t have to take that long in order to do it.

[00:38:06] Well, you literally just need, I would say, 30 minutes in your week to be able to plan. And if you can take 30 minutes out of your week. Whether that be on a, on a Friday afternoon, on a Sunday evening, or on a Monday morning, and be able to plan the return that you get from that, the ROI that you get from that 30 minutes is exponential.

[00:38:29] Joel: A hundred percent.

[00:38:30] Marissa: Let that be. Your action item from this episode is to stop what you’re doing. If you haven’t yet done your weekly preview this week, go do it right now.

[00:38:39] Joel: I think that’s super helpful advice. I would also offer. A little bit of an alternative for those people that want it. I think the minimum is do the weekly preview.

[00:38:52] Like you gotta do it. You need the minimal viable dose. 30 minutes is really all you need to do it. There are some weeks where I do it in 15 minutes if I’m like pressured on time and I like, I can’t even spend the 30 minutes on it. There are other times, however, where I do it over maybe an hour and it’s almost like.

[00:39:13] A luxury to just spend some time thinking about what I’ve done in the last week, thinking about what’s coming, and almost like dreaming about the future, a little bit about how I want the week to go. Not in some gauzy kind of way, some fuzzy sort of way, but like to just imagine myself in the future thinking about what it is that I wanna accomplish.

[00:39:37] And I find that actually. I mean, inspiring is like almost insipid of a word to use that way. I just, it’s exhilarating, maybe. Yeah. To just think about like, these are the things that I can probably get done and these are things that really energize me, right? These are things I wanna get done. And so absolutely do the weekly preview.

[00:39:57] Knock it out in 30 minutes. You might find the more you do it, the more you enjoy. A little bit more time to just kind of luxuriate in the process of deciding, in the process of prioritizing, in the process of making those kinds of decisions between a nice to have or a must have on the list and those sorts of things.

[00:40:23] I find it, like I said, exhilarating to do that. And then when I walk into the week having done that, I like to do that on a Sunday afternoon. When I walk into the week. Having done that, I like start Monday right on it because it’s right in front of me as to what I’ve decided to do, and I find it like empowering.

[00:40:41] Marissa: Well, I think the point here is that whatever time you do have, if you feel pressed on time, you can do the weekly preview. If you feel like you have a little bit more time and you wanna spend more time on it, by all means take that extra 30 minutes and make it an hour so that you can really, um, make this a ritual, a part of your, your weekend activity where it becomes a sacred time for yourself.

[00:41:04] That this isn’t just about thinking about your task list and something so. Bland, frankly as that. But this can be a process where you really, like you’re talking about Joel, become inspired and excited about the life that you get to live. This is really, yeah. What we’re here to do is help you guys prioritize what matters, forget the rest, and really live the life that you wanna live.

[00:41:30] Joel: You just said sacred, and you know, like if the weekly preview feels like this task, this duty that you have to do. Like any other task or duty you have to do when you’re already taxed, already burdened, it might feel like too much. But it’s, it’s sacred. And the word sacred means set apart. It means like preserved.

[00:41:53] And if we think about it as something sacred, if we think about the fact that we’re using this time not to just like take stock or make lists or whatever, but to imagine, and then therefore give us the ability to create. The kind of future that we wanna want, that we wanna live, that deserves a word like sacred.

[00:42:14] And that deserves the kind of intentionality that we would bring to a word like sacred. And so that time becomes precious. And I can think of almost no better way to start off a week or to close the week than to do this process. It’s, it’s very straightforward, and yet it is utterly liberating.

[00:42:33] Marissa: Sacred is the word of today.

[00:42:39] Well, thanks for joining us on Focus on This.

[00:42:41] Joel: This is the most productive podcast on the internet, so please share it with your friends and be sure to subscribe wherever you listen or at focus on this podcast.com,

[00:42:54] Marissa: and we’ll be here next week. We’re gonna talk about Stanley’s next. Three principles.

[00:42:59] Remember, we only covered three out of the six today, and we’re specifically gonna talk about how to build those into your ideal week.

[00:43:07] Joel: Until then,

[00:43:08] Marissa: stay.

[00:43:09] Joel: Stay focused, focused.