176. What Matters This Week?: Weekly Preview Pt. 1

Episode Transcript

Verbs Boyer:
We are starting a three part miniseries today on one of the most unique tools in the full focus planner.

Nick Jaworski:
That’s pretty good.

Verbs Boyer:
You can tell us more-

Courtney Baker:
I think that’s really good, Verbs, because-

Verbs Boyer:
About it.

Courtney Baker:
But I can’t be the judge. We need some people, native speakers, because on the Great British Baking Show or Bake Off as it is named there, they tried to do an American accent, and they were like, “That’s pretty good.” And I was like, “What!”

Nick Jaworski:
No, it’s-

Courtney Baker:
It’s terrible.

Nick Jaworski:
It’s very funny-

Verbs Boyer:
They make it sound like cowboys.

Speaker 4:
You know what they call aubergine in America.

Speaker 5:
What?

Speaker 4:
Eggplant. Eggplant.

Speaker 5:
Do you want some egg line in your burger?

Speaker 4:
That’s a great American accent.

Speaker 5:
I want a french fries with a hamburger please.

Verbs Boyer:
We’re starting the three part mini series today down here in the USA.

Nick Jaworski:
Ye haw!

Verbs Boyer:
Get your barbecue and your apple pie and join us.

Nick Jaworski:
Ye haw! I listen to that show though, so let’s not throw that out.

Courtney Baker:
Verbs and I are really excited because we’re going to be talking about one of our favorite tools, and rather than trying to cram everything we love and want to talk about regarding the weekly preview, we are going to be doing it over the course of three episodes. For two and a half years, Verbs, we’re like, how many episodes in a row can we get about the weekly preview? It’s here. They finally agreed to let us just unleash the weekly preview love.
This week specifically, we are going to be starting by talking about setting your weekly objectives. We call them your weekly big three. We’ve said many times before that this is really the most important part of your weekly preview, although we could probably debate some other things that would be in consideration. But it’s really the part of the system that drives achievement, this weekly big three.
We’re going to be covering that first again, because it’s a really important piece of the system and your weekly preview, the way it’s set up, it’s at the end because there are pieces and questions that kind of set you up, get you in the right head space to select your weekly big three. But anytime I do the onboarding webinar, Verbs and I do the onboarding webinar together, we always tell people if that’s too overwhelming, if you’ve never done the weekly preview, just start by setting your weekly big three. Skip everything else.
So again, the weekly big three is to your week, what the daily big three is to your day. You set them by weighing three considerations and we’re going to go over those three considerations today to help you have a great weekly big three.

Verbs Boyer:
Welcome to another episode of Focus On This, the most productive podcast on the internet so you can vanish distractions, get the right stuff done, and finally start loving Mondays. I’m Verbs here with Courtney Baker, ready to get into it. Happy Monday to you, Courtney. And happy Monday to you Nick.

Nick Jaworski:
Well, happy Monday. This is very exciting.

Courtney Baker:
Happy Monday!

Verbs Boyer:
Happy Monday, sir.

Courtney Baker:
Sometimes Nick, I just feel like we should introduce you out of the gate because for everybody listening, you are the one consistent. You are always here.

Nick Jaworski:
I’m always here.

Courtney Baker:
No one is ever recording without Nick.

Nick Jaworski:
Well, what you guys don’t realize is that I actually never leave this virtual recording room, so I just live in this room and wait and I’m just waiting-

Verbs Boyer:
I love what you’ve done to the place-

Nick Jaworski:
Like a dog waiting for their owner to come back. I am just waiting for someone to pop in.

Courtney Baker:
Verbs, what if we found out that Nick wasn’t actually a person, he was just AI?

Verbs Boyer:
An AIA-

Courtney Baker:
That you learned… The reason I feel so connected to Nick about we were born in the same year, we have a lot of things in common. Actually that was just the AI reflecting back to me. It was-

Verbs Boyer:
Just coded in there-

Courtney Baker:
Just coded in-

Verbs Boyer:
His build.

Nick Jaworski:
That would make the times we’ve been in person sort of difficult, but wait-

Verbs Boyer:
I don’t know though. That’s where the world is hidden.

Nick Jaworski:
Well. Okay, so how about this. Maybe I was real at one point and now I’m AI. So actually the real Nick is actually out golfing or something, and I’m just here-

Verbs Boyer:
It’s Nick and Tupac somewhere on the island.

Nick Jaworski:
That’s right. I’m a hologram-

Courtney Baker:
Nick, I’m pretty sure-

Verbs Boyer:
And others-

Courtney Baker:
I haven’t actually been in person with you since 2020.

Nick Jaworski:
Famously it was the last thing that I did before the world shut down, was spend a morning in a room with Courtney-

Verbs Boyer:
Oh, so the plot thickens-

Courtney Baker:
That’s right-

Nick Jaworski:
And Blake and Courtney. I’m sure I’ve said this before, but Courtney, an hour in, was looking at her phone something and goes, “Wait, this is a big deal.”

Courtney Baker:
I was like, “We’re shutting the office down tomorrow.”

Nick Jaworski:
Like watching it occur to Courtney in real time was something that is a key part of my story about the pandemic, was I was in this room, Courtney was like, “I think this is a big deal. It’s really happening. They’re closing this,” and that was it. And now here we are.

Courtney Baker:
And I have recordings on my phone that I did from that day that I was like, “Hey, we could use these on social.” And we were just so happy. We just were so naive. I keep looking at us laughing at each other like, “Oh. You three had no idea what was about to happen.”

Verbs Boyer:
I was already at home with a box of masks, ready.

Nick Jaworski:
Were you?

Verbs Boyer:
I’m just kidding.

Nick Jaworski:
Oh, okay.

Verbs Boyer:
The first sign of it, I was just like, “Hey, let’s not play with it.”

Nick Jaworski:
I tried to buy a mask or hand sanitizer on the way from St. Louis to Nashville and couldn’t, because the world was changing while I was in the car. That night… Wait, we can talk about it later. Go ahead. Let’s talk about the considerations we should weigh while setting the weekly big three, everybody.

Verbs Boyer:
All right, I’ll jump in. Consideration number one is importance. Without a plan, we always end up in reaction mode. We’re responding to what feels the most urgent instead of slowing down and really begin to consider what’s important. Now, if you’re setting your weekly big three, you should be considering what will be the biggest gains, the highest leverage task on your plate that you need to accomplish this week, and whatever other high level priorities that you may have. So don’t let the important be sacrificed just because there’s something that’s urgent that’s on your plate that’s coming your way. The time that you take to designate what those important things are, the higher probability that you’ll stick to those throughout the week when these urgent things come knocking on your door.

Courtney Baker:
The second consideration is urgency. You can’t just be like, “Yeah, I’m doing the important things and that’s all I’m going to do.” In a perfect world, that would be great. Unfortunately that’s just not reality. Importance matters more, but urgency matters too. And understanding that the urgency of a task or an objective, how that is going to shape what you plan and how you plan to complete it. It also gives you a chance to plan your week around urgent deadlines rather than having an unrealistic expectation for what you can complete as you work down to the wire.
I see this a lot of times where consideration for importance is so great. You plan your weekly big three only thinking about importance and then you can’t ever get to those things because you haven’t accounted for the things that are due or are urgent for you to get done. So it’s a very important, sometimes underutilized in the weekly big three view.

Nick Jaworski:
See, I have the opposite problem, which I think is a lot of people, I don’t think I’m [inaudible 00:08:28]-

Courtney Baker:
Interesting-

Nick Jaworski:
Which is that I’m like, I sit down and do my weekly preview and I go, “I already know what needs to happen this week because I’m thinking about it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And the urgent is always the thing that I have to fight against. So it’s nice to see that importance is listed first because I do think that that’s difficult for people.

Courtney Baker:
Well, so Nick, I hear you on that. As you go through the steps with the weekly preview, part of the reason you’re thinking about your wins, you’re thinking about what worked, what didn’t work. The reason you’re reading through your goals is actually to help your brain think about the things that are important, not just the urgent. And so I’m just curious, even when you go through those steps, your brain still says, “I got it. The urgent becomes number one.”

Nick Jaworski:
Well, I just think it’s a weird mental space where you have to go, “I just know this has to get done.” You go, “This has to happen. I got to fill out all these forms and I’m going to have to go to this appointment and prepare for that.” So you’re all in on that and so I have to really back off and go, “I can still do that.” I can still do those things. I don’t have to write that as a weekly big three necessarily.

Courtney Baker:
Well, and I would say if I was coaching you in this moment-

Nick Jaworski:
Please-

Courtney Baker:
Which I am because-

Nick Jaworski:
You are-

Courtney Baker:
No one’s going to stop me unless you edit it out later, which I will hear. It’s to say, yeah, those things could still be, may be weekly big three, but can you retain at least one of them that is something that lands squarely in the important but not urgent?

Nick Jaworski:
Yeah, I really try to shoot for, if I’m in a situation where I know… I’m trying to go on vacation here, and so I know that there’s a lot of urgent stuff happening. But generally, I might give one of my weekly big three to an urgent thing for that week and then I try to focus the other two on the important stuff. Important, not that it’s not meaning that it’s connected directly to my goal, my larger goals.

Verbs Boyer:
So just for clarity though, guys, so we’re saying there are tasks that can be both, right? Important and urgent.

Courtney Baker:
Absolutely.

Verbs Boyer:
And it would be okay to put those onto our weekly big three.

Nick Jaworski:
Not just okay, Verbs. Smart.

Verbs Boyer:
We should put those on our weekly big three.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah, I mean those are the easiest. If you’ve got something that rises to the level of a weekly big three that’s both urgent and important, absolutely. You don’t want it to become where every weekly big three, it’s just urgent things. It’s just things that you have to get done and so you’re never making progress on your goals or things that fall into that important but not urgent realm, that you may be easy to slip into.
And vice versa. If you’re not taking into consideration the urgent things and you’re consistently only putting things that are important and then each week you’re frustrated because you’re like, “I never get done with my weekly big three.” Most likely it’s because you aren’t considering the urgent. So there’s a lot of nuances of knowing yourself and how you lean. Kind of Nick, to your point of, ‘I usually end up with all the urgent,’ or, I’m not speaking for myself here, ‘I’m a perfectionist and I always have important things,’ and never any consideration for the urgent of just examining where your weekly big three are falling.

Verbs Boyer:
All right, let’s do consideration number three, which is feasibility. So your weekly big three should be realistic. Now your goals are risky, but your weekly big three should be completely doable. Now, if you have too much happening, this is the moment to reassess and reprioritize. Again, just as we spoke about in consideration number two, there’s some things that you’re going to have to sort through regarding the important and the urgent and figure out what those things are. That way you can properly place your top three high level priorities in your weekly big three. You can’t do it all. I’ll say it again, you can’t do it all. So don’t focus on trying to get everything done, but on getting the right things done.

Courtney Baker:
I think one tip here with keeping things feasible is just writing down your weekly big three as actionable. Same. Recently we just had an episode all about verb, making it an action. Verbs. Always supposed to remember verbs even when you’re writing your weekly big three because that’s going to help you actually achieve them.

Nick Jaworski:
I want to say that I think this is obviously part of the full focus system. It is how it is designed, but I do feel like it’s worth repeating because it’s not that I forget this, but it is something to keep top of mind. Is that your annual goals, when you design them using the smarter framework, one of the steps is that they are in fact risky and that comes with a sense of push that you’re going to stretch to achieve them. And then when you get there, you’re going to feel so good because you didn’t think you could or whatever. But that your weekly big three are very doable, right? Because you’ve taken your large goals and chopped them down into very manageable bite size pieces. You’re not eating the whole elephant at once. You’re just taking one bite at a time.

Courtney Baker:
Yes, that is right. As a reminder, these three considerations are importance, urgency, and feasibility. I’m just reminded as we go through these, James Clear, when he talks about productivity, his definition is thinking intentionally about your work. And it’s part of the reason that I love the weekly preview so much. In my opinion, this step is one of the most productive things you do all week and you’re not actually executing anything. You are just thinking intentionally about the work that you’re going to do for the next week. These three considerations are really key to do that successfully. So this week do the weekly preview and use these three considerations. I think you’ll be much more successful at completing them at the end of the week.

Nick Jaworski:
Okay. Courtney, I’m popping in the show. I’m the producer of the show. I can do whatever I want.

Courtney Baker:
It is so true, and you can make a sound however you want. Sometimes I’ll listen back and I think, ‘Ah, Nick, you were supposed to cut that out.’

Nick Jaworski:
But sometimes it’s fun, so it stays in. But I want to talk to you today about, look, I look at you as a organized person, an intentional person, and I want talk to you a little bit about dinner.

Courtney Baker:
Okay, yes. Let’s talk dinner.

Nick Jaworski:
So one of the things that I’ve been on as a journey in general, I think people who listen to the show know, is I don’t know if I’ve ever taken my day and really quite broken down the things that I just do out of habit and the things that I’m doing intentionally. Dinner is one of those things for the last year and a half maybe that we’ve been toying around. How do we eliminate the stress around dinner? Dinner is… You’ve got to feed people every day. So there’s all these steps. You have to know what you’re going to make. You have to have the stuff, you’ve got to know when you’re going to do it, you have to know how you’re going to store it. There’s all these things. And if you don’t do it quite right, it can really start to get on top of you in the same way that laundry can if you don’t take care of it every day. Suddenly you’re struggling and two days later, you’re bad.

Courtney Baker:
Which by the way, side note, we had a massive freeze here in Nashville and our pipe froze for our washing machine.

Nick Jaworski:
Oh no. Yeah.

Courtney Baker:
That was very southern. Washing machine.

Nick Jaworski:
Yeah, washing.

Courtney Baker:
And I couldn’t do laundry for a whole week and it took so long to get out of that hole. The whole time I was like, this is why we do it every day. We’re so brilliant, Nick.

Nick Jaworski:
That’s right. Well, it was your idea. I love my everyday laundry at this point, but in that situation, I probably would’ve sent it out to get done.

Courtney Baker:
I know. I actually thought about it after I was through the torture, that I thought, ‘Why didn’t I just send this out?’

Nick Jaworski:
Yeah, just once or twice a year is totally great in a busy season.

Courtney Baker:
It’s because we were on Christmas break and I didn’t see you to tell me the answer. That was the problem.

Nick Jaworski:
That’s true. It’s like, they’ll come get it and then they’ll bring it back to you folded.

Courtney Baker:
I know, yes.

Nick Jaworski:
It’s pretty great.

Courtney Baker:
That would have been good, yes.

Nick Jaworski:
Okay, so talk to me about dinner. How do you guys know what you’re making? How do you plan your dinner?

Courtney Baker:
Listen, I have experimented because I agree this is a major pain point. So let me tell you about the things I’ve experimented with. There’s a great book called Cook Once Eat All Week where you do all the prep at the beginning of the week, you essentially cook most of it, and then night of you’re kind of just putting pieces together and baking. That worked pretty well for a while, but as I had a younger child in the house, it’s just a big prep time. She actually has an updated book called Cook Once Dinner Fix, which isn’t even updated, I think she’s like, this is the even better way to do it.

Nick Jaworski:
What is that?

Courtney Baker:
That premise is basically one meal you cook once and it provides two meals. So it would be the meal for tonight and the meal for tomorrow night. So for example, you might make a chicken soup the first night and then tomorrow night that chicken and some of the vegetables would be chicken tacos.

Nick Jaworski:
Gotcha. Yeah, yeah.

Courtney Baker:
Like a totally different second meal, but it cuts in half a lot of your prep time. I’ve also done where each quarter I would sit down and come up with all the recipes that I wanted to do and then what the ingredient list were for each week. And I would rotate through. So when it would come time to go to the grocery store, I would just pull my list for the week. I would know what recipes that we were doing and have that ordered. That honestly was probably the most successful. But once I had Alice in the mix, once I had a baby, even that felt like I need to streamline this even more, and I went back to something that I hadn’t used in a long time.

Nick Jaworski:
I’m so excited.

Courtney Baker:
If you recall at the beginning of last year, part of my goal was to try being vegetarian for a month and during that season I started using HelloFresh again, but the vegetarian meals. We had done HelloFresh years and years, back when it kind of first came on the scene and I remember it was okay then. Guys, we have loved it. And let me tell you what is so helpful for us. They come in a brown paper bag, it’s folded up, it’s got the label on it. The recipe sheets, we have a certain spot where they sit in our kitchen so that anybody in the household can just be like, “Oh, it’s time to cook dinner.” They go grab the sheet, they grab the brown paper bag and get to work.
So even previously it was still hinging on me. They would have to be like, “Hey, what is tonight? Where’s that thing? Do we have this?” And so it just cut out some of those extra things. If I’m not there, dinner can happen seamlessly. It’s so easy. There’s no phone call. There’s no text message. So that’s what we’ve been doing really for the last year and it has been really fantastic for us. Now, I will say this disclaimer, both of my girls are great eaters to the note that my two-year-old would eat dog food on a daily basis if we did not cook for her-

Nick Jaworski:
But to be clear, you’re not feeding your two-year-old dog food?

Courtney Baker:
I am not feeding her dog food, but she will go to the dog’s bowl and just start having that. But she loves things I’ve never seen small children like, just tomatoes. Just eat ’em.

Nick Jaworski:
I don’t want that.

Courtney Baker:
Just straight tomato.

Nick Jaworski:
I don’t want that, ever.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah, it’s like pistachios are her all-time favorite thing. Just she has a very… I’m like-

Nick Jaworski:
You go.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah, you go. You go, girl. So I do put that disclaimer, but my children, I would say 85%, which I think is a pretty great batting average, love the meals.

Nick Jaworski:
That’s interesting. I’ve done HelloFresh and we might be in a season of life and experience level that perhaps it would work for us. I felt like I was wasting food. I would feel like behind, it was sort of a mess. But it makes total sense. We’re not sponsored by HelloFresh, yet.

Courtney Baker:
Yes. But if they would like to, that would be great. I will say, my strategy is we have to get through our meals before we will go out to eat.

Nick Jaworski:
Smart.

Courtney Baker:
Because sometimes you’re just like, “I’m tired, I just don’t feel like…” Even though it’s honestly pretty easy, I just don’t feel like it. If we kind of reset that, “Hey, we’ve got to do these meals before we’re going to go out to eat,” it really takes that feeling of having too much away, for us. So that’s worked. I mean, if you’re listening, there’s I think three different options there to look into. If you’re thinking of ways to streamline dinner.

Nick Jaworski:
Well, let me tell you a little bit about… I’m thinking about this because we’ve… Look, we got the laundry, we’ve got the dishwasher doing the dishwasher thing, and now we’ve really been focusing on just our meal planning. We’ve got a couple apps, a couple things that people could think about or consider. Honestly, I was more involved in the first app actually, my wife sent me, I was like, “Tell me about this other one.” So I have notes from her over here.
But for a while we’re using an app called eMeals, which it’s basically HelloFresh except you’re doing the buying of stuff. So you go, ‘here’s our meals for the week, and so do you want this, this?’ And as you select a meal, it’s like chicken tacos or chili or whatever, you put it in your cart. And then what it does is it takes all the ingredients and exports it to Instacart if you want.
And so now it’s like, you should get this, you should get this. Then either you can have Instacart deliver or you just have the grocery list for yourself, and that was really fun. And so we got a lot of fun recipes that we really like an Asian beef that our child loves. We were doing that for a while and that was pretty great. But now recently, we feel like we have a bunch of recipes we like and that we’re comfortable with. So Ashley has been using an app called Paprika. Are you familiar with this?

Courtney Baker:
No.

Nick Jaworski:
So it has a browser inside Paprika and you can take your recipes and copy them and put them in the app and it will then sort through your ingredients for you.

Courtney Baker:
Very cool.

Nick Jaworski:
Actually, it helps you create a calendar. I have a shared calendar right now with Ashley that has our meals for the next month, I think on it. What’s really cool… So this doesn’t integrate with Instacart in the same way, but what was really nice is I had to go to the grocery store and she sent me a list that was from Paprika that was organized by grocery section, which was great.

Courtney Baker:
That’s nice.

Nick Jaworski:
Here’s your dairy, here’s your produce, here’s your grains, here’s your whatever. And so that’s been really great, and what we’ve been doing is we’ve just been doing monthly prep right now. Just planning, and that’s been going well. So for a while we were really, I felt like white knuckling our dinners, and what do you want? Oh, now it’s five o’clock and there’s no plan and the child has to study for a test and then I got to finish a thing. It’s been a mess. So trying to minimize that.
And the other thing we’ve been doing, in fact, I was meeting with Joel yesterday and I was like, “I’m going to go, I’m going to make dinner.” It was like 3:30. So that’s the other thing I’ve been doing is making dinner early or whenever we’re available, and then it’s just there when we’re [inaudible 00:25:37]. So that’s the other thing. So that was just things to think about. If people have thoughts on this, they can let us know in the Facebook community.

Courtney Baker:
Oh, I’m sure there are so many great thoughts in the Facebook.

Nick Jaworski:
I’m ready. ‘If you combine this with the dishwasher and you’re ready to go.’ Let us know about how you are getting through your dinners in the Facebook community. We’ll put a post up and this is another edition of Nick gets to talk about whatever he want. So thanks for coming. Thanks for joining me, Courtney.

Courtney Baker:
Thank you. Thanks for having me, Nick.

Verbs Boyer:
So today’s tip to level up your focus is write down your weekly big three for the upcoming week. Just as Courtney mentioned, do it with some intentionality and make sure you get them listed down to help you out and set you up for a great week next week. Thanks for joining us on Focus On This.

Courtney Baker:
This is the most productive podcast on the internet. But before I go on Verbs, Nick, last week we had a bunch of clients in for Business Accelerator, our small business owner coaching program and had dinner with some clients. And Heidi, who I did not know, she stopped me after dinner and just said, “I just want to tell you, this podcast has meant so much to me. I just love it so much. You’re truly an inspiration. I just love the team, what y’all share.” It was really her entryway to learn about the full focus planner, all the things. I mean, guys, I can’t even say the nice things that she said because they were so nice. I can’t repeat them without it sounding like I’m bragging, because Lord knows I barely know what I’m doing half the time. That’s not true. Now I’m belittling myself-

Verbs Boyer:
It’s not true. Stop it.

Courtney Baker:
It just made me think that maybe there are more people out there like Heidi that love this show. If you do, it is really helpful if you will leave a five star review. It’s how more people find out about the show like Heidi, who literally would say that this has helped change her life. So if you would do that, that would be awesome. We would love it. In case you were worried, don’t be, because we will be back next Monday with another great episode. Until then, stay focused.

Verbs Boyer:
Stay focused.

Courtney Baker:
I sounded really mean that time.