7 Days To Success

Have you got an impending deadline that you’re struggling to meet? A job that needs doing that you just can’t muster the motivation to get done? Or maybe it’s something that has no deadline and you want to do it, but you just don’t know where to start or what to do?

These are all circumstances that respond well to implementing a 7 Days to Success plan! The idea is to keep things as simple as possible so as not to feel overwhelmed with the task, but at the same time, having a fairly structured plan that will allow the work to proceed and progress across the 7 days.

The great thing is that it doesn’t matter what day of the week it is now, you can just get started by calling this “Day 1” and getting into action!

In fact, don’t fall into the trap of thinking “I’ll start on Monday”, which, as we know is generally the worst day of the week for most people! Instead, start now and Monday will just be part of the plan rather than the day that’s looming as The-Day-We-Must-Get-Started!

So let’s not waste any time, let’s get into the plan!

Day 1

Use day 1 to set up your plan of attack for the task you’ve chosen to successfully complete (or progress – I’ll talk a little more about this in a moment) within the 7 day timeframe. Today will be a planning day, so don’t expect to do any actual work on the task (although you may find yourself motivated to start moving things forward…and this is ok!).

Define The Task and Scope

It’s important to really know what you want to achieve within the 7 days. Sometimes this appears to be easy because the task is self contained, for example, write the next chapter of my book (say, 5,000 words) or maybe, de-clutter the junk room.

But, once you start really thinking about the task, there are often other sub-tasks that creep in. For example, writing the next chapter of the book may require some specific research, or clearing out the junk room will require decisions around what to throw, what to keep and where to re-house it, what to re-cycle/donate and to whom and whether the room will be re-decorated as part of the process.

Now is the time to make those decisions.

So, write down everything you can think of that forms part of the task at hand so that you can see the full potential scope laid out on paper.

Eeek! It’s Just Too Much

Ok, so now you’ve written it out, it looks a little…or a lot…daunting! This is where we get back to considering whether this is a task to be completed over 7 days or whether it would be better to identify a meaningful chunk to progress over the course of the week.

You get to make this choice, but remember: don’t overwhelm yourself, there will be ample opportunity for future 7 days to success goals, so taking a smaller part of the overall project could be the best option.

Take Out The Nice To Haves

Now that you can see what the entire task entails (as far as you can think of, right now), take some time to remove the ‘nice-to-haves’. These are the things that you would like to get done, but, strictly, completion of the task can be achieved without doing these things.

Write these out on a separate piece of paper to refer back to later.

What Depends on What?

Looking at your remaining list of sub-tasks, what depends on what? In other words, what needs to be done first so that other tasks can be undertaken.

For example, if your junk room is full to the brim, how and where will you initially create some working space? Maybe you’ll need to designate a second room as the working room and bring out boxes one at a time to sort.

With the writing task, maybe you’ll need to carry out a certain amount or kind of research before you can start a particular section or maybe you need to upgrade your version of Word etc.

Roughly put your tasks in order of dependencies.

Know What Your ‘Finished for Today’ Looks Like

So now you have a list of tasks ordered in such a way that you won’t get stalled because you forgot that you needed to do one task before starting another. That’s great.

Now it’s time to consider what your ‘Finished For Today’ looks like.

This is really important, because it’ll help you keep perspective and avoid overwhelm and burnout. It’ll also give you some reflection time between each work stretch, which, even if you don’t sit down and actively think about your progress and what’s next, will happen automatically anyway.

This kind of reflection can lead to new ideas and methods for progressing the task which will enhance the process.

So, with an acknowledgement to your dependencies, how much work on the core task will you need to do every day to achieve success?

To write 5,000 words of your next book chapter, that’s 1,000 words per day (5,000 divided by 5 days…day 7 will be kept for editing, reviewing and celebrating : ) .
To de-clutter your junk room this could be achieved by sorting a number of boxes (take an inventory or how many boxes before you start) per day or designating an area of the room to clear. Again, plan this over 5 days when you’ll get the heavy, hard work done. Day 7 will be for a final tidy up, re-purposing of the room and celebration 🙂 .