The Distance Between Your Plan and Your Week

On Sunday evening the week looks orderly. Prospecting in the mornings, a block for follow up, an afternoon set aside for the listing presentation, and time on Thursday for the thing that has been moving down the list since August.

By Wednesday the shape has gone. Nobody decided to abandon the plan. It gave way an hour at a time to things that felt urgent in the moment and, looked at now, mostly were not.

What the gap is actually made of

It is tempting to file this under discipline and leave it there. Discipline is part of it. It is rarely all of it.

Go back through last week and find the three moments where the plan came apart. Look closely at what replaced it. Was it a client matter that genuinely could not wait, a task you prefer to the one you were avoiding, or a request from somebody who has learned that you always answer immediately? Those three causes look identical by Friday afternoon and they require completely different responses.

The story you tell afterwards

The second half of this is how you talk to yourself about it once the week is over. Some people conclude they are undisciplined. Some conclude the plan was unrealistic. Some do not think about it at all and write the same plan again on Sunday.

None of those is obviously right. What matters is whether your conclusion is one you can act on. "I am bad at this" cannot be acted on. "I agreed to three things on Tuesday that belonged on Thursday" can be. Which of the two does your own version sound more like?

Plans that survive contact

A plan that only works in a week where nothing goes wrong is not really a plan, because that week does not exist. So it is worth asking what your week would have to look like to survive an ordinary amount of disruption.

For some people that means fewer commitments and more space between them. For others it means moving the most important work to the part of the day that nobody else has access to. There is no universal answer here, and the agents who find theirs are usually the ones who stopped looking for a system and started looking at their own evidence.

One further thing is worth testing. Ask whether your Sunday plan was ever a plan for the week you actually have, or a plan for the week you would like to have. Those are two different documents, and only one of them can be followed on a Wednesday.

The cost of repeating the experiment

Many agents have been running the same week for years, with the same distance between the plan and the outcome, and have never sat down to look at the pattern. The pattern is usually quite stable. The same day goes wrong. The same task gets moved. The same person interrupts at the same hour.

That stability is good news, because a stable pattern can be addressed. It only requires that somebody look at it on purpose rather than notice it in passing.

A question to sit with this week

At the end of Friday, write down the single hour that did the most damage to your week and what you were doing instead of what you had planned. Do that for four weeks. What would you expect that list to show you, and are you willing to find out whether you are right?

Where to take this next

If it would help to look at your own pattern with someone who will ask rather than tell, you can book a discovery call.