Concept
Weekly Planning by Roles
Weekly planning by roles is a practice from Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: you start each week by listing the roles you're responsible for, choose one or two important-but-not-urgent goals for each, and book them into the calendar as appointments before anything else fills it.
Most planning happens in days, and a day is too short a frame. By the time you sit down to plan it, urgent requests already own it. Covey's alternative is the week. It is long enough to hold work that matters but never shouts, and short enough to see whole on one page. The starting point also changes. Instead of a to-do list, you begin with who you're responsible for being: manager, parent, partner, friend, and someone who looks after their own health and learning. Each role gets a goal or two, and each goal gets a time slot. A goal with a slot competes with emergencies on equal footing. A goal on a list loses every time. The second half is delegation: hand people results, not methods. Supervising how someone works eats the very hours you just protected.
A real-life example
On Sunday evening, Mara, an engineering lead, writes down four roles. As a lead, she plans a career talk with her newest engineer. As a mother, she adds her daughter's Thursday swim meet. As a partner, she books dinner out on Saturday, and for herself, two morning runs. She schedules all of it before opening email. On Monday she asks a senior engineer for a migration plan the on-call team can follow by Wednesday. She leaves the method to him. By Friday, three of the four goals had happened.
How to use it
- 1List four to seven roles you actually hold this week. Include one for your own health, learning or rest.
- 2Choose one or two important-but-not-urgent goals per role. Book each into a specific time slot before you read messages.
- 3When you hand off work, agree on the result, deadline and limits. Then leave the method to the person doing it.