3 Pillars Of A Successful Week for Solopreneurs

A meaningful life happens a week at a time.

Making an impact starts with understanding yourself, your goals, and how to fit it all together in a way that moves in the right direction.  One way to improve your chances is to structure your week in a way that makes it easy to do the right thing.

I’m not a time-management expert, but I pay attention to what’s working.

To have a stone’s throw chance at successfully building the world’s most powerful platform for professional alignment, I need to make sure I spend my time on earth well.

Here are my three pillars for a successful week and how I’m implementing them to live up to my potential and make the most of the incredible blessing of life.

Pillar 1: Milestones

You cannot live a meaningful life without purpose.

A mighty week requires outlining my ideal accomplishments.  Accomplishment is my currency, after all.  It’s why I can’t stand activities that don’t have an immediate payout (even when they carry long term value).

Milestones are any outcomes that help me get where I want to go.  They can be long-term or short provided they are relevant to the week.  An ideal week has a mix of long and short-term milestones, but real life isn’t usually so neat.

Here are some examples from my past few weeks:

Notice how none of them say Change the world with your ideas?  Big changes happen once in a while, but reinventing yourself and making a huge impact is a result of millions of little wins stacked on top of each other for a long time.

Strong weeks lead to consistent output of little wins.

The milestones anchor everything you do: your WHY.  

Simon Sinek said “When we know WHY we do what we do, everything falls into place. When we don’t, we have to push things into place.”

Human beings are driven by purpose.  Smart weekly milestones frame everything you do.  Activities that don’t align with a milestone need a good reason to be there, otherwise they should be cut.

Pillar 2: Systems

Everything written about systems is confusing.

People use that word in strange ways.  Systems to me are groups of tasks or behaviors you repeat the same way every time on a schedule:

A successful week requires practicing and improving the systems that surround it.  My key systems include:

Themed Days

As a solo founder I have a lot of control over my schedule, but even when I was working for the man I’d  shape my week to focus each day on a single idea.

Ever get interrupted by something important only to have it absolutely shred your productivity?  We are not good at changing contexts.  Themed days solve that problem.

Each day of the week should focus on one thing.

For example, I’m currently balancing a hobby blog, my personal brand, and an entire technology business.  This week I’ve split the days up as:

Theming my days allows me to channel one area of my brain and invest directed energy into one thing.  It’s easier to be creative when I don’t have to worry about solving a complex software bug or researching a cold contact.

Weekly Planning

Every Sunday night I follow the same 5-step process to plan the upcoming week:

Reflect on last week

Review unfinished work, how well I handled my milestones, and if I over-planned or under-planned my week.  My goal is to leave a little work on the table each week. It’s much better than finishing everything and not knowing what to do.

Identify weekly goals

Find milestones for a successful week.  These outcomes span every aspect of life, from health to business.

Review calendar

Ensure upcoming events or meetings are still necessary, and plan any required preparation, travel and time for them.

Plan daily details

I like to outline rough ideas of what I’m working on, per the theme of the day.  Hard, important tasks go to the top of the list.

Close outstanding emails

Dealing with all my emails and messages ensures I enter the week fresh.  Unsubscribing to things and scheduling Monday morning messages is a favorite pastime.  A fresh inbox to start the week is a sweet hit of dopamine.

Task Management

There are a million different ways to track what you have to get done.  I’ve met very successful people that keep everything in their own head.  How?

But most people are like me: human, with limited memory.

I write everything down that I can: separating the “planning” brain from the “operator” brain makes it easier for me.  My system for tracking what I want to get done is a bit of a hodge podge.

Tetheros tracks larger tasks and segments the different stages of growth in each area that I care about (business, life, hobbies, etc).  Tons of lists, kanbans, and resources live here.

My whiteboard gets the colorful end of the marker every Sunday when I’m laying out the milestones and daily tasks I want to focus on.  The “tasks” are more like high-level descriptions of what I’m doing.

For example, I don’t write “Build the global network calendar React component and squash the email server bug”: “Product development” works just fine.  The details are all stored in Tetheros – the whiteboard merely adjusts my compass.

Every once in a while a stray sticky note ends up on my desk too.  They’re ephemeral and loathed, but don’t overstay their welcome.

Personal Development

It’s easy to get caught up in the minutiae of the week or the problem of the day, but important to carve out time to work on yourself.  Investing in yourself carries the highest returns.

These systems are a little fuzzy because I don’t prioritize this as a specific activity in my week: self-improvement comes in different flavors.

First, I read every single night before bed.

I’m very analog – preferring to turn real paper pages.  This habit guarantees at least 30 minutes of reading every day.  Topics range from business development to technical concepts – anything I think I can benefit from.

Second, I stay on top of my industry news by making it a point to publish a social media post every week where I react with an opinion.

One of my goals is to become recognized as a thought leader in my space, and forming my own (original) opinions is an important part of that equation.  Forming and sharing your opinion requires me to express it intelligently and think critically about a topic – both of which are severely underrated skills.

Less formally, I try to find time every week to watch a few videos or just think.  Walks and showers are incredible for unlocking these parts of the brain.

Morning/Night Routines

Internet gurus tend to promote and praise morning routines like cold showers, meditation, and 6 mile walks.

They aren’t for me.

My routine kicks the tires and gets me started in a very chill way.

After I wake, I make coffee, brush my teeth, review the day (as written on the whiteboard), take a multivitamin, and work my way through 32 oz of water (a personal prerequisite to coffee).

My evening routine is also boring: plan the first activity of the next day, brush my teeth, read, then go to sleep.

They aren’t sexy routines, but following the same patterns every morning and night guarantees I don’t have to spend any additional brain power or thought into figuring out how to spend the first few hours of every day.

Which leads to my next pillar…

Pillar 3: Momentum

All the planning and systems in the world don’t mean a thing if you don’t execute.

I’m a huge believer in momentum: productivity in motion tends to stay in motion.  I design my weeks to take advantage of this concept, but it requires understanding a few personal laws of physics.

Law #1: Throughout the day you will lose willpower.

There are things you can do to sustain it and expand your starting amount, but the needle always moves toward empty.  We’re less capable of good decisions and high quality work at the end of a day compared to the start.

Willpower is the fuel for getting things done.  It powers your motivation, capability, and focus.

So how do you improve it?

Capitalize on the systems of your week.  

For me, having a consistent morning and evening routine automates the activities I’m doing.  It’s scientifically proven that habits and routines require less energy than new problems or activities.  Doing the same thing every morning returns rocket fuel to my brain to use for everything else I’m working on.

Law #2: Time management is inherently selfish.

There are three ways I practice selfish time management to keep momentum strong.

Saying no

I believe in saying yes to a lot of things, especially in your 20s, but don’t allow your unbridled openness interrupt an already-planned day.  Too much context switching and mental disruption will crush your momentum.

I’m not talking about turning down opportunities or being a jerk – I’m suggesting you normalize protecting the time you set aside for productive activities.

Eating frogs

If you wrote “eat a frog” on your whiteboard for the day, it’d be the last thing you wanted to do.  Like me, you’d probably put it off until the end of the day and even then, you may decide you’d rather live with the consequences of not eating the frog.

But procrastination has consequences.

Waiting to do the hardest, nastiest, uncomfortable tasks drains our energy.  It’s a big rock that we need to fit in a jar, and if we don’t make it a priority, there won’t be any room in the jar at the end.  All your willpower will be gone.

The lesson: prioritize doing the hardest things first in your day and you’ll have more capacity to get everything else done after.

Activity relocation

Imagine if every professional sports event was split in two by a few hours of television.

Athletes would have to warm up again and review what they learned in the first half of the game.  All their motivation and momentum: deteriorated.  It’d be like trying to hold a bolder in place halfway up a hill after it was moving, then restarting the whole process again.

Anticipate motivation-killing events and place them after your important work is done.

If I sit down for leisure for more than 20 minutes, it’s game over.  Being productive after an hour of fully relaxed time requires a lot of luck and a specific realignment of the stars for my productivity to be worthwhile.

Beyond time management, momentum is also intimately tied to energy, which comes from three sources:

Energy management gives you a bigger tank to start with.  Kicking your day off with a bigger bang each week allows you to work longer and better.  Duracell batteries trump kinetically-powered hamster wheels.

It’s also extremely beneficial to find a pace in your week to recharge.  Walk away from the productive part of the mind and focus on family and relaxing.  There’s a reason God rested on the seventh day – marathon’s are only possible with pace.

I hope some of this was helpful, insightful, or even inspiring!

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Every week I share what I’m learning about professional development, entrepreneurship, and technology while building ​Tetheros​.