Hi Reader,

An extra note this week, because this one only works on a Monday. (Your usual letter still comes on Friday.)

This week I'm posting one practice a day on LinkedIn on how a cognitive athlete runs a high-performance week. Today's is the one that has made a really big difference for me, and I wanted you to have it while there's still a whole week to use it.

Ask a capable person what their plan is for the week and you get one of two answers. They open their calendar, or they show you their task list. Both are reasonable places to start. But most of the time you end up surviving the week, rather than having a great week.

What was missing for me, and what has made a huge difference, week after week, was connecting what I was doing to why it mattered to me - and keeping that in front of me all week.

So write the week as a story - what I call a weekly success story. Don't write it at the end of the week, write it at the beginning, as though it is Friday and the week went well.

When a task comes to mind, keep writing past it with "...so I can..." - and then again. I finished the budget draft, so I can take it to the board with confidence, so we can commit to staffing next year. Now the task is connected to why it matters.

One warning from the research. Positive fantasy - what many offer as "the power of visualization" - backfires. Gabriele Oettingen found that people who dwelt on a pleasant imagined future put in less effort and did worse. So have a vision, then name the obstacle standing in its way, and write an if-then plan for it. And decide what you will stop doing to make room.

Here's the template that I built into MakeTimeFlow. Copy it onto a piece of paper and keep it next to your monitor:

I hope you have a great week. If it helps you to start well (or at least think about it), hit reply and tell me how you will begin well this week - the calendar, the list, or something else?

Yours in flow,
Narath

The research, if you want to go deeper: Oettingen & Mayer (2002) on fantasies versus expectations (doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.83.5.1198); Gollwitzer & Sheeran (2006) on if-then plans (doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1); and Wang, Wang & Gai (2021) on doing both (doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.565202).