Monday, March 22, 2010

Genius of the Seven Day Plan

Seven is among other things thought of as the number of completion. Genesis tells us that God created the whole universe in Seven days. In fact, He likes the week frame so much that later in Scripture He talks about a "week of weeks" and "week of years" etc.. This is a wonderful planning time frame to get things accomplished at work. Former Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca, in his Biography shared how he spent two hours every Sunday evening planning his week. Then , he would schedule according to his highest priorities. Stephen Covey in his 7 Habits Series recommends planning in 7 day increments.

And Strengths Expert Marcus Buckingham in his wonderful book, “Go, Put Your Strengths To Work” says this:

“The most effective routine is a Strong Week Plan.  There’s magic in the seven days of a week. When you are asked to plan for next year, you may manage to define a few carefully calibrated goals: what you will get done. But you rarely take it down to the level of specific activities: what you will actually be doing. Even a month is too long a time frame to wrap your head around. Whereas, at the other extreme, days, hours, and minutes are too disjointed to provide you any real momentum.

Only a week strikes the perfect balance and the psychological note… There’s just something quintessentially useful about the scale of a week. And this should be no surprise. A week was designed this way. It was designed expressly to meet the psychological needs of human beings, something you can’t say about any other unit of time...And they are highly resilient to modification. The most recent redesign of the week was attempted by the French revolutionaries in 1793, who changed a week from seven to ten days and renamed it, confusingly, a “decade”. Needless to say, this redesign didn’t last long—more than a “decade”, but less than a decade.”


If you are currently in a career that is essentially a good fit for you, but maybe not a perfect fit, Buckingham’s job crafting method that he outlines in “Go, Put Your Strengths To Work” is phenomenal. The book is our Amazon resource of the day and his Dvd is in our resource center at the column to the right. If you want to take his workshop it is available for free in our guest teaching sessions courtesy of the Oprah Winfrey Show.

If you are unemployed, Harvey MacKay makes the wise suggestion that looking for a job is your job. In the free resources that accompany the promotion of his latest book, he offers a Week Planner Page for job seekers. You can find that in a group of pdf files under Career Links and Harvey MacKay or just click on the link here:  http://www.harveymackay.com/pdfs/gettingajob.pdf

Note: For some reason this link can be a little finicky...you may have to try it 2 or 3 times.
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