Achieve Time Management & Goal Setting Software Help

Weekly Planning Wizard (Achieve Planner Pro)

Achieve Home Top Previous Next

The Weekly Planning Wizard is designed to help you review your mission and guiding principles, review and rewrite your long term goals and dreams, and organize and schedule your projects and tasks on a weekly basis. It is a tool to connect the long-term perspective of goal setting with the day-to-day perspective of effective time management.

See Weekly Planning Overview for a detailed look at the practice.

You can invoke the Weekly Planning Wizard from the Tools menu. When you invoke the wizard, you will see a dialog indicating the week that you are about to plan and the starting date for the planning process. Click OK when you've selected the correct week.

Step 1 Review Result Areas

Step 1 allows you to review the mission and guiding principles for each of your result areas. This review process is intended to connect you with your long term mission and core beliefs on a weekly basis and guide the rest of the process.

As part of your review, you can add any necessary Projects that you want to focus on during the week ahead.

Use the Wizard | Next Item command to advance to the next result area. After you reach the last one, the command will move you to the next step.

Step 2 Review and Rewrite Your Dreams and Goals

Step 2 allows you to rewrite your dreams and goals. Rewriting your dreams and goals is a powerful way to refocus your attention on your long term objectives.

Use the Wizard | Next Item command to advance to the next dream/goal. After you reach the last one, the command will move you to the next step.

Step 3 Select Time Chart and Block Off Fixed Appointments

This step allows you to select a time chart that you want to use for the week (using the combo box.) You can also edit existing time charts or create new ones as necessary using the Edit... and New... buttons respectively.

The Outlook Sync... button allows you to synchronize your appointments, emails and contacts with Microsoft Outlook® since the last time you performed a synchronization step (see Outlook Synchronization for details.)

You should also enter any new appointments or meetings to block off the time.

Step 4 Determine Your Personal Time Commitment to Various Projects

This step allows you to commit a certain amount or percentage of your time to the various projects on your plate using both your work and personal resources. This commitment indicates how much time you plan to spend on each project this particular week.

The process begins with your "work" resource for work related projects. For each project you can set or adjust the time commitment or time % value and identify the projects that are your MVPs (Most Valuable Projects) for this week. As you commit your time, you will see the "Total Committed", "Time Left" and "% left" values decrease accordingly.

When you are ready to commit time to your "personal" projects, move to the next resource using the Next Resource button or the Wizard | Next Item command and set/adjust the values for projects using your personal resource.

NOTE: your time commitments for various projects will be recorded as Project Resource Assignments in the project.

Step 5 Schedule Project Blocks for Each Project

This step allows you to schedule Project Blocks (see Weekly Planning Overview) for each of your projects based on the time commitment values you entered in Step 4. The Project and Resource editors display the current project and resource being scheduled and the Time Remaining editor shows the amount of time that still needs to be scheduled for the project.

You can simply drag the project block to the time slot where you want to schedule it and click the mouse button to drop the block. The next block will be automatically prepared so you can drop it again.

Time Chart	Select the time chart you would like to use for this week
Block Size	Controls the size of the project blocks being dropped
Avoid Collisions	Check so that project blocks are automatically adjusted in size if they collide with other appointments. If not checked, the project block will be scheduled at the same time as the colliding appointment
Stop/Resume Drop	Use this button to stop/resume the drop operation (to continue dropping project blocks) on the schedule view. You can uncheck it to exit drop mode or press Esc key.

The order of project blocks that are dropped is based on the priority of the projects (big rocks first). Once you've dropped all the project blocks for a project, the wizard will automatically move to the next project/resource to continue dropping blocks. You can also force the wizard to move to the next or previous project before all the blocks have been dropped using the Wizard | Next Item or Wizard | Previous Item commands.