What is Monday Hour One & My Week #1 Experience

Read all of my Monday Hour One posts here

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What is the Monday Hour One Technique?

I first learned about it on the Life Coach School’s podcast titled Monday Hour One. It is a time management technique where you spend an hour on the first day of your workweek planning your week ahead. You would come up with a list of items you want to work on or achieve that week and fit them into your calendar.

After listening to the podcast, I googled a little more and found this blog post by Tiffany Goyer explaining the process of the Monday Hour One technique in further detail. My biggest takeaway from the post was the different categories of time blocks including the Personal Free Time and Focus Time (also known as ‘no time‘).

The Monday Hour One technique is intriguing to me as I will be able to hold myself accountable whenever I am not on track or when I waste my time away watching Netflix or scrolling on my phone.

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Combining what I learned from the podcast and Tiffany’s post, I have decided on what my process will be like and that I will be documenting my experience on jenthinks weekly.

What Will My Monday Hour One Process Be?

Instead of working on my schedule for the upcoming week on Mondays (the start of my workweek), I have decided to spend an hour on Sunday morning instead. The reason being is that I will not be using my work time as my schedule will relate to more than just my employment so if I do it on Mondays, it means I will have to wake up very early. Therefore, I have decided Sundays would be the day.

My tool of choice will be Google Sheets as I love how easily accessible it is across platforms (desktop computer, laptop, phone etc). I played around with a number of different formats and eventually decided on the simple table below:

I expect this will most likely take some trials and errors before I find a cadence and pace that will work for me but for now, I will be updating my progress on the tracker daily or at least every other day so I will get some feedback and be able to make adjustments to my schedule throughout the week (remember, you are allowed to make changes as you go).

At the end of the week, which will be Sunday for me, I will review my previous week and celebrate my accomplishments, no matter how small. We are all too harsh on ourselves sometimes and be able to see “on paper” what you have accomplished would serve as a pat on the back.

Monday Hour One Weekly Recaps
Monday Hour One Week 15
Week 21

Week 1 of Monday Hour One

(started on Saturday this time)

Accomplishments by Category

💰 Personal Finance – filed 2019 Tax Return for both Eric and I
🎓 CPA – finished Week #5 reading, Quiz #5, Practice Case #5
jenthinks – published 1 post (this one)
3DIAC – researched and finished 2 posts
📚 Reading Clear My Name by Paula Daly
👩‍🍳 Recipes (first-time) – Hot & Sour Soup, Beef Bourguignon, Pork and Dried Scallop Congee, Hotteok, Steak Fajita, Guancomole, Beef & Broccoli Stir-fry, Dairy-free Rice Pudding, Spicy Pork with Sliced Potatoes

Thoughts?

I actually had a calendar reminder set up to do our tax returns last weekend but I totally ignored it. As it turned out, I received a few more tax slips in the mail this week so the timing was perfect.

Surprisingly, my reading for CPA went better than I thought and I was able to finish earlier than scheduled. That felt really good as I used to stress about not taking advantage of the extended timeline fully by cramping everything last-minute.

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For my blogs, I accomplished what I set out to do so that was a plus as well. I actually enjoyed the research I had to do for the posts so that reaffirmed my belief that 3DIAC will succeed.

I finished Clear My Name on the weekend and like I mentioned in my tweet, it was hard to put down the book once I have reached the halfway mark!

It was also another week of first-time recipes and they were largely successful. I also decided to start an Instagram dedicated to my cooking as I suspect my friends and family might be getting bored of my stories consisting of nothing but food 🍲🥘🍛. I also wanted to focus my new Instagram (@jenthinksfood) on the recipes too and they might be useless for people who usually watch my stories on my personal Instagram.

Closing Remarks

I thought my first week was a success as I accomplished most of what I set out to do with the exception of the experience report for CPA.

I am not sure if this experiment had anything to do with it but my week at work has been extremely productive as well. I was able to work on a few improvements that will likely help my team in the long term. Overall, I am loving the Monday Hour One technique!

Read all of my Monday Hour One posts here