Happy Monday 🌞
It’s been a minute, but I’m happy to be back in your inbox.
If you joined recently, hi 👋 I’m Hailley. This newsletter is where I share systems and frameworks anchored in my work (as a Marketing leader at Buffer) and life (as a mom of two with my own hobbies) to balance ambition with staying calm and intentional.
Have you ever felt a week slip away from you? Somehow it’s Thursday or Friday, and you didn’t get nearly as much as you intended to get done, or it feels like you were replying to others without moving on your own goals and priorities?
This used to happen to me frequently, and a week is — in my opinion — one of the best units of planning, because you usually have some consistency in schedules for a week whether it’s for yourself or for a partner or kids, that make it easier to think in a week.
The best tool in my repertoire for actually getting things done throughout the week is to go into the week with a plan, and I do this by weekly planning.
Weekly planning helps me ensure my task list is reasonable, that my work is connecting up to a bigger strategy, and helps me feel more calm throughout the week because I know the plan.
Weekly planning has been on my mind a lot lately as I’ve gone through a busier season (hence the lack of newsletters here recently) but my this one routine has stood the test of time because I can crunch or expand it as needed on Sundays (or sometimes Mondays) to make space for it.
I follow a very simply system for weekly planning: reflect → gather → plan.
1️⃣ Reflect
Before jumping into a new week, I take a few minutes to look back at the last one:
- Priorities check: Are last week’s priorities finished, moving to this week, or no longer relevant?
- What went well / what I’d do differently
- Voice note analysis: This is where AI comes in. I take the voice notes I’ve recorded throughout the week and run them through a Claude Project to spot patterns I might’ve missed.
→ Read more: Using voice notes and AI for personal growth
2️⃣ Gather
This step is about collecting everything before I start planning. I pull together tasks, project docs, email, meeting notes, my calendar, and my goals for the year. AI has been very helpdul in making this step faster.
- Opening Todoist on a weekly view
- Checking progress against my annual goals
- Running a scheduled Claude task that pulls action items from meeting notes into Todoist
- Running a scheduled Claude task that scans my email for anything critical
- Reviewing my calendar for the week ahead
3️⃣ Plan
Now it’s time to see if everything actually fits into the week.
- Workload: I look at my to-do list next to my calendar to make sure they line up. I’ll often catch that I’ve stacked all my tasks on Monday, when Monday is actually full of meetings — so I redistribute.
- Priorities: I keep 3-ish priorities per week, living outside my task list, split into work, personal, and side-projects.
- Goals: Does what I’m planning actually connect to my bigger goals for the year?
→ I rewrote my full post on weekly planning with a lot more detail on my website.
Reminder: as a subscriber you can grab my weekly planning template + other systems here.
I’d love to hear from you: do you have a weekly planning practice? What’s in it? Have you brought AI into your planning yet, or are you holding off?
I hope you have a lovely week ahead. As always, feel free to reply if this sparks any thoughts or questions. ✨
See you next week,
Hailley
- Buffer recently rebuilt our analytics offering and we have way more powerful insights into social now (yes, I am a very biased source on this). For the Buffer blog, I wrote about how I built an AI social media coach with my social data. Let me know if you try the same!
- I recently did an interview about Buffer, marketing, my journal to social media. If that sounds interesting, the interview is here and there’s a YouTube video if you’d prefer to watch/listen.
- If you work in Communications and are looking for your next role, there are several great openings right now.
“Remember: words, especially those written, are immortal.” - Virginia Evans, The Correspondent (a great read!)
P.S.: Do you run your own newsletter and want to do a newsletter swap? Send me a message if you’re interested, I’m going to try this with a few folks!
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