I'm going to let you in on something that separates consistently productive advisers from those who spend their weeks in reactive chaos: it's not talent, it's not luck, and it's not some mystical productivity gene. It's twenty minutes on Sunday night. That's it. Twenty minutes of intentional planning that most advisers skip because they're too busy "relaxing" before the week starts, only to spend Monday morning wondering what on earth they're supposed to be doing.
Look, I understand the resistance. Sunday evening is precious. You want to enjoy the last moments before the work week intrudes. But here's the uncomfortable truth: if you don't take control of your week before it starts, your week will take control of you. And it won't be gentle about it.
Why Sunday Night Specifically
There's a reason this works better on Sunday evening than Monday morning, and it's not just about getting a head start. By Sunday night, your brain has had genuine rest from work. You're not yet caught up in the urgency of the moment, the emails demanding attention, the client who called with a crisis. You can think strategically rather than reactively.
Monday morning planning, by contrast, is almost always compromised. You walk in, or open your laptop, and immediately the week is happening at you. The inbox is full. Someone needs something. That thing you forgot about on Friday is now urgent. By the time you've dealt with the immediate demands, it's lunchtime and you still haven't actually decided what your week is supposed to achieve. Sound familiar? Of course it does. It's how most people operate, and it's why most people feel perpetually behind.
Twenty minutes on Sunday evening, when nothing is urgent and nobody is demanding your attention, allows you to approach the week as a strategic exercise rather than a survival exercise. That mental shift alone is worth the time investment.
What Those 20 Minutes Should Include
Let's be specific about what you're actually doing during this planning session, because "planning your week" is vague enough to be useless.
Start by reviewing what happened last week. Not in painful detail, just the highlights and lowlights. What did you accomplish? What didn't get done that should have? Are there any loose ends that need to be tied up before they become problems? This review takes about five minutes and prevents the accumulated mess of unfinished tasks from growing into something unmanageable.
Next, identify your three most important outcomes for the coming week. Not your twenty tasks. Not your endless to-do list. Three outcomes that, if you achieved them and nothing else, would make the week a success. Maybe it's submitting a particular application, having a crucial conversation with a referral partner, and completing your compliance training. Whatever they are, write them down and commit to them. Everything else is secondary.
Then look at your calendar and figure out when these important outcomes are actually going to happen. Block time for them. Protect that time like it matters, because it does. If your calendar is already full of meetings and commitments, you need to either move things or accept that your important outcomes aren't going to happen. Better to face that reality on Sunday than to discover it on Friday.
Finally, identify any preparation required for scheduled meetings or commitments. Do you need to review a file before a client meeting? Pull together information for a referral conversation? Complete something before a deadline? Knowing what preparation is required means you won't be scrambling at the last minute, which is both inefficient and stressful.
The Psychological Benefits You Didn't Expect
Here's something interesting that happens when you plan your week on Sunday evening: Monday morning stops being terrible. That vague dread many people feel on Sunday night, that sense of impending chaos, largely disappears when you actually know what you're walking into. You've already made the decisions about what matters. You've already identified the priorities. Monday morning becomes about execution rather than figuring out what to execute.
There's also a compounding effect on sleep quality. The Sunday night planning session essentially downloads the week from your brain onto paper or screen. Instead of lying in bed mentally cycling through everything you need to remember, you've externalised it. Your brain can actually rest because it's not trying to hold everything in working memory.
And throughout the week, when unexpected demands arise, you have a framework for evaluating them. Someone wants your time? You can check it against your three key outcomes. Is this more important than what you've already committed to? Usually the answer is no, and having that clarity makes it much easier to protect your priorities rather than constantly being pulled off course.
Making It Stick
The challenge with any productivity practice is actually doing it consistently. You'll do it for a week or two, notice the benefits, then gradually let it slip as other things feel more pressing. Before you know it, you're back to Monday morning chaos wondering what happened.
The solution is to make Sunday planning a ritual rather than a decision. Same time each week. Same place. Same basic process. When it's a ritual, you don't have to decide whether to do it. You don't have to summon motivation. It's just what Sunday evening includes, like dinner or that show you watch.
Some advisers combine it with something enjoyable. A quiet coffee. A specific playlist. A comfortable spot. The planning itself takes twenty minutes, but the ritual around it can be whatever makes it sustainable for you. The point is removing the friction so that skipping it feels wrong rather than tempting.
The Compound Effect
Twenty minutes per week is roughly seventeen hours per year. That's a trivial investment. But the return isn't measured in hours saved, although you will save hours. It's measured in the quality of your decisions, the reduction in stress, and the steady accumulation of weeks where you actually accomplished what mattered rather than just staying busy.
After a few months of consistent Sunday planning, you'll notice something has shifted. You're more in control. Less reactive. More strategic. The weeks feel less like they're happening to you and more like you're directing them. That shift is worth far more than seventeen hours of your time.
If you want to go deeper on productivity systems and prioritisation frameworks like the Eisenhower Matrix, read Getting Organised When Nobody's Watching for a comprehensive approach to self-management.
Give it a proper trial. Four weeks, minimum. Twenty minutes every Sunday evening. If after a month you genuinely believe it's not improving your effectiveness, you can go back to Monday morning chaos with a clear conscience. But I suspect you won't want to. The advisers who try this tend to wonder how they ever operated without it.
Now stop reading and put a recurring reminder in your calendar. Sunday evening. Twenty minutes. Your future self will be grateful, even if your current self thinks you have better things to do.