tl;dr: Weekset is a weekly call in which you‘ll reflect your week and plan the upcoming one with your Weekset partner.
On top of this there are additional concepts which you can adopt, adapt or ignore.
If you already attended our Session on Accountability, most of these concepts should not be new to you.
Getting started
Checklist before you start your first Weekset
⚠️ If you’re part of a cohort run by us (Malte/Martin), we’ll guide you through these steps 👍
- find a weekset partner
- agree to a schedule with them. When is your first Weekset?
- customize the Notion template and share it with your partner
- (Cash) commit to doing Weekset for at least 8 Weeks (optional, but recommended)
Your first Weekset
Goals
Before you start your first Weekset it can be helpful to think about your bigger Goals for the upcoming weeks or months. Write this down in the main document and differentiate between:
- Top Goals
- this should be only 1-3 things that are most important to you.
- Example: “Have a good Semester” or “find out how to be happy again”
- Instrumental Goals
- What do I need to do to archive my top goals?
- Example: “attend all university events”, “spend more time in nature”
- Secondary Goals
- other things you want to do. Should try to keep this to less than 10 Goals.
- Example: “keep doing sports”, “learn some c++”
It is always good to take a look at these Goals while doing a Weekset. Sometimes you will have to edit your goals, as they change over time.
Skip ahead to Planning the next Week so you understand what to review from the past week.
Schedule of a Weekset
Review of last Week
Open the document for last week. You should talk about:
- Your general impressions with the week
- Example questions to talk about:
- Have I been happy with how my week went?
- Has there anything that really annoyed me?
- Am i proud of something I did this week?
- Your tasks
- Evaluate each task individually and tell the other person how it went
If there is any doubt about whether you have completed a task, present your case and let the other person decide if your actions were in line with the task's expectations. We suggest being slightly harsh when judging this.
Medals
Medals
If you feel like you had an especially good week, you might want to ask your partner to award you a medal.
We have the following Medals:
- 🏅 Full House
- you archived all your tasks
- 🔥 High Energy
- you powered through this week and gave everything you have
- ❤️🩹 Recovered
- Had a bad start but managed to pull yourself together or
- overcame significant hurdles (like for example being sick)
Planning the next Week
The idea of Weekset is not to write down every small thing you need to do in the upcoming week, but to look at the bigger picture and select tasks that you normally would not do, but should do. Weekset should help you to deal with important tasks, that are not necessarily urgent.
The usual tendency is to write down too many things that you want to do. Keep it easy in the beginning and increase the difficulty as you go along. You should always aim to being able to accomplish all of your tasks.
The standard categories to sort tasks are:
- Routines
- Examples: “going to the gym everyday”, “doing a Power Crunch on Mon-Thurs”
- Ugh Tasks
- Tasks that you really don’t want to do, event though they usually can be done quickly.
- Example: reply to someone you should have replied to some time ago
- Normal Tasks
- everything else
Of course you can also add you own categories. Another one can be:
- Not-to-do list
- habits that you want to get rid off
- Example: “watch TikTok videos outside of work”
Additional Weekset Concepts
Cash Commitments
To add extra commitment to a task you can “bet” money on it. This should increase your willingness to do the task. Start with something like 5€-20€.
If you fail you will have to give your money away. You should decide beforehand where it should go. A charity might not feel bad enough and actually should feel good (if it’s a good one). Physically burning it can be a good idea. The closest equivalence to that in the digital world might be donating it to the Schuldentilgungskonto.
You can also use other punishments, like taking cold showers, doing push ups, etc.
Daily Voice Messages
A week is really long. It can be easy to forget about your weekset tasks if you don’t check it regularly. One solution is to commit to send your partner daily 30s - 1min voice messages. In it you can plan your day and tell your partner what weekset tasks you want to do on that day.
You can reflect one these voice messages either in another voice message the next day or in a power crunch.
You can commit to this by writing it down under routine tasks.
Power Crunches
A 30 min call, usually in the beginning of each week day. The idea is a) plan the day and do the Daily Voice Messages together and b) to start working on some weekset tasks.
You can find a schedule for the power crunches at the bottom of the main page.
To commit to this, write it down as a routine. Use your weekset call to schedule the power crunch call times with your partner.
Other generally useful tools
Website blocker that costs money, but has proven to be much more effective to us as it blocks websites across devices and browsers.
Schedule 25 min, 45 min or 75 min video calls with a stranger to be productive. This can be a good replacement for a Power Crunch if your partner doesn’t have time. The free plan includes 3 sessions per week.