The method: plan your week around your life roles

The method is a weekly loop in five steps. Define the roles you play in your life, set goals for them, plan each week as small steps toward those goals, review the week to see which role got nothing, and keep your head clear so there is room for the people in your roles. It grows out of Stephen Covey’s roles and goals, and Motive is built to run it.

The first two steps you do rarely — roles change over years, goals over months. The third and fourth you do every week, and they are the loop: plan, live the week, look back, plan again. The fifth runs underneath all of them. Each step has its own page below.

Step 1: Define your life roles

A role is a part of your life where someone — including you — depends on you: parent, partner, the person at work, friend, and yourself. Stephen Covey made roles the base of weekly planning in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and they are the base of this method too.

Defining them takes an evening. List every hat you wear, merge them down to about seven, and for each one write a sentence about who you want to be in it. Everything that comes after hangs off these roles.

How to define your life roles, with examples →

Step 2: Define your goals

Goals are beacons: even when you don’t yet know how to reach one, you know which direction to move in. Start with dreams — what you want before you know how — and turn the ones that matter into goals, each tied to a role.

There is no single best goal-setting method. WOOP makes a wish survive real life, SMART suits goals with a finish line and a date, OKRs fit results you can count, and habits fit what you want to keep doing. The step’s page shows what each is good for and how to use them together.

Goal-setting methods: WOOP, SMART, OKR, BHAG →

Step 3: Plan the week and perform

Once a week, choose a few small steps for your roles and goals and give each a real day. Then perform: keep those steps alive while the week throws urgent things at you.

Instead of the Eisenhower matrix’s four quadrants, the method asks two separate questions — how important is this, and when? Importance belongs to the task, urgency comes from its dates, and anything that can’t happen yet is postponed out of sight until it can.

The Eisenhower matrix for weekly planning, simplified →

Step 4: Review the week, and the year

The review turns planning into a loop. Once a week you look back by role — what happened, what got in the way, which part of your life got nothing — and choose what changes next week.

Once a year you do the same with the whole year: read it back, close the goals that are done or no longer yours, and plant the dreams for the year ahead.

Weekly review and year-end review questions →

Step 5: Clear your head

Move everything you are trying to remember — tasks, ideas, dates, someday-wishes — into one place you trust, so your mind stops holding them. A fifteen-minute brain dump is enough to start.

Mental space is not emptiness. It is room for the people in your roles: to think a thought through, to notice your partner is quiet tonight, to actually hear what your kid is telling you.

How to clear your head and make mental space →