Have you ever made a brilliant plan? Of course you have. You dreamed it up in your mind. Maybe you even wrote it down. Maybe you got fancy and built it in a planner, in some productivity software, or a beautiful Gantt chart. It all looked so promising and sequential… until reality happened. Halfway through you’re making constant adjustments, or the plan never really gets off the ground.
There’s a popular saying in military strategy: “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” Meeting your “enemy” with no plan isn’t a good plan either. The answer isn’t to stop planning. It’s to plan for plans not going according to plan—and build that into the plan. (Yes, the redundancy is the point.)
You Don’t Need Better Plans — You Need Better Rhythms
Plans are snapshots. Rhythms are systems. A rhythm absorbs surprises, feedback, and new information without losing the plot. Instead of betting everything on a perfect blueprint, install a weekly rhythm that helps you adjust quickly while staying aimed at what matters.
What this looks like in real life:
- Predictable checkpoints that force you to zoom out and re‑aim
- A simple cadence for turning lessons into changes on the calendar
- Fewer “start over” moments, more small mid‑course corrections
A Week Is the Building Block of Your Life
A day is almost always too tactical. You’re in hand‑to‑hand combat with each day’s distractions and surprises. A month, a quarter, or a year is useful, but the farther out you plan, the more guesswork you’re doing—and the easier it is to lack the urgency to act now. “We have so much time,” we tell ourselves.
A week sits in the sweet spot. It’s imminent enough to identify concrete actions for your most important goals, projects, and roles—and wide enough to get you out of the daily fray so you can be intentional with your time. Think of the week as the unit of progress. Stack great weeks, and you build a great year.
The Weekly R.A.P Up Ritual
At Climb.Coach we help our clients implement a weekly R.A.P up ritual.
Reflect
Ask a few reflective questions that help you celebrate progress and name challenges. What moved forward? What felt heavy? What did you learn? Reflection turns experience into insight so next week starts smarter, not just faster.
Audit
Audit isn’t scary (and it isn’t about tracking every second or what you ate for breakfast). Look at how you actually spent your time versus what you intended. Which blocks held? Which slipped? Which actions got done, which need to move from your backlog into next week, and which should be deleted altogether? This is where you re‑align your calendar to your priorities.
Plan
Look at the upcoming week and lay out your focus. Choose the primary objective you hope to work on. Then put that goal onto your calendar. Block time for your goals and key projects. Guard deep‑work blocks. Bundle admin. Leave buffers for the unexpected. The calendar is where intention becomes commitment.
How a Performance Coach Helps
You don’t have to use a performance coach to start using the Weekly R.A.P up and planning your weeks better. But just like taking a wider view helps you make better decisions, working with a coach gives you a stronger outside view—seeing the forest, not just the trees. A weekly summit meeting on your calendar increases accountability and helps you develop a weekly planning rhythm that sticks. A coach will help you:
- Clarify your primary objective for the week (and say no to the rest)
- Design a calendar that matches your energy and your business model
- Install safeguards and tripwires so plans adjust before they derail
