Note: New to Monday Hour One? You’ll want to read this post first. 

5 pro tips for your Monday Hour One practice

I’m sharing five pro tips that will help you take your Monday Hour One practice to the next level:

1. Be your own project manager
2. Schedule from the right place
3. Check in with Future You
4. Choose, then have your own back
5. Bring in Oprah

Be your own project manager

Hat tip to my amazing client Brad* (name changed) for this idea. He was able to stay objective about the results of his Monday Hour One practice by pretending that he has a project manager named Chad. Chad is responsible for generating the Monday Hour One plan and scheduling it; Brad then executes on it.

When Chad overschedules or doesn’t set Brad up for success, Brad can just calmly go talk to Chad and ask him to tweak things slightly moving forward. No big drama about how Brad sucks or isn’t cut out to be a business owner.

Schedule from the right place

Thanks to another client for helping me uncover this insanely helpful tip. She was struggling with her Monday Hour One follow through, so I asked how she’s feeling when she’s setting up her schedule for the week. She replied, “I’m super hopeful when I’m doing it!”

We pinpointed that that was the issue: She was scheduling from a place of “I hope I get this done,” vs a mindset of “I’m going to do everything that I schedule, no matter what.” So check in with yourself: Are you hopeful or are you committed when scheduling?

Check in with Future You

At the end of your Monday Hour One scheduling block, time-travel to meet with Future You, who exists at 5pm on that Friday.

Does that person approve of how you scheduled the week? Were you generous with downtime? Did you schedule in alignment with your overall life priorities? Did you anticipate all of the obstacles that you could, and strategize for how to solve them effectively?

Practice looking out for Future You at all times; this strengthens your relationship with yourself.

Choose, then have your own back

You will go off your Monday Hour One plan at some point. It’s 100% going to happen. When it does, your work is to notice that you’re making a decision (even if it feels like it’s just happening to you), then support yourself on that decision.

Here’s an example: You get a call that someone in your family is sick, which disrupts your carefully scheduled afternoon. If you’re going to veer off your schedule to help them out, love your reasons and have your own back on your decision. This eliminates any guilt or resentment.

Bring in Oprah

One of the biggest things that people push back on with Monday Hour One is allocating a certain amount of time to a task and sticking with it. People often say that they can’t predict this. I’ll start by saying that it takes a lot of trial and error.

Now, let’s say that you allocate 30 minutes to work on writing an email to your list, but you’re not sure if it might take longer.

If I told you that Oprah was going to walk through your door and give you one million dollars if you finished it in 30 minutes, would you? (99.9% of people say yes at this point, but sometimes someone sassy will say no.)

The point is, if you had a compelling reason (like💰💰💰), you’d get that shit done. Make your commitment to yourself your compelling reason.

Which tip did you need to hear?