“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
— James Clear
The shift started with a calendar
One day I was listening to Jesse Itzler talk about his “Big A** Calendar.” It’s a giant visual map of his entire year. He said that once it’s filled out, all he has to do is execute. The year is already baked.
That word hit me: baked.
He didn’t wake up each day trying to figure things out. He knew where he was going. All that was left was the doing.
That’s when I started experimenting.
I remembered Brian Tracy’s line in Master Your Time, Master Your Life—that simply writing down what you want puts you ahead of 95% of people. So I started writing tomorrow’s plan the night before.
And I noticed something.
I didn’t have to burn decision-making energy each morning trying to figure out what to do that day. It was already done. All I had to do was show up and follow the plan.
*I know, not exactly a groundbreaking discovery.
Progress you can’t see
Planning tomorrow helped me survive the day. But it wasn’t enough to steer the ship.
Progress is invisible on a day-to-day scale. You can be doing all the right things and still feel like you're running in place.
That’s when I started planning not just the day, but the week.
Sunday Systems
I built a worksheet for myself—something simple and lightweight that I could fill out every Sunday.
It’s not about planning every hour of every day. It’s task-oriented. Where am I trying to be by Friday? What life buckets do I want to invest in?
For me, those buckets are:
My job
My social life (I just moved to NYC, so building a community is essential)
My creative and entrepreneurial ventures
Without a system, my job quietly cannibalizes the other two. If I try to balance them on the fly, sleep suffers. I burn out. It’s a vicious cycle.
But when I start the week with intention and track it, I protect what matters, and I get way more done.
The worksheet is built around powerful frameworks like the Eisenhower Matrix and the 80/20 rule. It helps me:
Focus on important but non-urgent tasks (Quadrant 2 in the Eisenhower Matrix)
Batch the annoying-but-necessary stuff (grocery runs, laundry, Quadrant 3 in the Eisenhower Matrix)
And most crucially: pick one single priority that will define the success of that week
* By the way here’s a link to a video I made about the Eisenhower Matrix.
There’s a line at the top that reads:
“If I only accomplish ONE thing this week, it should be…”
That one box changes everything. Week by week, you can see the progress stacking. It becomes a breadcrumb trail toward your bigger vision. Now, I’m prioritizing it.
Moving the needle
When I use this system, it feels like the gears are finally catching. Like I’m making progress on something too big to hold in my head all at once.
When I don’t use it, the gears strip. I’m running in place.
And here’s the kicker: the very reason most people don’t use systems is the same reason they need them.
They say, “I don’t have time.”
But systems save time. They save energy. They multiply your output per unit of effort. They make the invisible visible.
And they’re simpler than people think.
P.S.
If this resonates with you, I’ve made my Sunday Systems worksheet available for Notion, Word/Google Docs, and as a PDF. It’s free. It’s lightweight. And if you use it for a month, I think you’ll be shocked at the results.
👉 Download the Sunday Systems worksheet here.