Rethinking my approach to weekly planning and action

[culturepainter]

I am asking myself this question so that I can polish my approach for the future.
I like to reassess my approach and my premises that I have been holding every once in a while. When I do this I find that I can see my life from a different light. I get a lot of insight and it allows me to tweak my approach to life so that I can be more effective. So as part of that exercise I asked myself some questions.

Background:
For the most part, I have been quite pleased with the things I have acted for the in last 5 to 10 years.I ended up addressing the things that were most important to me. I am glad I was committed to them and stuck by them even though it was not always easy. But during the 5 to 10 years, on a week to week or a month to month basis, I had a lot of doubts about what I should have been doing. There were many times I was distracted and felt like I wasn't doing what was important.

Question:
So I was considering what would have worked for me to gain confidence in my actions in the last 5 to 10 years in terms of weekly planning and acting?

Trying to answer:
So what would it mean for me to get confidence that I was effectively acting for what's important on a weekly basis? There is a difference between acting for just acting for the important things and actually being effective.

First of all it seems that the goal needs scope. It needs to be measureable. Otherwise you can act and act and not feel like you're making progress. There has to be a clear beginning and an end to a mid-level (yearly) goal.
If the long term goal seems endless (for example for health or gaining marketable skills) then you break it down into subprojects or tasks that are more tangible and measureable on a yearly basis. You can further break it down into a few months and so on.

During this time, you keep thinking of the long term goal in abstract and make all kinds of associations and brainstorm, but the short term tasks are measureable.
Action in the shortterm and sharpening the saw in the long run have to both go on continuously.

Prioritize your yearly goals. What are the most important things? Understand your own scope. You're not trying to be everything for everyone. Be clear on both what you're trying to be and what you're not trying to be. Try to identify with the person that you're trying to be in the long run.
Identify clear things that you focussed on in the last year that you will not focus so much this year.
Plan in room for leisure and rest. That makes for a rich quality of life.

Inorder to do the above, break your weekly time in chunks. A chunk of time for health, for marketable skills, for leisure, etc. And when that time is finished, you don't work on these things. But you try to make the time you do work on these things, the most effective. That means constantly prioritizing your 'to do list' in each of these areas. Constant synergizing between things you need to do inorder to get the max out. How do you make best use of that chunk of time that you've set asside for that activity?

Well, the more you plan to get the most out of that chunk of time for that activity, the more preparation time you need. And of course you can't just focus on everything and try to have preparation time for everything. You have to focus on a few things. You need to define the scope of a few things you will set aside chunks of time for.

And to define that scope you need to get rid of the fear of the unknown (the things that don't know that could bite you in your butt down the road). How do you do that?
Well, one thing you need to do if you want to be effective is get rid of fear of the unknown. Part of that is the difficult task of being widely read (so the world is known to you) while being able to constantly re-establish your shortterm goals in your mind (so that you're not distracted by all the things you hear). That is tough for me.

I'm open to any insight or advice you can provide based on your experience.