Craft Your Ideal Week: a User-Friendly Guide
A key element of personal productivity is managing our time efficiently. By making the most out of our energy levels throughout the day we can get more things done and stay motivated for longer.
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| Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash |
At the beginning of this year, I experienced a week of low motivation and tried out different methods to get my productivity back to where it was. One method that helped me was drafting my ideal week.
In this article, I want to share my experiences and shed light on how you can craft your ideal week too.
What is an ideal week?
A definition
The definition is straightforward: An ideal week is when we look back and say, “This week was awesome!”
But what is awesome?
I’m not talking about how an awesome week would be with unlimited money or unlimited free time. I’m talking about how an awesome week would be right now. It is a week where you get a lot of things done and enjoy the process while staying energized and motivated.
Very likely, an ideal week will be different for all of us and it depends on our unique traits, habits, and quirks. Some basic categories are:
- sleep
- work/commuting
- eating/hygiene
To plan your ideal week, the timeboxing method is applied for an entire week. However, you don’t just apply it for the upcoming week. Instead, you apply the method to a week without any pre-planned appointments.
Essentials: Timeboxing
Recently I once more read an article about timeboxing. Personally, I have been applying the method for quite some time now and I have to say that it can be a great enhancement to productivity - especially to overcome those moments where motivation is low.
Timeboxing is a time management method where you allocate a fixed, predetermined amount of time to a specific task. The objective is to increase focus and productivity by defining the time spent on each task beforehand. A practical way to implement timeboxing is by blocking off time in your calendar.
Timeboxing has the following benefits:
- It promotes a sense of urgency and prevents overthinking.
- It supports you in prioritizing tasks.
- It separates (i) the planning of work and (ii) the actual work.
I’ve been using timeboxing for almost two years now. It is definitely a great productivity tool, but you shouldn’t over-plan - leave some room where you don’t pre-plan a task. It is your flexibility corridor you can use once the chaos of reality unfolds and you have to move your timeboxes around to make room for an urgent meeting.
But now let’s get back to the ideal week.
Your ideal week
A big part of your ideal week is most likely your work. If you are employed at a company, the times you work are more or less predetermined. If you are self-employed, however, you most likely have more freedom when to work. Whether you are employed somewhere or work independently, I’d recommend subdividing the process of crafting your ideal week into two parts:
- Craft your ideal week without subdividing work into sub-activities. However, you should differentiate between different jobs (e.g. 9-5 & side hustle).
- Plan your ideal work week (within the work blocks).
For the whole process, I suggest that you use a spreadsheet to support your planning. You can use my template if you want to: it is available for free at Gumroad.
Craft your ideal week
Start with writing down a list of all the things you want to include in your ideal week. The first list is just a draft and you will most likely combine some activities and add new ones during the process, so don’t try to make it perfect in the first go. The list could include …
- sleep
- employed work/side hustle /housework/commuting
- cooking/eating/personal/hygiene
- family time
- reading/working out/…
Once you have written the list, assign the activities to the following categories (you can also divide an activity into several activities on a percentage basis):
- Health
- Love
- Work
- Play
A week has exactly 168 hours - no matter how productive you are, this is the amount you need to work with: allocate the time to different activities.
But don’t begin by putting it directly into the calendar. It’s easier if you first decide how much time you want to spend on a particular activity and then plan the time in your calendar later.
Start with allocating time to the activity that needs the most time. Most likely this will be sleep. If you plan to sleep 7 hours per weekday and 8 hours on Saturdays and Sundays in your ideal week, these are 51 hours.
The second biggest chunk is most likely work. In my example, work-related activities are 42 hours of actual work, 7.5 hours commuting, and 2.5 hours for lunch breaks.
Then add all other activities, but ensure that you leave some “unplanned time” - even your ideal week needs some buffer!
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| Example of time allocated to activities by the author |
Once you’ve allocated all 168 hours of the week, the next step is to plan the activities in a calendar. I’ve personally tested using 60-minute, 30-minute, and 15-minute blocks. Planning with 60 minutes is too broad, while a 15-minute grid makes the overview too large. So, in my view, a 30-minute grid works best.
You can use any calendar app you like, but I suggest using a spreadsheet. It lets you test different schedules, and the spreadsheet makes sure the times add up correctly.
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| Example of activities added to a 30-minute grid by the author |
Take your time adding the activities to the calendar and don’t hesitate to go back to your time allocation and tweak it. I had to move back and forth for about 10 times until I was happy with the result.
For fast morning routines (like the one in the example) a 30-minute grid can still be too rough. However, you can assign multiple activities to a single block of time.
There you have it: your ideal week. As a next step, you can plan your ideal work week in more detail.
Craft your ideal work week
How you deal with your ideal work week depends on what kind of work you are employed in:
- employed work with little creative freedom: In this case, you most likely cannot craft your ideal work week, but you can focus on improving your ideal week instead and just treat work as a necessary block.
- employed work with lots of creative freedom (e.g. manager roles): In most companies, you will have some kind of freedom in your weekly planning to set some blocks aside to do deep work (and block out meetings).
- self-employed work: This is like the second option, but it’s even better because you get more freedom: you can choose when and how much you work on your own.
I currently serve as the head of a department dedicated to Digitalization & IT and fall into the second category. Hence, I will show how you can approach crafting your ideal week from that perspective.
Let’s start with a list of different activities at work, but keep them generic to be flexible in the future:
- Shallow work
- Deep work
- E-Mails
- Planning work
- Leadership
As a manager, a big portion of work is sitting in meetings and often it’s the case that you cannot decide when to have these meetings. However, you can decide on when not to have them by blocking off time in your calendar to be used for a different type of work. This won’t protect you from all meetings, but usually, people tend to send you meeting invitations for times when you are available (or at least give you a call before over-booking).
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| Example of activities added to the ideal work week grid by the author |
In the example, I began with the most important kind of work, called deep work. To boost motivation on Mondays, it’s great to start the week with deep work and make progress on big and important projects right away. It’s crucial to schedule deep work when you have the most energy during the day—early if you’re a morning lark and later if you’re a night owl.
As a manager, another significant part of work is, unfortunately, shallow work—small tasks that don’t require deep focus but still need time and attention (like signing an order, checking budget figures, or preparing for a meeting).
It’s also helpful to plan when you’ll plan your work and your team’s work. I find it very useful to end the workweek on Friday with half an hour of planning for the tasks in the next week. This ensures that I can clear my mind before heading into the weekend. Similarly, I schedule half an hour on Sundays to plan the upcoming week - this ensures that I can start right away with deep work on Monday mornings.
You can plan your ideal (work) week with as many details as you like, but remember: the more activities you plan in advance, the less likely it is that your ideal week will actually happen.
Apply ideal week
The ideal week is a helpful tool to reflect on how much time you spend on different activities. It helps you to think about when to do certain things (according to your energy levels) or which activities are generally fixed and cannot be rescheduled.
When applying the ideal week, think of the following guidelines:
- Keep it simple: Don’t go crazy with activities. You shouldn’t have more than 12 different activities - if you do, consider combining similar activities (it creates more freedom).
- Block off deep work in your work calendar: This can be a true productivity booster. After figuring out when you feel most energetic, plan to do your deep work during those times. This helps you use your time wisely, and you won’t waste your productive moments in a meeting.
- Leave enough room for unplanned time: From my experience with this method, I’ve learned that having “unplanned time” is crucial. In reality, things can get a bit crazy sometimes. If that happens, you need flexibility to get back on track, and it’s much easier if you have some extra time buffers to work with.
- Don’t stick to your ideal week at all costs: Remember, your ideal week is a tool to help you be more productive. However, some meetings can’t be changed, or there might be a burst of motivation you don’t want to lose - in any case, be flexible and don’t hesitate to adjust from your ideal week if it makes sense.
Thank you for reading! If you are interested in reading on: in the past weeks I’ve written some related articles:
- In a recent article, I delved into the topic “stress” and how it can be a productivity booster.
- You do not have to become a morning lark to operate at peak productivity.
For this article, I’ve mostly used my personal experiences using the “ideal week”. Initially, I heard about it by Ali Abdaal in his Trident Calendar System.