Ideal Week

This week I revised my ideal week. An ideal week is a template for how you would like to spend your time in a normal week. It’s a way of making decisions about your schedule before life happens, as it seems to pretty much every day.

Mikey Anderson has a good post about ideal weeks:

Think of an ideal week like city zoning. In any city they want to make sure they have a good mix of commercial, light industrial, high density residential, and low density residential. City planners section off the city into zoning areas so that as people want to develop property, they can—but they keep the desired balance.

An ideal week should zone off your time so that your calendar can get filled in organically, but still make sure that your life has the right balance of priorities.

Spontaneous types might resist this level of planning, but there’s still lots of room in your ideal week for flexibility.

One unexpected benefit of having an ideal week is that it fences in rest time. I thought it would make me want to work harder. Actually, it helps remind me that I need to stop working and pay attention to family, reading, and recreation.

I was surprised to see that I couldn’t fit all the things I want to do into my week. No wonder I felt like I never had enough time. Working on this plan helped me to realize that I had to choose between good things and schedule only the things that matter most.

If you don’t have an ideal week, I’d encourage you to try. Just block off some time, think about what matters most in your life, take into account your rhythms, and have some fun planning.

Let me know if you have any tips on how to do this.