Put your hand up if you’ve heard of the ‘Ideal Week’, popularised in recent years by Ali Abdaal and a bunch of other Productivity Bros?
Okay, those of you with your hands raised, feel free to archive this email and move on with your day.
If you haven’t heard about it, then strap in. This has gotta be one of the most helpful productivity tools I’ve ever had for my writing—and also one of the nerdiest.
🏋️♀️ ← That’s me, about twenty minutes ago
While I was at the gym (leg day — boring but necessary since I have little stick legs), I was thinking about how much I’d already achieved with my day, and I felt proud.
I’d written 1,500 words, worked on revising edits on a different project, eaten lunch, made headway on a video editing project, and talked to my dad on the phone.
More important than the number of different projects I’d worked on, I feel like I’ve worked on them all with full focus. The way I’ve done this is by limiting the amount of time spent on each project.
🌾 Do a Little of Lots
Schedule small bursts of focused work on different projects, instead of full days committed to one project.
I’ve found that more often than not, whether I schedule two hours or five hours to complete a task, I’ll put in around two hours of focused effort. If I schedule two hours, I’m likely to focus the whole time. If I schedule five hours, I’ll do half an hour of focused work, then take a break, then get sidetracked with chatting or eating or watching a YouTube video, then I’ll do a bit more focused work … and suddenly the entire five hours have gone by.
Parkinson’s Law states, “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”
When I have multiple demands on my time — be they personal or work-related — I find it easier to follow my schedule. If I have an entire day off, I’ll likely wake up late, spend more time on menial tasks, and maybe not even get around to writing at all.
If you have this problem, too, then good! I have a solution that’s completely revolutionised my output.
📆 Schedule Your Days Like a Nerd
Just so you’re prepared, this is gonna look kinda insane. You don’t have to follow this concept to the degree that I do, but I encourage you to at least give it a try, and feel free to make it work for you.
The concept is simple. You schedule your week using a calendar (either an app or a notebook, it doesn’t matter) in advance, noting down your priorities and aspirations.
Let me show you how I do it.
Disclaimer: We’re in dreamland here, okay? We’re gonna make our dream week without policing ourselves. Yes, work gets in the way. Yes, unexpected activities will arise. Think of this as what it is: an exercise.
- Start with a blank canvas:
- Add in your non-negotiables.
Don’t add work in yet, though. There’s time for that later. Non-negotiables are things like a doctor’s appointment, picking the kids up from school, meals, and sleep.
- Add in your priorities.
Now’s the fun part. Time to dream big. Think about the top priorities in your life right now. What do you want to achieve? If you need a compass to figure this out, imagine going to bed at night and looking back on your day. Ask yourself, ‘What am I most proud of doing today?’
If it’s to get in shape, add in your gym sessions. Put in as many as you’d ideally do. If it’s writing, put in writing sessions, and put them at a time you’d ideally do them, even if that means 2 a.m. If it’s hanging out with friends, schedule in some dinners or some daytime coffee-walks.
For me, Writing and Gym are really important. As is Friend Time.
This is where you can start choosing fun colours and making it pretty.
- Add in some reality.
The remaining gaps in your calendar are for you to fill with secondary projects, time to read, and menial tasks like taxes and grocery shopping.
If you’re like most of us, you have to work. We aren’t all in a position where we can spend 100% of our time doing exactly what we want … yet. The schedule needs some shuffling.
Add in the hours you have to spend at work. For some of us, that’ll completely mess up our entire week:
Yup, that looks like a stressful week.
- Shuffle to taste
This means that suddenly your evenings and early mornings are crammed with your extracurricular activities. But this is the thing you gotta keep in mind: those ‘extracurricular activities’ are often the things that turn you on the most. Writing, time with friends, working on a small business side hustle … that’s the worthwhile work. It’s important to prioritise these things.
If you’re lucky enough to work from home or have a job where you can choose your own hours, you might be able to schedule your work hours around your priorities in a way that doesn’t completely raze the playing field.
🃏 Shuffling Time
How can we make this work?
What can you move around, compromise, negotiate, change, to make sure you’re happy with your life balance?
You might decide there’s no way you can do what you want when you’re having to work full-time. But, if you’re creative, you might find there is enough time in your week to do most, if not all, of the things that turn you on.
Maybe you can’t write for two hours every morning, but you can manage one hour on weekdays and ninety minutes on weekends. Maybe you can trade a few sessions at the gym and play social netball, so you can double up social interaction with exercise.
Make the adjustments you can until you feel you’ve reached an ideal life balance.
Now, that’s your schedule! Try to keep to it for a week and see how you go. Shuffle things as other unexpected activities come up. I bet you’ll find that you spend time on unexpected activities more than you think. If you find that you spend four hours going down a YouTube rabbit hole about AI art (like I did last week), don’t beat yourself up about it. Shuffle the calendar and move on.
😱 Chill
I warned you at the beginning of this newsletter that it’s a doozy of an idea. It’s hard not to come across like a typical Productivity Bro™ while writing this.
After doing this for a couple of weeks, you might begin to feel like a slave to your schedule. If that’s the case, ease up on yourself. Schedule in some breathing exercises or some yoga, or ‘coffee and reading’.
You get more quality work done when you’re rested and leading with joy, so take care of yourself.
For interest, this was my week last week:
Wednesday night I got carried away editing and couldn’t tear myself from my laptop.
I had grand ideas about waking up at 6 a.m. to write … but because I had a chill week with work, I got up late every day. That meant I had to reschedule my calendar as I went, shifting and shuffling to try to fit everything in.
Did I fit everything in? No. Could I have done better with my time management? Yes.
But I’m gonna take it easy on myself. I got a lot done last week. So what if I wasn’t a superhuman?
📣 Shout Out to: Dave Richards
Thanks to Dave for sending this photo back with the bins removed. Made me laugh.
📖 Shout Out to: The Swift and the Harrier
Really enjoyed this book! As I wrote in my Goodreads review:
So much fun! If you like historical fiction, and romance, then this book is a home run.
Set in the 1600s during a Royalist-Parliamentarian war in England, the story spans a decade and centres around a female physician (a female physician? How inappropriate!) and a wily man with chameleon-like abilities to fit in anywhere.
Highly recommended. Thanks, Minette Walters, for taking so much time with research and striving to make dialogue fun to read.