The Ideal Week is a productivity technique that involves designing our lives to live more intentionally. Its ultimate purpose is to manage current tasks and help us work systematically towards our goals.
In this post, we’re discussing what an Ideal Week is, how it works and how you can start one yourself.
What is an Ideal Week?
In Free to Focus, Michael Hyatt explains his Ideal Week as the week he would live if he controlled 100% of what happens.
We can either live on-purpose, according to a plan we’ve set or we can live by accident, reacting to the demands of others.
If you had a choice, wouldn’t you rather live on your own terms? That’s the whole point of an Ideal Week.
The Power of Mega Batching
When several tasks come up at the same time, our instinct might be to tackle the tasks all at once. And we might even take pride in our multitasking ability, but our brains don’t really work that way.
Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, says that when we change our focus from one task to another, our mind doesn’t immediately follow. Switching between tasks causes a sort of attention residue that can stay with us the rest of the day.
Batching is a productivity technique that involves grouping similar tasks together and doing them in a single block of time.
Megabatching is like batching on steroids. This usually involves batching tasks over a day or even several days.
For example, you might decided to record a whole season of podcast content over a few days. Otherwise, recording an episode that could have taken an hour or two ends up taking the whole day.
That’s because our minds have to switch into focus to get started. In this case, we need to get “podcast ready”. After recording, it will likely also take some time to unwind and tackle another type of task.
No matter who you are, you can try to take a similar approach by batching all your meetings into two days a week. For example you might reserve Mondays for internal team meetings and Fridays to meet external clients and vendors.
That leaves three days of your week to focus on the tasks that matter most to you and your development!
So how do you create an ideal work week?
1. Start with Current Tasks & Projects
The first step to an Ideal Week is getting to grips with your current tasks. We can do this with a simple brain dump. Grab a piece of paper and outline all your current tasks and projects on a piece of paper. You should then have a clear overview of your current responsibilities.
Once you have a list of all your tasks, ask yourself which are your priorities. We want to build an Ideal Week around our most important actions. Remember to use the Eisenhower matrix if it helps! Number your tasks by priority and make sure to find time for your most important tasks.
Hold onto this page! We’ll start organising current actions into our Ideal Week in step 4.
2. List your Goals
After you’ve written down all your current tasks and projects, move onto your goals. The idea is to start step 1 with an overview of all our responsibilities in our current role. Then, we can move onto the actions that help us develop and reach our goals.
Remember that goals are great, but we need systems to achieve our goals. An effective Ideal Week is one of the best systems you can get. By putting our goals on paper, we can plan our intentions into the Ideal Week.
Thomas Edison followed this approach. His goal was to create a major invention every six months and a minor invention every ten days. Edison made a name for himself by being an intentional inventor.
For now, just list your most important goals. We will manage their required actions along with current tasks and routines in step 4.
3. List your Routines
Once you’ve listed your current tasks, projects and goals, note down all your current routines. Before we can move onto actually scheduling our week, we need to list all the ways we currently spend our time. Your routines might include exercise, grocery shopping or writing.
Social media is another habit where most of us probably spend a little too much time. Write that down as well and set a time limit for it. Our Ideal Week should reflect the things we need to do as much as the things we need to not do.
Now we can start planning our Ideal Week around all our current actions, goals and routines.
4. Set a Theme for Each Day
For this step, you may want to start creating the schedule of your Ideal Week. So start by listing out the days of the week in a classic calendar view.
Now it’s time to assign each day on your calendar a theme. We’ll use these themes to group our tasks, projects, goals and routines.
Jack Dorsey uses this very method to run two companies.
All my days are themed. Monday is management. At Square we have a directional meeting, at Twitter we have our opcomm [operating committee] meeting. Tuesday is product, engineering, and design. Wednesday is marketing, growth, and communications. Thursday is partnership and developers. Friday is company and culture. It works in 24-hour blocks. On days beginning with T, I start at Twitter in the morning, then go to Square in the afternoon. Sundays are for strategy, and I do a lot of job interviews. Saturday is a day off. – Jack Dorsey
Setting a theme for each day of the week is a powerful tool to reduce attention residue and improve productivity.
How to Set a Theme For Your Weekdays?
At this point, you may be staring at a blank weekly calendar not quite sure what your themes should be. Really, there’s no wrong answer here. After all, it’s going to be personal to your work and the way you work, and there will always be room for improvement.
You should start by getting inspiration from the tasks, habits and routines from the first 3 steps. Group tasks together if they serve a similar purpose or require the same kind of mental or physical energy.
Some common themes might include:
- Writing
- Auditing
- Process improvement
- Admin
- Meetings
- Creative work
At the end of the day, your ideal themes will come down to your current roles, responsibilities and routines, as well as the goals you’re working towards.
Ideally you’ll have between 5 and 15 themes, which equals a comfortable week of work and one rest day. You probably won’t want to apply more than three themes to a day, because it can get overwhelming quickly. But if it works for you, go for it.
Now with your themes, list out your most important tasks for that day. Shade your highest priority tasks a specific colour. Then, list your other tasks for each day, and shade them another colour.
Your tasks should fit neatly within your themed days as long as your roles and responsibilities remain unchanged. If you notice that tasks start appearing outside these themes, you may want to go back to the drawing board.
As our responsibilities change over time, so too should our daily themes and Ideal Week. That’s why a regular review and optimisation can be so useful. This might fit in well as an additional component of your weekly review.
Planning Front Stage & Back Stage Days
Michael Hyatt recommends planning our Ideal Week by grouping each day as either a “front stage” or a “back stage” day.
Back stage work is any activity that prepares us for the actual job we were hired to do. This might include sending email, learning new skills, arranging meetings and doing research, among other activities.
Front stage refers to the actual job we were hired to do. This will change depending on your profession. For example, as a public speaker, Hyatt’s front stage activities include speaking at conferences, creating new video content and hosting clients.
He makes a point in scheduling his front stage days from Tuesday to Thursday and reserves Mondays & Fridays for email, arranging conferences and other backstage tasks.
You may think it sounds easy to schedule your days like this when you’re your own boss. In that case, you and I are probably in the same boat. The main obstacle for my front stage work is the number of meetings I need to attend each week.
My strategy is to batch whatever I can. If I have a free afternoon, I like to log off the IM to focus on a project I can make substantial progress with in a few hours. On the flip side, I try to book as many meetings as I can in a row. I feel there’s less wasted time when you know the meeting can’t go over time, because you need to jump onto another after the allotted time.
Try to plan your week by dividing days (or at least half-days) between front stage and back stage tasks. You’ll need at least one to two front stage days per week to get work done.
Having this “Ideal Week” in mind will help guide you as you plan your day.
5. Optimise your week
Now that you have your whole Ideal Week planned out, it’s time to optimise. Remember we’re trying to plan our Ideal Week, so it will probably require a few tweaks.
The best approach to optimisation is long-term. Stick with the habit of following an Ideal Week, take notes whenever you notice improvement opportunities and you can make small changes over time.
We can also take inspiration from our current daily plans to improve our Ideal Week.
As you get used to the Ideal Week, you’ll get better at understanding what “ideal” really means to you. And the longer you stick with it, the more benefits you’ll reap.
So How Do We Stick to our Weekly Plan?
If you’re used to working on whatever comes up in the spur of the moment, following an Ideal Week may be a foreign concept to you.
Once you’ve themed your weekdays and followed a weekly outline, it can still be difficult to implement. It’s a new habit after all, so it can easily slip under the rug. That’s why we need to treat it like any other habit.
The Ideal Week Habit
When we’ve consistently checked in with our Ideal Week for 2 months, we will have successfully built a new habit. The biggest hurdle to implementing our Ideal Week is making it 2 months with the new habit. Luckily, we know exactly how to build new habits.
James Clear offers four rules for building better habits in his book, Atomic Habits.
- Make it obvious
- Make it attractive
- Make it easy
- Make it satisfying
Clear argues that motivation is overrated and that our environment and natural reward systems play a larger part than we might realise.
For example, we can make our Ideal Week obvious by printing out our daily themes and pinning it to our wall or drawing our schedule in our Bullet Journal.
Make the Ideal Week habit attractive by including one thing in your schedule per day that you really look forward to. Make it easy to look over your Ideal Week each morning and complete the planned actions throughout the day.
The most satisfying feeling is when you feel you’re making progress. That’s why reflecting at the end of a successful week can be a valuable part of your Ideal Week. You’ll fortify the habit by listing out all the progress you’ve made that week with your goals and responsibilities. You can also reflect on how much more energy you have without the attention residue from constantly switching tasks.
Building new habits really comes down to the four habits above. By following these guidelines, we increase our likelihood of implementing a new habit with simple tweaks to our environment and mindset.
Use the habit stacking cheat sheet for more tips on simplifying the habit.
Share Your Ideal Week with Others
Once you have your Ideal Week, share it with your team and other people in your life. They can help hold you accountable.
They may even be encouraged to create their own Ideal Week after noticing how productive you’ve become!
Living Your Ideal Week
While you should try to follow your Ideal Week as often as you can, you don’t want to ruin your life by following your plan! Make sure you have enough time in your plan to rest and relaxation. Remember, we benefit from effective rejuvenation!
Make it work for you, not the other way around. At the end of the day, you’re in charge of your life!
There’s always room to optimise and improve your Ideal Week, and some days we should just feel free to take a break. We’re only human after all.
Your Ideal Week in a Nutshell
The Ideal Week productivity technique helps us design our lives around our current responsibilities and greater goals. When we know what’s important and have a plan to work towards it, our goals become one step closer to achieve.
By batching our work into daily themes, we can avoid attention residue altogether. This can make it feel like we’re achieving a new level of productivity.
Your biggest problem might be keeping up the habit, but luckily we have four rules to help implement any new habit. We can also ask friends and colleagues to hold us accountable so we actually stick to the plan.
Ultimately, the purpose of our Ideal Week is to manage our current tasks and work systematically towards our goals.
Reach a new level of productivity with the Ideal Week and Mind & Practice today.