Hello, and welcome to episode 348 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

What would a perfect day look like for you? I’m not talking about drinking sangria in a park, feeding animals in the zoo, and later, a movie.

I’m talking about how a typical day would go.

What time would you like to wake up?
What would you enjoy doing for the first hour of your day?
What would you like to do in the evenings?
And what time would you like to go to bed?

These questions are all part of what I call designing your perfect week. It’s an exercise that helps you to bring some structure into your day. Once implemented, this reduces the number of decisions you need to make each day and makes planning less demanding and a lot faster.

Not taking control of your calendar means others will take control of it. If not your boss or customers, it’ll be your family and friends. This leaves you being pushed and pulled all over the place.

When you wake up in the morning, you have no idea what will happen or where you will end up. More dangerously, you will have no idea whether you can get your work done, and inevitably, you’ll find yourself with huge backlogs and a lot of accumulated stress.

Not a great place to be if you want to be better organised and more productive.

So, let me show you how you can regain control of your calendar and start putting what you want first.

This means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Megan. Megan asks, hi Carl, I’ve tried designing a “perfect” week but found I don’t have enough time to do everything I need to do. Do you have any tips to fit everything in?

Hi Megan, thank you for your question.

That you have discovered you don’t have enough time for everything you want to do is part of why I recommend people do the Perfect Week calendar exercise. The purpose is to help you see what you do and don’t have time for.

But first, how do you set up the Perfect Week calendar?

First, open up your calendar—it doesn’t matter whether it’s a Google, Outlook or Apple Calendar. What you are going to do is create a new calendar and call it “Perfect Week”.

I recommend you do this on a larger screen. It is possible to do it on a phone, but you won’t see the bigger picture of the week. A laptop or tablet works better when you do this.

Now, begin with your personal life. How much sleep do you want? What time will you go to bed? Block those times in first. For instance, if, in your perfect world, you go to bed at 11:00 pm and want seven hours of sleep, then you would block 11:00 pm to 6:30 am. (Allow yourself thirty minutes to fall asleep).

Now, how long do you want for your morning routine? Perhaps you want the first hour of your day dedicated to you. To exercise, read, plan, meditate and/or write a journal. All you need to do in your perfect week calendar is block the time you want for these activities on your calendar. Call it your Morning routine time. (The details of what you do in that time can be added as a checklist in your notes later.)

Next look at the evening. What would you like to do?

Be careful here; you may wish to block time out for family and friends. When you do this, you are involving other people, and they will have a different agenda to you.

You could, for instance, protect 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm for family time, but be flexible. Your teenage daughter will unlikely want to spend much time with you. Your partner, on the other hand, may wish you to sit with them and talk or watch their favourite TV show.

Consider “family time” as being flexible. If no one wants to spend time with you, be available. Perhaps you could read in the same room as your family or do some chores around the house.

Next, what would you like to do later in the evening before you go to bed? Put that on your calendar.

Many of my clients enjoy playing a musical instrument, others use that time for self-study and some go out for an evening walk. Whatever you want to do, put it on your calendar.

Now, your work.

A couple of questions you can ask here are: how much time do you need to do focused work? Work that if you are consistent with will prevent backlogs and ensure you meet your deadlines.

And how much time will you allow per week for meetings?

Limiting your available meeting time is a great way to control time.

Imagine you work a forty-hour week and you want three hours a day for focused work; that would leave you with twenty-five hours each week for everything else.

If you were to limit the time you were available for meetings to fifteen hours a week, that would leave you with ten hours for all the unexpected demands that inevitably pop up. Would that be sufficient time?

Play around with these numbers and see if you can find a happy balance.

With the meeting limit once you have filled the limit for that week, you only offer meeting times for the following week.

As this is your perfect week, you can fix times when you are available and when you are not.

Once you have completed your perfect week, does that look like a week you would be happy living?

One adjustment I made to mine was on a Monday. My calls begin early—well, early for me—meaning I need to wake up at 6:15. That’s much earlier than usual. I discovered I was not able to work effectively after around 11:00 am. So, I added a ninety-minute nap window from 11:00 am. That worked perfectly for me.

Now, once you have created your perfect week, turn on your other calendars. Where do things align? You will probably find some activities already aligned, but some will be wildly out

Your mission now—should you choose to accept it—is to align your real calendar with your perfect week one.

This mission will not happen instantly; aligning things may take several months, but it gives you a purpose and goal.

What happens if, after doing this exercise, you discover there are not enough hours in the week to do everything you want to do?

Most people find this after completing this exercise.

It is worth remembering you do not have to do everything all at once.

You could take a course on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and go to your Pilates class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings. Perhaps you could do your weekly planning on a Saturday morning instead of a Sunday evening.

This is about completing a puzzle. How do you fit everything into your 168 hours a week?

You can also consider making things seasonal. In the winter months, you do one activity, and in the summer, you do another type of activity. After all, the weather is generally nicer in the summer, and the days are longer.

You may even wish to use the Spring as the cleaning-up season. I do.

Designing the perfect week calendar is not about locking you into a strict structure every week. Its purpose is to help you become realistic about what you can and cannot do each day. It’s from here that you can design the kind of life you want to live.

Over the five or six years since I first did the Perfect Week exercise, I have modified it many times. For example, when I did it the first time, I had this rather ambitious idea: I would go to bed at 11:00 pm and wake up at 6:00.

That didn’t last very long. Many of my coaching calls happen late at night, and I often don’t finish until after midnight. Now, I go to bed at 1:30 am and wake up at 8:30 am (except for Mondays). That has worked for me for over a year now.

I’ve also learned that while I’ve always believed that I am a night owl, I am more focused and creative in the mornings. This led to me protecting 9:30 to 11:30 am five days a week for my focused work.

One thing you don’t want to do, Megan, is to try and squeeze everything in. That will leave you feeling exhausted. Always remember you are a living, breathing human being, not a machine.

You need breaks, you do need to stop and enjoy nature and the environment you live in. It gives your mind a rest, and it elevates your creativity and fulfilment by giving you something different to look at other than a screen.

While I am very structured, I like it that way—I still keep my afternoons free for activities I want to do in the moment. Taking my dog, Louis for his walk, doing the grocery shopping and reading, for example. Whatever needs my attention, the afternoons are when I can do it.

Learning those things was a result of doing the Perfect Week exercise.

David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, often says, “You can do anything, but you cannot do everything”, and I’ve found that’s true. That means the question becomes, what will you do?

I would also say that the end of the year is a perfect time to do this exercise. The start of a new year gives you a motivation to try things and develop the kind of week you want to live.

Thank you, Megan, for your question and thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.

Carl Pullein

Yes, You Can Design A Perfect Week.

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Yes, You Can Design A Perfect Week.

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How to Plan Your Week in 45 Minutes or Less.

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