ACTIVITY: Your Ideal Week
Here is an approach which will
- help to ensure that you spend your time where it needs to be spent, particularly for ‘important but not urgent’ activities
- emphasise time as a finite resource. We have financial budgets, why not time budgets?
- make scheduling easier
- Make a list of the categories of activities that you need and want to do in your life. (If you are using an action map, then this will be a simple task.) Your list may include:
- production – whatever it is that generates your income. For an author, writing, a programmer, coding … You may wish to break this down into different types of production: writing: research, creation, editing
- marketing – to get production work
- meetings
- answering emails
- socialising and family
- exercise
- personal growth – Developing Happy Atom Program
- planning and reviewing
- playing guitar
- Decide on how much time you wish to spend on each of these activities in an ideal week
- Consider the most appropriate times for each activity, taking into account your likely energy levels, access to resources and people etc
- Allocate each of the activities to blocks of time on a Week Template.
Here is an example using an Excel spreadsheet.
[Note: the blocks are for illustration; I am not recommending this as an example week!]
Click here to download a blank version of this template.
Clearly there will be variations and it will be a rare week when you follow your template completely. But knowing your ideal structure increases your flexibility.
There may be specific activities that only happen at the beginning or end of a month or if your work is project-driven there may be different stages in a project. If this is the nature of your work, then you may consider creating multiple templates to reflect different weeks in the month or project stages.