The Ideal Week

Description

How to Design Your Ideal Week:

1. Know where you need to be

The first step in creating your ideal week is knowing where you need to be during the week. Whether that’s somewhere out of your house, in your home office, schooling with the kids. Knowing where you are needed is crucial to begin to formulate a plan of what will happen when.

Make a list of the different roles you have (for work, school or in your home) and where you’ll need to be in each of those roles.

2. Know what you need to be doing in your ideal week

The next step in creating your ideal week is getting a clear picture of the tasks and activities you need to do. Note that this starts with things on a need to basis! Activities that move you closer to your goals and dreams are actions that you need to do. Also, your self-care and rejuvenation is a priority and comes under the need to category.

Conversely, tasks that other people put on your schedule that you don’t want to do, I don’t consider to be a need – no matter how much the other person does!

When it comes to other people’s desires on your time, ask yourself whether it fits in with your values, goals and own desires. For example, does it agree with your core values about yourself or your view of the world? Does it align with your goals or desires? And ask whether you can commit to it without detriment to your other roles and responsibilities.

Once you know the activities you need to do, you can think about what activities you want to do. Define the ‘wants’ however you like. These are essentially the non-essentials. The activities that would make a great addition to your ideal week, but that, if you couldn’t get to them on a given week, you would still have a good week.

3. Know how long your activities will take

When you’ve got your list of activities, next you’ll need to estimate how long these activities take. If this is fairly new to you, I’d recommend that you overestimate the amount of time things take (and especially if you have kids!).

These estimations are just that – pure guesses. Chances are you won’t be spot on with everything and you’ll need to refine your timings as you begin going through the week.

But once you have rough timings for everything, you’ll be in a better position to know how much time you have in the day for everything.

Putting it together

Use this free printable to help you draw up your own ideal week!

I highly suggest that you schedule some buffer time into your ideal week every day. This is because life happens. Having some buffer space each day to take some of the blow from the unexpected will give you some breathing room to know that when unforeseen things happen, all is not lost.