Organisation begets organisation

Here’s the thing about getting organised. Getting started is tricky. It’s very easy to tell yourself I’ll start tomorrow. Chances are that you’ll say that same thing tomorrow. You might even go so far as to say I’m not an organised person, as if it’s some immutable fact of life. Once you get started, you’ll find you have a little more margin. This time on the edges is crucial. You get slightly less stressed; you make slightly better decisions as a result. From there, you can get a little more organised. That buys you a little more time. This isn’t more time for emails or Instagram or telly. This is time for you.

A lot of these productivity hacks don’t really work. Or at least, they don’t work for me. It’s about finding the right hacks to fit your lifestyle and your brain and your habits. I stumbled upon One Simple Trick recently that has been working very well for me. Your mileage may vary, but I think it’s worth giving it a go. The upfront time investment is small, maybe an hour. It begins to pay off almost immediately. It’s called the Ideal Week.

How to get started

1. Start with a blank calendar

The premise is simple. You block out your whole calendar for the week - all 7 days, not just working hours. This way you can visualise your work-life balance and factor in activities that can help. For simplicity, don’t put in anything shorter than half an hour. You might want to create a new calendar for this. It doesn’t have to be on your usual calendar - a piece of paper or a spreadsheet is fine too.

2. Plot the hard landscape

Start with the hard landscape, the things you consistently have to do. Eating and meetings, that sort of thing. Put in a morning routine and a bedtime routine. I give myself a 90-minute morning routine, 30 minutes for a shutdown ritual at the end of the working day and an hour before sleep to wind down.

At this point, you probably have a few big chunks of time and a few small chunks scattered throughout the week. There might be some days where you can already see there are no big chunks. That’s OK. Even though this is your ideal week, it still needs to be grounded in reality. As much as you might want a 4-hour block of “beach” every afternoon, that won’t help you get more organised.

3. Protect your key activities

Next, think of three areas that you really want to focus on. Some of this might be professional, but some of it might also be focused on health or family or creativity. Make sure you carve out at least one big chunk for activities supporting each of those important areas. For me, that means a long slot on Tuesday afternoon for coding, plus a long slot of Wednesday afternoon for exercise and for socialising on Friday evenings. Your calendar probably looks quite full at this point, with some smaller gaps of 30 minutes or 1 hour.

4. Plug the gaps

Now you tackle the smaller slots. What are things that you really should be doing, that can also fit in smaller slots? Intense periods of deep work like code or prepare for weekly presentation can’t fit in these small slots, so it’s not worth trying. The same goes for hobbies - if the activity takes a while to get going, like painting or cycling, then it’s probably not a good candidate for a small slot.

You could use small slots to catch up on some reading or tidy one room in the house or take care of emails. Every activity you’re able to put into the small slots means that you’re less likely to compromise on your big slots. Those three or four long slots for your most valuable activities each week are super important. Your ideal week will protect those long slots.

4. Plug ALL the gaps

Keep going until your calendar is completely full from morning til night. It’s OK to have a few slots for misc computer or slow coffee break. If you’re not used to time blocking, it can seem intimidating to have a wall of non-stop activity.

Don’t panic. Bear in mind that this is your ideal week, not your typical week. On any given day there may be compromises. Perhaps someone chucks in a last minute meeting. Perhaps your legs are sore and you can’t go on that run. Perhaps it’s raining outside and you decide to stay in and watch a movie instead of going out for dinner. All of that’s OK. You still have the freedom to override any block.

Benefits

What the ideal week offers is sensible defaults. It’s a template, a suggestion for what your day could look like. When you come to plan out your day, you can take a look at your ideal day and factor that into decisions along with the information that you have available at the time.

You’ll notice that you probably don’t have many slots carved out for doomscroll through the news or watch whatever Netflix's algorithm recommends for me. The things you want to be doing are more active, more engaging. The little nudge to get started may be all you need. When the evening arrives and you’re ready to switch off your decision-making brain, that’s fine. You’ve already decided. You’ve committed to half an hour of read psychology book or draw or study film history. It would take more executive brainpower to say “No, I really want to watch Hack My Home” than it would to go ahead and get started on those richer activities.

Iterate, iterate, iterate

Over time your ideal week will change. Maybe you want to carve out blocks to train for a marathon. Maybe you need to spend more time with family during a difficult period. Being able to see a whole week allows you to set some balance in a way that you don’t get in a daily plan. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do every thing every day. The ideal week lets you get comfortable with what you’re not doing. You can see that by pushing through lots of shallow work on some days, you are protecting time for deep work on other days.

If you find yourself deviating hugely from the ideal week on a regular basis, it might be time to tweak things. Ideal does not mean unrealistic. Maybe you noticed that those unpredictable last minute meetings keep happening on a Wednesday straight after the weekly Heads of Department meeting. That might be a sign that you’re boss is not that organised, or not that respectful of your time. You have a choice to make. Either you carve out that time every week for the meeting that may or may not happen, or convince your boss to change their behaviour. It’s up to you. As with any good system, the ideal week supports reflection and iteration.

I’ve been doing this for a couple of weeks and it’s been working great. I’ve made a lot of progress, without feeling overworked. The shape of my ideal week will change substantially once I start my new job, but the guiding principle is the same. You can be more in control of your time than perhaps you think. Yes, your to-do list is longer than you will ever manage to get through, and yes, sometimes you just want to curl up on the sofa and switch off completely. But in the long run, by carving out these blocks you are setting yourself up to make steady progress on the projects and areas that matter most to you.