Colour in your calendar.

How does it work?

Print your week, colour it in, and look at it honestly. A terrace on a Friday afternoon works as well as a desk.

1. Colour your week by kind of time. Pick a small set of colours that fits your life, such as client work, making, admin, family and sport, and mark every block. You will find five different ways to divide a week. The perfect one does not exist. What matters is one you keep using.
2. Count the hours per colour. Actually count them.
3. Put the numbers next to your three most important goals.
4. Pick one thing to drop next week, and one to protect.

What does it show you?

The totals tell you whether your time matched your priorities. The print tells you more: where the heat is.

Some days turn out to be one long string of meetings about the same thing. Some weeks turn out to belong almost entirely to one project or one client. You can find that in an hour tracker too, but on a printed week you see it in one glance, day by day.

How do I use it?

I keep an hour tracker, so I know the totals. I still do this regularly, usually on a Friday afternoon: I print the week, or a few weeks next to each other, and look at where the heat sits.

It is the fastest honest check I know on the question: did I spend this week on the right things?

Related: design your ideal week to know what you are comparing against, and give each week a colour to see the pattern over months.

My own Friday habit. First written in October 2026. The week in the drawing is invented.