Design your ideal week.

Before you rearrange another meeting, try designing the week you would actually like to live. Not a perfect week. A workable one, with room for the things that matter to you.

How does it work?

Use paper, or a separate calendar you can switch on and off.

1. List what you want in your week. Work, rest, exercise, family, friends, time to make something, time to do nothing. Start with what matters, not just what already has an appointment.
2. Choose your priorities. Everything on the list may be worthwhile. It may not all fit. Decide what you want to protect and what can be less frequent or smaller.
3. Build a realistic week. Put the fixed commitments in first, then make room for your priorities. Include travel, meals, admin and gaps. Do not solve it by pretending you need less sleep or that every meeting ends on time.
4. Keep it separate from your real calendar. This is a reference picture, not a second set of appointments. On paper, keep the two weeks next to each other. Digitally, use a separate calendar.
5. Compare the two. What is missing? What takes up more space than you want? Which gaps are within your control, and which need a conversation with someone else?
6. Move one thing closer. Protect a block, remove a recurring meeting, free up an evening, or cut back an unrealistic commitment. Start with a change you can actually make.
7. Review and adjust. After living with the change, compare again. Move your real week closer to the picture, or change the picture if it does not fit your life.

How did I use it?

After my separation it became clear that the kids would be with me a third of the time, from Wednesday to Sunday. So I sat down and looked at my life as a two-week sprint, in which certain things simply have to happen.

When do the groceries get delivered? When does the cleaner come? When do the plants get water? When do I rest, and when do I really have time for myself? And a question I worked on quite deliberately: how do I make my weekends feel longer?

Asking that question at all already helps. It comes back in my quarterly reviews too. One of the answers we found: do something on Friday evening. Go out, have a game night, anything active, and the weekend feels longer. A film night usually does not.

Where is the useful part?

The ideal week is not the result. The difference between that week and your actual week is where the exercise becomes useful.

“I want more time to think” is easy to agree with. Seeing that your calendar has no uninterrupted block makes the problem concrete. So does noticing that exercise only fits if nothing runs late, or that every evening has quietly become available for work.

Do not try to fix every gap at once. Pick one that matters and decide what has to move to make room for it. Adding a priority without removing anything is usually just adding pressure.

What if a week looks nothing like it?

Some weeks will: travel, deadlines, illness, school holidays. That does not make the exercise pointless. It gives you something to return to when the exception has passed.

And if your ideal week only works under ideal conditions, it needs more room. Leave space for life to happen.

Next: colour in your calendar to see where last week went, and give each week a colour to see the pattern over time.

An exercise that was passed on to me; I don’t know who first came up with it. I made my own version after my separation. First written in October 2026. The weeks in the drawing are invented.