Give each week a colour.

I learned this from Tom, a former colleague at NS Dutch Railways. He holds a picture of how his week should look, how he divides his time, including time with his family, and checks each week against that picture. Not just whether the work got done, but whether the week was the kind of week he wanted to have.

What struck me was how driven he was about it, and how aware he was of the quality of his weeks. Taking a moment to ask how your weeks are actually going, and what could be better, helps you sharpen them. And in time: after a few weeks, not after a few months.

How does it work?

1. Define your version of a good week. Write down what needs to be in it: the work that matters, time with your family, exercise, rest, or whatever you want to protect. Keep it realistic: a week you could actually live, not one in which nothing ever goes wrong.
2. Plan against that picture. Before the week starts, put the important commitments in your calendar. If the week is already impossible on paper, change something before you begin.
3. Live the week. Plans meet real life. The point is not to force every hour into place.
4. Give the whole week one colour. At the end of the week, compare what happened with the picture you started with. Use the same criteria each time.
5. Add one sentence. Note why you chose that colour. Enough to recognise the reason later. This does not need to become another journal.
6. Look along the row. Review several weeks together. If the same problem keeps coming back, choose one change for the next week.

What do the colours mean?

• Green: broadly on track. The important things had their place. A week does not have to be perfect to be green.
• Amber: some things slipped, but the week was still workable. Notice what got squeezed out.
• Red: the week derailed. Too much work, too little recovery, important commitments pushed aside again and again.

A productive week can still be red. Finishing everything for work does not make it a good week if it keeps costing you the things you wanted to protect.

What do you do with the row?

One red week can happen. Several red weeks in a row are a signal to change something: workload, planning, priorities, buffers, energy or commitments.

The sentence next to the colour helps you decide what. “No room between meetings” asks for a different change than “said yes to too much” or “family time became the buffer for unfinished work”.

Keep the change small and specific: leave a gap between appointments, move a deadline, drop a commitment, or protect an evening. Then see whether the next few weeks change colour.

This is not a score for how well you performed. It is a check on whether the way you organise your weeks is working.

Related: design your ideal week to make your picture of a good week explicit, and colour in your calendar to see where the hours in one week went.

Learned from Tom, a former colleague at NS Dutch Railways. First written in October 2026. The weeks in the drawing are invented.