Creating a calendar template for the week you actually want.

Like a lot of people, I struggle to find the time for projects outside of work. I don’t have any problem showing up to my day job, but when it comes to exercising, writing, or other things I want to be doing outside of work hours, there just never seems to be enough time in the week.

After too many months of workouts missed and slow responses to personal email, I finally decided to take some action and figure out how to claw back time for second-shift pastimes.

Taking inspiration from both a Salesforce training as well as an Ali Abdaal video (two sources you don’t often see in the same sentence), I decided to look at my calendar and do something about it: I created an Ideal Week.

Today, I’m going to walk you through the process of creating your own ‘ideal week’ and also share how it can help you actually make the time for these other commitments that you claim are important.

The Ideal Week

Not to be confused with a Perfect Week, an ‘Ideal Week’ is supposed to be a template for how you want a ‘typical’ week to look for you.

To get started, open up your calendar app of choice (I’ll be using Google Calendar) and hide all your existing calendars. We’re going to start with a clean slate.

Next up, create a new calendar that you’re going to use as your ‘ideal week’ template. While you’re at it, I recommend changing your calendar settings so that your weeks start on Monday. I found this process easier when my weekend days appear adjacent to each other.

Next, build the foundation of your perfect week: sleep. Ask yourself: realistically, how much sleep do you want to get each night?

Now, you might think, “11 hours a night sounds great!”, but keep in mind that this calendar needs to be achievable. There’s a difference between an Ideal Week in Candyland and an Ideal Week in the real world. Pick a workday sleep schedule that seems reasonable, but attainable, then make it a recurring event.

As an example, since I work Monday-Friday, I’ll assign the sleep schedule for Sunday -> Thursday nights. I typically stay up later on the weekends and also sleep in a bit more, so I’ll create recurring Sleep events for Friday and Saturday nights that go from 10 PM to 7 AM.

Now that we’ve gotten sleep taken care of, let’s move on to the other non-negotiable stuff in your calendar.

Do you have other weekly events that are more-or-less set in stone, where you don’t have much flexibility? Maybe you drive your daughter to krav magav class on Thursday nights or maybe you have a family dinner time that’s sacrosanct.

While you’re add it, add your day job to your calendar too, including commuting time. If you need to be at work by 8 AM but there’s a 45 minute train ride to get there, be sure to set aside time for both in your ‘ideal week’ calendar.

Also include work-related recurring events like 1:1 meetings or conference calls. Maybe, someday, you won’t be doing as many of these, but for today, we’re accepting our lives as they currently are. If you know that you absolutely need to attend that weekly check-in with your boss next week, whether you want to or not, add it to the template calendar.

As you’re adding new events, by the way, be sure to create them all as weekly recurring events. You should be able to pull up this ‘template calendar’ on any week in the future and it should look the same as at does right now.

We’ve got our sleep, we’ve got our fixed events. Now, let’s start adding in more fun stuff. Maybe you practice the viola, maybe you want to do more watercoloring, maybe you want to show up at CrossFit more regularly, maybe you want to set aside time to spend with your significant other. When, realistically, will it happen?

Don’t treat this ‘ideal week’ schedule like a Sudoku puzzle; the goal isn’t to fill in every last blank space. Instead, we’re trying to generate a rough plan of how you think a ‘typical’ week could look, and that includes chunks of unstructured time. Personally, I try to keep my “ideal weekends” almost entirely empty, except for a writing block and a workout block.

Three Benefits of an Ideal Week Template

OK, we’ve created an ideal week. So what? What is this actually good for?

First of all, I really like going through this exercise (even if you never look at it again) because it forces you to ground-truth your dreams.

It’s great to have big ambitions for your blog or your band or your biceps, but all these side projects take time. The Ideal Week acts like a tough life coach: “You say you want to step up your game with your klezmer band, but when, exactly, are you going to have extra practices?”

Second, by putting your Ideal Week in a separate calendar alongside your primary calendar, it makes it easy to compare: how am I actually spending my time vs. how do I want to be spending my time?

In Abdall’s video, he suggests color-coding the different types of events on your “ideal week calendar”; I tried this and I actually don’t recommend it.

I found that it’s actually way easier to compare your Ideal Week to your actual calendar if the Ideal Week events are all the same color, a color that contrasts with your other calendars.

Now, is your actual week calendar going to ever match your Ideal Week? No, almost certainly not. But it’s still useful to compare the two because it helps you realize: “Oh, the dinner we’re going to on Wednesday will conflict with my normal workout time. If I still want to do the workout, it needs to go somewhere else.”

Third, I think the ‘Ideal Week’ puts some healthy guardrails up against over-committing yourself. It’s so easy, too easy sometimes, to commit to a more aggressive blog posting schedule or sign your kid up for lacrosse. The Ideal Week acts a check against overfilling the box that represents your available time.

You want to add something else to the glass? “Sure,” says the Ideal Week, “But you’ll need to find something to take out of the box to find space for that weekly ukulele lesson.”

One Last Disclaimer

This may be obvious to many, but I still feel I need to include this clarification: I don’t actually think you should schedule ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING on your real, actual, non-Ideal Week calendar.

The Ideal Week is only an ideal for how you spend your time, not how you schedule it. If your Ideal Week has you going kayaking one evening per week, you probably don’t deeply care if you get out on the lake at 6 PM or 7 PM, or which day of the week it actually happens; you just want it to happen.

I still use my Ideal Week to try and make sure that I’m making time for the things I claim are important, but I’m not stressing about trying to make my real like match the template exactly.

How (and Why) to Craft Your Ideal Week was originally published in Better Programming on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.