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LM: #264: The Platonic week
One of the most powerful departures you can make from traditional time management is to quit your daily routine, and start a weekly routine.
With a weekly routine, you follow your energy fluctuations to be more focused in the moment. The length of the cycle also creates a sense of calm urgency that snuffs out “do it tomorrow” thinking that lets procrastination run wild.
But developing a whole weekly routine sounds daunting. How can you possibly have a predictable week when so many things change week to week?
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That’s why I like to start with an “ideal week.” If I could predict how I’d use my energy throughout the week to accomplish what I want, what would that look like?
Here’s my latest iteration:
Notice my ideal week incorporates Prefrontal Mondays that keep me in the “Prioritize” mental state I talked about in Mind Management, Not Time Management. But as the week wears on, I start developing and preparing to ship ideas with the Explore, Generate, and Polish mental states.
With every productivity system, there’s the Platonic ideal in the mind, then the Heraclitian reality of day-to-day. I rarely live an ideal week, but it’s there as a template to help me make decisions about how to best arrange the non-negotiables in my schedule.
And if I’m far from my ideal week several weeks in a row, maybe it’s time to revise my ideal week.
Book: Walden and Civil Disobedience (Amazon) contains Thoreau’s two most-famous works.
Cool: Letterboxd is like a Goodreads for movies.
Best,
David
