1: This week, we’ve been exploring Dan Martell‘s concept of the “Perfect Week,” where we regain complete control of our day by planning our upcoming week.
We create a templatized weekly plan that allows us to utilize every minute of our days effectively. We batch similar tasks together into time blocks. We commit to starting and ending meetings and activities on time. We eliminate buffer time where there are gaps between meetings.
“With a proactive, planned week,” Dan writes in his book Buy Back Your Time, “we will get far more done, and the most important tasks will always get done because they’re in the calendar. . . We’ll know what we must say ‘no’ to in order to say ‘yes’ to something else.”
But doesn’t that sound boring? Too structured? Don’t we want to remain open so we can add some spice into our lives?
“Sometimes when I talk about the Perfect Week,” Dan shares, “a creative soul begins to worry that their life is going to get too planned. They feel like all this is going to stifle their creative energy.”
Exactly!
Not so fast. “I have a secret for you,” he notes: “When we plan, we have more time for more spice, more fun, and far more creativity.”
When we plan our perfect week, we can block out dedicated times for creativity each day.
“Before I had children,” Dan writes, “I did my most creative work late into the evening, and I planned for it. After my wife gave birth to two human alarm clocks (my two wild and fun boys), I’ve had to change my schedule around. Now, I block off a few hours in the morning for my most creative work. Then, at lunchtime, I do a workout, which helps reset my energy and refocus. I do most of my face-to-face meetings, Zoom calls, and one-on-ones in the second half of my day. Again, most of these are batched to optimize.
“By planning my week,” he observes, “I’m not answering emails during my creative time, and I’m not thinking about a podcast interview when I’m conducting my one-on-ones. Instead, I’m able to take the demands of others and route them on my calendar according to preplanned blocks.
“This optimizes not just my time, but everyone else’s. I produce better work creatively, I’m fully present during meetings, and any needed technological tools are more readily available. Plus, since I don’t have thirty minutes of white space here and there, I’m getting far more done throughout the day, letting me come home earlier while feeling great about my productivity.”
2: Studies of workplace effectiveness show that people are wasting, on average, about 22 hours a week at work.
“They’re performing tasks others could have done for them, escaping to social media, sitting in inefficient meetings, etc.,” Dan writes. “The Perfect Week will help remove the time between tasks. But ultimately, I’m not trying to save you thirty minutes a day from browsing your favorite YouTube channel. That won’t kill you.
“But here’s what will kill you,” he adds, “a constant nagging frustration of lost productivity.
“Planning out our week, while a seemingly small task, will allow us to make space for the work we want and need to get done. Over time, we’ll be buying back bits here and there, all of which can get redeposited into production. . .
“How much energy and time could you buy back, simply by grouping similar tasks together?
“What if all our sales calls were scheduled only on certain days of the week so we could mentally prepare for them?”
3: So how do we engineer our “Perfect Week”? Dan provides several recommendations.
Tip #1: Be willing to iterate. “Having a preplanned weekly calendar is a must, but a Perfect Week is a bit of a misnomer,” he notes. When we begin the process of planning our perfect week, we’ll inevitably make some mistakes. That’s part of the process.
“Likely, it won’t work well the first week or so,” Dan predicts, “but if we iterate on it, it should only take about two or three weeks before we start seeing massive results. I still iterate on mine, even years later.”
Tip #2: Batch work. “Certain tasks require a certain headspace,” he explains. “Every time we switch between tasks, time drops in between. We can batch tasks into categories, enabling us to stay focused and avoiding changing location or environments. Remember, batching can be especially helpful if we want to compartmentalize dreaded but necessary tasks that we can’t off-load right now.”
Tip #3: Important work goes first. “The key is not to prioritize your schedule, but to schedule your priorities,” Stephen Covey once wrote.
When planning our week, we start with the most important tasks first. “I’m talking about every important activity, whether professional or personal: workouts, meetings, time with your spouse, important project work. Put it all in,” Dan suggests. “If we templatize a week without the most important people, dates, and events on our calendars, we’re likely to achieve exactly what’s on our calendar and nothing else. When we put everything in, we get another benefit of having a Perfect Week: we can also easily tell what we’ve been spending your time on.”
Once we have entered all the important activities, we then add everything else. Dan’s suggestion? “Put in all the tasks we need to perform, not just work-related activities. I include everything in my Perfect Week—lunch breaks, interviews, time for deep work, date night. By the end, my day looks stacked.”
Tip #4: It’s about energy, not just time. “The saved time is small potatoes compared with the energy saved,” Dan writes.
He shares the example of business coach Michael Hyatt “who utilized a Perfect Week approach to help him stop dreading meetings. As an introvert, face-to-face time can drain him rapidly, distracting him from other valuable work. However, as the CEO of Thomas Nelson, meetings were also an integral part of his job. He finally set up his weekly schedule so that he only took meetings on certain days of the week. He then informed his assistant that those days were the only times when meetings could occur. This allowed Michael to spend the other days in a clear headspace of creativity.”
Tip #5: Honor our Perfect Week. “Here’s the downside to the Perfect Week,” he shares: “with no buffer time between tasks, our days will be very stacked. If we mess up, even by a little, our whole day can get thrown out of whack. If we let meetings run over, or we spend more time on a sales call than we planned for, we’ll experience a cascading effect. So when we make a Perfect Week schedule, honor it.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: How would my energy, creativity, and sense of accomplishment change if I truly honored a “Perfect Week” designed around my priorities?
Action: Block time this week for my most important work and creative pursuits, and commit to following my plan—even if it means adjusting and iterating as I go.
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