How Do You Plan Your Weeks?

This essay originally appeared in the Monday morning newsletter on 4/18/22.

Do you typically plan out your weeks?

I’ve been thinking about planning recently because I 1) started using a new planner for Q2 and 2) finished Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.

I really liked Four Thousand Weeks. It was proactive and fresh. The concept of the book (4,000 weeks = how many weeks you live if you live to age 80) is that life is finite… so much more finite than we think. We can’t do everything – or even close. Accepting that and applying our limited time supply to things that matter to us is the best we can do.

Burkeman writes about the “paradox of limitation” saying, “the more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty and frustrating life gets…

But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead – and work with them rather than against them – the more productive, meaningful and joyful life becomes.”

I have two feelings that I oscillate between when it comes to planning a week:
The first is partial to the statement above – I think I should plan less and live in the moment more. The second is the opposite: I know that, at least for me, feeling in control, and specifically in control of my time, makes me feel happier and more relaxed. When I plan, I feel like I’m choosing how I want to spend my time, proactively, rather than allowing the week to pass me by and happen to me.

I know there’s a happy medium in here somewhere, and after reading Four Thousand Weeks, I have some new mindsets and ideas I’m excited to put into action.

My favorite approach to planning in general comes from author Laura Vanderkam. In one of her books – Off the Clock: How to Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done – she writes about how she plans her weeks on Friday afternoons, a time when it’s hard to find the motivation to start a new work project, but a time she can almost always repurpose to thinking about what her future self should be doing.

On these Friday afternoons, she takes a few minutes to reference her calendar and think about what’s happening next week. Then, she makes a three-category priority list of things she would most like to accomplish over the next week in the areas of career, relationships, and self.

It’s nothing too intense – the categories might contain 2-3 things each – but what I think makes this approach really special is the “self” category.

It wasn’t too long after reading this that I was trying to make my own priority list for the week. I quickly filled out the career section based on what I knew I needed to do for work and jotted down a birthday dinner and friend I wanted to call in the relationship section. But then I came up blank for anything constituting “self.”

It wasn’t like it was a bad or unreasonably busy season – it was going to be a normal, run-of-the-mill week. But because of this practice, I identified that there weren’t any inherent “just for me” things planned.

So, I added some to the list. I picked up flowers while grocery shopping. I made time to read one morning and run another before work. I got a pedicure over the weekend.

To me, that right there is the magic of planning: a week that would’ve been just fine/average was transformed by taking time to think about how I wanted to spend time. I went from getting through the week to enjoying the week.

It doesn’t mean every day was perfect or unfolded as anticipated, but despite the week’s curveballs and stressors, I remembered those little moments I did for myself and the progress made on other priorities. Thinking back on the week as a whole, I felt satisfied, and even a little balanced, striking it right between my two planning extremes… which is always the goal.    

So, what do you think? Would you give this three-category priority list a try?

And more importantly, what will do – just for yourself – this week?

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