Plan a realistic ideal week

Big changes become doable when you think through your hours

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of I Heart Radio.
Good Morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
Today's tip is to gain clarity on your goals by
picturing a realistic, ideal week. From time to time, I'll
see an exercise in self help literature that involves picturing

(00:26):
a perfect day. The idea is to ponder, in the
absence of all constraints, how you'd like to spend your
time now. I suppose this can be useful in some ways,
but there are a few problems with this exercise. One
is that, if your imagination is good enough, a perfect
day doesn't offer a whole lot of insight into your
current life. In my perfect day, I'd have a flying car,

(00:49):
but no one else would, and thus I could skip traffic,
or maybe there'd be teleportation. I could eat cinnamon rules
all day and not feel sick. I'd probably cure cancer
before breakfast while I was at This is not a
particularly useful thought experiment. The other problem is that we
don't live our lives in days. We live our lives
in weeks. So even if I'm going to ponder a

(01:10):
more realistic good day, should I think of a Tuesday
or should I think of a Saturday. They both occur
just as often, even if I spend my time quite
differently on each day. So that's why I like the
idea of creating a realistic, ideal week. This is the
schedule that you, within the current parameters of your life,
might reasonably expect to live. You don't get a flying car,

(01:34):
but you do spend your work hours on your favorite projects.
You take breaks to get lunch with friends or colleagues,
or to get some fresh air. You leave on time,
and you do interesting things with your evenings. You spend
your weekend hours in rejuvenating ways and minimize time devoted
to things you don't enjoy doing. The most straightforward way
to picture this week is on a spreadsheet. You can

(01:57):
go to Laura Vanderkam dot com that's my website and
fill out the subscription form to be sent a blank
time log, or you can just create one yourself and
Excel numbers or Google sheets. I put the days of
the week across the top Monday through Sunday, and then
half hour blocks down the left hand side from five
am to four thirty am. So that is a three

(02:17):
thirty six cell spreadsheet representing the hundred sixty eight hour week.
I feel in what time I'd like to wake up
and what time I'd like to go to bed. I
fill in my daily runs, maybe a date night with
my husband, a family adventure reading time. I fill in
long stretches of uninterrupted writing time, and maybe a few
walks with individual kids for conversations too. In my realistic

(02:39):
ideal week, I'd have a social get together, maybe a
lunch out somewhere. So that's me. I suppose. It's an
open question of how optimistic this realistic ideal week should be.
I mean, how realistic are we talking? I guess in
my realistic ideal week, my four year old would never
wake up before six thirty am. Alas, judging by the
past week or so, this is a streak he's unlikely

(03:01):
to hit. I might aim to go to bed at
eleven or so and wake up at six thirty. But
I could leave some flexible time before bed so that
if he wakes up at five thirty am too many
mornings in a row, I could start going to bed
at ten thirty or ten. But the upside of creating
a realistic ideal week is that it reminds you of
the good things you'd like to have in your life

(03:22):
that are relatively accessible. All that stands between me and
my husband going out to dinner every other Friday night
or so is looking at our calendars and arranging to
have it happen. Since I work from home, going out
to lunch feels like a treat to me, and I
should take the initiative to invite people I find interesting
or just go myself. If I know I like evening

(03:42):
walks with kids one on one, I should do that
when I find myself in this situation where another adult
is in the house to watch the other kids, but
there's some downtime. I think it can also be useful
to create a template of a realistic ideal week and
then track an actual week. Time tracking has helped in general,
but it can be enlightening to compare a week that

(04:03):
actually happened with this realistic ideal Where do things match?
Hopefully they do, somewhere where do they diverge? No doubt
this happens too, but when you see it, you can
ask why and figure out if there's anything to be
done about that. Maybe nothing can be done, but maybe
something can, and that's good to figure out. So take

(04:25):
some time today to think about what your realistic ideal
week would look like. How would you spend your hundred
sixty eight hours? How are you spending them now? I
hope over time we can bring these two schedules very
close together. In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening,

(04:45):
and here's to making the most of our time. Hey, everybody,
I'd love to hear from you. You can send me
your tips, your questions, or anything else. Just connect with
me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Before Breakfast pod
that's B the number four, then Breakfast p o D.

(05:10):
You can also shoot me an email at Before Breakfast
podcast at i heeart media dot com that Before Breakfast
is spelled out with all the letters. Thanks so much,
I look forward to staying in touch. Before Breakfast is
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from

(05:30):
my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.