Coaching practices for How to Design Your Work Week

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For How to Design Your Work Week, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• Every Monday I open a calendar that other people have already filled, and I just react to it all week
• My whole week is an undifferentiated blur where every single day mixes a bit of everything, and I end most of them drained and somehow with nothing finished
• Every week fills itself with whatever lands in my calendar first, and I get to Friday having never touched the things I actually care about
• My days are a blender
• I made a real plan for the week and somewhere along the way it quietly fell apart again, and I genuinely can’t tell you where it went sideways

Practices that may help

1. Create an ideal week template
   Design a blank-canvas week that shows where each type of activity should live, before any specific week's demands arrive.
   Ideal Week Design
2. Ideal Week Design
   Michael Hyatt's Ideal Week framework asks you to design the week you would want before the week you have arrives — assigning broad themes to each day and protecting time for your most important work. It is a proactive design exercise, not a rigid schedule, that gives you a template to return to when reactive demands take over. The method is widely used in executive productivity coaching; direct experimental evidence for the format is limited.
3. Assign a theme to each day of the week
   Decide in advance which type of work each weekday is for and protect those assignments.
   Theme Days, Made Practical
4. Design your ideal week before you fill it
   Draw the week you want to live, then defend it from the week that arrives.
   Lifestyle Design, Made Practical
5. Assign broad themes to days of the week
   Dedicate each weekday to a broad category of work (deep creation, meetings, admin) to reduce context-switching.
   Ideal Week Design
6. Compare ideal and actual week each Friday
   Review the gap between the week you designed and the week you lived, and pick one structural change.
   Ideal Week Design
7. Run a weekly preview before the week begins
   On Sunday evening, scan the incoming week against your ideal week template and protect what matters.
   Ideal Week Design
8. Weekly planning
   Set the week’s priorities and rough blocks before the week starts.
   Time Blocking, Made Practical
9. Do a weekly review every Friday afternoon
   Review last week's time log and set next week's priorities while context is fresh.
   The Time Audit
10. Map tasks to energy levels throughout the day
    Assign high-cognitive tasks to high-energy periods and low-cognitive tasks to low-energy ones.
    Ideal Week Design

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