Run a weekly preview before the week begins

On Sunday evening, scan the incoming week against your ideal week template and protect what matters.

Why it works

The week's demands are mostly known by Sunday — meetings, deadlines, obligations. A brief preview scans for conflicts between those demands and the ideal week template, creating time to resolve conflicts before they happen rather than discovering them on Tuesday. Pre-decision about trade-offs is cheaper than in-the-moment decisions under time pressure.

How to do it

1. On Sunday evening, open the coming week's calendar.
2. Check each deep work block: is it protected? Check each buffer: is it free?
3. Identify one conflict and resolve it now — rescheduling the meeting, delegating the task, or accepting the trade-off deliberately.

Evidence

Pre-mortem and prospective planning research suggests that anticipating obstacles before they occur improves goal attainment by increasing resilience planning. The weekly preview applies this principle to schedule management. (mechanistic)

The weekly preview is a widely used practitioner ritual; the specific anticipatory-planning benefit has not been tested in isolation for this format.

Sources

• Klein (1998), pre-mortem and prospective planning, Sources of Power

Common mistake

Treating Sunday evening review as a burden rather than a leverage point — the 15 minutes spent Sunday evening typically prevents multiple hours of priority damage during the week.