The Ideal Week
Block your perfect week to see what time you really have
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 80%
The Ideal Week is a planning exercise Abdaal calls one of the best time-management strategies he's found. You open a blank calendar, label it 'ideal week', and block out what your perfect week looks like: wake and sleep times, gym slots, date nights, deep work. The exercise produces a paradox: you discover you have more time than you realised, and also less, because your 18 aspirational projects plainly won't fit into the available hours. That constraint is the value. It forces you to eliminate what doesn't matter and concentrate on what does. Once you know you have a manageable set of things, you put them into your actual calendar so the time is genuinely reserved rather than merely wished for.
Origin
Extracted from Feel Good Productivity; Abdaal presents the ideal week as his core time-management method on Modern Wisdom.
Core principles
- 01You have more time than you think and less time than you think
- 02Blocking an ideal week reveals whether your commitments actually fit
- 03Seeing the constraint lets you eliminate what doesn't matter
- 04Time exists for a task only once it's in the calendar
How to run it
- 1
Create a blank ideal-week calendar
Open a fresh Google Calendar and name it 'ideal week'. It's a template, separate from your real schedule.
- 2
Block your perfect week
Fill it with when you'd like to wake, sleep, train, work and have date nights. Design the week you actually want, not the one you have.
- 3
Test your projects against it
Try to fit your list of desired projects into the blocked week. You'll find there simply aren't enough hours for all of them.
Pro tip The discovery that you have less time than you thought is the point, not a failure.
- 4
Eliminate and schedule
Cut the things that don't matter, then place the surviving tasks into your real calendar so the time is truly reserved.
Pro tip If it doesn't fit in the ideal week, you don't have time for it.
In the wild
Abdaal describes a productivity-minded person who wants to do 18 things on their to-do list at a high level. Building an ideal week, they block wake, sleep, gym, work and date nights, then try to slot the 18 projects in. They realise there are simply not enough hours in the day, which is fine: it lets them eliminate the projects that don't really matter and focus energy on the ones that do. The constraint converts an overwhelming list into a manageable, scheduled few.
→ An impossible 18-project list is pared down to a realistic, calendared set.
Common mistakes
Keeping tasks only on a to-do list
A to-do list is infinite and unbounded by time; until a task is in the calendar, you haven't actually made room for it.
Is it for you?
Best for
Productivity-minded people juggling many projects who can't tell what actually fits.
Not ideal for
People with highly unpredictable or externally-controlled schedules where blocking is unrealistic.
From the transcript
“the ideal week is basically where you create a blank Google Calendar you call it your ideal week and you just block out what does…”
“you have more time than you realize and also you have less time than you realize”
From the episode
How To Stop Procrastinating For Good - Ali Abdaal - #719
Ali Abdaal