My Ideal Week | Lifestyle 2018

I came across Michael Hyatt’s blog post about making an ideal week, suppose you have 100% control of how your time is spent. The idea is that since time is a resource, it will be treated as a resource, and is allotted to certain “departments”.

As Michael Hyatt explained it,

    My Ideal Week—the week I would live if I could control 100% of what happens—is divided into a simple grid. Each day has a theme. In addition, each day is segmented according to a specific focus area.

My week looks entirely different now, compared to how my spreadsheet would have looked like a few months back. I actually made another one that’ll show how may have looked like if I went back to school this semester. (I filed for a leave of absence -- that’s another blog post)

Anyway, let’s focus on the spreadsheet that I’ll actually be using.



My day theme is right above the days of the week.

My Sundays are dedicated to tying up loose ends (errands, week calibration) and taking a bit of time for myself (devotion, meditation, etc) before I go back to the workforce.

My Mondays and Wednesdays are my routine days -- work, home, meditate, relax and sleep. I think this would boost my stress management skills and reinforce the thought that I have an outlet, writing.

My Tuesdays and Thursdays are my fitness days -- I’d like to take some time from my day to be active for one and a half hour -- be it power walking or actually going to the gym. I intend to eat a little healthier these days as well.

My Fridays are reserved for house keeping like groceries, planning out the week, cleaning, etc. Mostly groceries, as it would be time and energy efficient (the market is on my way home and it’s my first rest day)

My Saturdays are my creative days. I am refreshed from getting more sleep and I have a plan to follow for my posts. This is the day that I consider my “cheat day” as I won’t impose any time for sleep. More flexibility.

My focus areas are on the first row. The time blocks of my week are color coordinated with my focus areas. I modified this part to reflect my week instead of following the template Michael Hyatt used because I have a different shift schedule. I just made sure to give myself ample time to wind down before sleeping and roughly the same time waking up to create a routine.

One thing I also learned from his blog post was to make hard boundaries, which I can only explain as "Once work time is up, stop working.". Each of my focus points are also there to be used as my guidelines, and not set rules. I believe this would help me this year because there’s more flexibility with the periods, unlike when I had every hour assigned to a task. Now, I can just refer to my Ideal Week and see if the task on hand is in line with my goals. If yes, then I decide where to put it in. If no, then it’s taken off the priority list and revisited sometime later. I made sure to allot large blocks for rest and relaxation. I think with my current condition, I need all the chill I can get.

I also used the notes feature of Google Spreadsheets to insert any snippets that I do have to remember such as medicine doses and writing prompts. When I print this out, I’ll just use a ticker or a post it for reminders.

I foresee that having a routine and a template to follow will lessen my stress levels because I don’t need to brainstorm what to do first. I can just assign tasks to their corresponding time blocks and deal with it when the said time block comes up. It will allow me to focus on specific tasks for specific time periods which I believe will increase my productivity greatly.


I plan to implement this by next week and document my progress. Just as I always do.