Picture your (realistic) ideal week

One way to nudge thoughtful choices

From time to time I’ll see an exercise in self-help literature that involves picturing a perfect day. The idea is to ponder, in the absence of all constraints, how you’d like to spend your time.

On some level it’s fun, but there are a few problems with this exercise. One is that if your imagination is good enough, a perfect day doesn’t offer many insights into your current life. In my perfect day, I’d have a flying car but no one else would, and thus I could skip traffic. Or maybe there would be teleportation and I’d pop over to Portugal for breakfast. I could eat cinnamon rolls all day and not get sick. I’d probably cure cancer before 10 a.m. while I was at it. 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 more realistic good day, should I think of a Tuesday or a Saturday? They both occur just as often, even if I spend my time differently on each.

168 hours

So that’s why I like the idea of picturing a realistic ideal week. This is a schedule that you —within the current parameters of your life — might reasonably expect to live. You don’t get a flying car. 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.

So — as you’re doing your weekly Friday planning — why not spend some time thinking about your realistic ideal week too?

The most straightforward way to picture this week is on a spreadsheet, and you can use the same one that I have people use to track their time. Just go to my website and fill out the subscription form to be sent a blank time log. Or you can create one yourself in 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 5 a.m. to 4:30 a.m.

To create my realistic ideal week (incidentally, an exercise that you might want to do after any big life changes, or even seasonally), I fill in what time I’d like to wake up and what time I’d like to go to bed. I fill in when I’d like to exercise, or read, or sing with my choirs, or do family adventures, or do date nights or get together with friends. During my work hours, I block in long stretches of uninterrupted writing time. I build in little treats like a lunch out somewhere.

Optimistic realism

I suppose it is an open question of how optimistic this realistic ideal week should be. In my realistic ideal week, my 5-year-old would cheerfully go to bed on his own by 8:30 p.m. every night. Alas, this does not seem to be “realistic” at the moment. But I can come up with ways to spend time while I’m sitting with him in the dark, or a schedule of nights where my husband and I switch off, and then I choose what to do on those nights instead. And he usually is out by 9:30 p.m., which still leaves time before my 11 p.m. bedtime.

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 that are relatively accessible. All that stands between me and my getting together with friends regularly is looking at my calendar and calling them up and arranging for it to happen. Since I work from home, going out to lunch feels like a treat to me, but this is obviously a doable treat. There are a lot of restaurants in the world! And it’s good to think through what a “good” evening would look like.

I think it can also be useful to create a template of a realistic ideal week, and then track an actual week for comparison purposes. Time-tracking is helpful in general, but it can be enlightening to compare a week that actually happened with the 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.