On Planning and Winning the Week

Get things done by balancing the supply of time with the demand of tasks.

It’s Friday evening. You just finished work. You worked hard during the week, you had many meetings and many things to deal with. But you can’t easily tell what you achieved. You feel defeated, and unproductive.

Preventing this, and similar situations, is the starting point for the planning framework from the book “Winning the Week”. In this article I’ll describe it and share my thoughts after trying it for 2 months.

As a manager, you may feel your calendar fills up on its own, unnoticed. Often, weeks pass with no meaningful work delivered because most of the time is spent in meetings. During my gap year, it has been equally important to control my calendar to get things done.

Time is much more precious than money. We can’t get it back.

Time & Tasks / Supply & Demand

We developed a complicated relationship with time. We can save time, we can spend time — the same verbs that we use with money. Yet, when we lose time it does not hurt as much as losing money.

It’s common to hear "time is money", but I disagree:

Time is much more precious than money. We can’t get it back.

Thinking of time as the supply and work as the demand changed how I approached planning. In the book, the authors used the verb "calendarising", which I liked. Putting everything into the calendar shows clearly when things are happening and is a cold-water-shower realisation. We are too optimistic about how much can be done.

It’s impossible to meet the demand if it requires more time than you have. On the other hand, good estimations and strict time slots help prevent overthinking and using more time than needed:

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion"

— Parkinson's Law

The Framework

The "winning a week" framework presented in the book consists of 7 steps:

1. Make the planning session a positive experience by associating it with positive things (such as buying yourself a small treat after the session or planning in a nice place). This will help you form the habit of planning each week.

2. Start the planning session during the weekend (or early Monday morning) and review how the previous week went compared to what was planned. This will allow you to make adjustments for the upcoming week.

3. Choose your priority (your leverage). The one thing that is most important and will make other tasks easier (leveraged priority).

4. Review your calendar to ensure you know how much time is available — this is your supply. Make sure to add at least an hour or two every day as a buffer for unexpected demand.

5. Triage your task list to keep things that need to be done — this is your demand (move the rest to the "someday" task list).

6. Match your time supply with demand in the form of tasks, and put them in your calendar slots (calendarising).

7. Execute.

Lessons Learned

I followed the framework from the book "by the book," but I was too strict. My planning sessions took more than two hours every Monday, and I eventually failed to execute the perfect plan flawlessly.

These improvements stayed with me:

• Run a quick planning session each Monday, check the supply, and review demand.

• Set the priority for the week at the start, and each day at the beginning of the day.

• Aim to estimate everything (including life-related chores).

• Put everything into the calendar.

• Review the previous week every Monday.

I wasn’t happy with the additional work needed to track how I use my time supply, so I used additional tracking software to visualise where the focus goes (I picked RescueTime. It tracks all the apps and shows where you spend your time on the timeline. In addition, it offers a great focus mode. I enjoy the product, so I generated a referral link. If you use it, you’ll buy me a coffee).

Summary

When Friday evening approaches, I feel a sense of accomplishment. For the last two months, I’ve achieved my “one thing” priority every time. Both my time supply and task demand changed, but setting the “one thing” made it much easier to control my focus.

Each of us works differently, and there are many productivity methods. Explore and find one that suits your needs. I hope you find a good method for you.

Thanks for reading,

— Michał

PS If you want to use the framework. The authors prepared a set of templates.

---

Post Notes

Discover Weekly — Shoutouts

Articles that might help you explore new perspectives, related to planning:

• "11 mistakes I made as a solopreneur" —

  Orel Zilberman
  shares lessons from his journey, and there are two points directly related to planning.

• "Career Progression For Software Engineers: How To Own Your Success (Part 1)" (+ Part 2) —

  Samuel Kollát
  shares great advice on planning a career.

• "How I plan my week as a Senior Engineer in Big Tech" —

  Jordan Cutler
  shares his practical take on planning days and weeks (including templates).