How to plan your week (the whole-life way)

What a whole-life weekly plan includes

A plan for the week is not a to-do list. It is a small set of decisions about where your time and attention will go, made in the light of what you value and the person you are trying to become. That sounds grand for a Sunday evening. In practice it is the difference between two runs appearing on the calendar because an article said so, and two runs appearing because you have decided you want to be someone who can still run at fifty. Deciding in advance is not busywork: a meta-analysis of 94 studies by Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran found that spelling out when, where, and how you will act makes you much more likely to follow through.

What this looks like varies enormously by life. The weeks gallery walks worked examples end to end: a duty-day GP, a founder on US-hours calls, a person planning around ADHD, each from constraints to a final approved week.

• Work: the one or two outcomes that would make it a good week
• Health: training, recovery, sleep, and the meals that make them possible
• Money: the decisions due this week, not every transaction
• Relationships: the people and dates worth planning for in advance
• Growth and joy: reading, reflection, and the things you actually enjoy

The priority test: how to choose three to five

The hardest step is the cut. Everyone can list fifteen things that matter; a week can hold three to five. Run each candidate through five questions, in order:

• Is it time-sensitive: does it genuinely have to be this week, or does it just feel loud?
• Does it prevent a future problem: is doing it now cheap and doing it late expensive?
• Does it advance something you actually value, or is it motion for its own sake?
• Does it belong to this week specifically, or is it a quarter-sized ambition wearing a weekly disguise?
• What does it displace? Every yes is a no to something; name the something before you commit

The capacity arithmetic nobody does

Most weeks are overplanned because nobody has ever done the arithmetic. A week is 168 hours. Sleep, protected properly, takes about 56. Work plus commute takes 45 to 50 for most full-time lives. Meals, household running, care, and basic admin absorb another 20 to 25. That leaves 37 to 47 hours on the clock, which sounds generous until you look at where they sit: the twenty minutes before the school run, the hour after nine when you are already done, the Saturday morning that is really three errands. Strip out the fragments that cannot hold a block and the hours genuinely yours to plan into are usually somewhere between 15 and 25, and for parents and carers well under 10. Not the 60 that Sunday-evening optimism assumes; fifteen to twenty-five.

Two consequences follow. First, three to five priorities is not a productivity aesthetic; it is what the arithmetic allows once each priority gets an honest size. Second, never plan all of it: place your priorities into sixty to seventy percent of your discretionary hours and leave the rest empty on purpose. That buffer is not slack; it is the structural allowance for the week behaving like a week. The plan with no buffer and the plan that was abandoned on Wednesday are usually the same plan.

One week, planned by hand

Here is the whole method run once, with a pen, by someone real enough to borrow: a designer with a product launch on Thursday, a half-marathon six weeks out, a friend's birthday on Saturday, an overdue money admin task, a course she keeps meaning to continue, and a flat that needs a proper clean. Six candidates, one week.

She starts with the wall: work nine to six, the launch day immovable, two evenings already spoken for, sleep protected. The arithmetic says roughly seventeen discretionary hours. The priority test cuts the six candidates: the launch prep is time-sensitive (in), two training runs prevent a future problem, six weeks out (in, sized as two hours), the birthday present needs buying by Friday (in, thirty minutes, plus the Saturday itself), the money task is fifteen expensive minutes late and cheap now (in, small). The course fails question four, it is a quarter ambition, so it gets one protected hour, not five; the flat fails the displacement question against the launch week entirely and moves to next week without guilt.

Placement takes five minutes: deep launch prep lands Tuesday morning, her reliable peak, before the Thursday chaos; runs go Wednesday evening and Saturday morning before the birthday; the present and the money task share Friday lunchtime; the course hour sits Sunday. Roughly eleven of seventeen hours are placed, and the rest stays empty on purpose. That is the entire method, and the template below is the page she did it on.

# Week of ____________

## The wall (fixed: plan around, never through)
-
-

## Discretionary hours this week (honest number): ______
## Planned hours (60 to 70 percent of that): ______

## Chosen: three to five, sized and placed
1.                          (size: ___  slot: ___)
2.                          (size: ___  slot: ___)
3.                          (size: ___  slot: ___)

## Optional: lives here, not on the calendar
-
-

## Not this week (moved without guilt)
-

## Midweek note (when reality arrives, replan here, 5 minutes)
-

What not to schedule

A weekly plan dies of overcrowding more often than of neglect, so the discipline of leaving things off the calendar matters as much as placing things on it. Do not schedule optional tasks; that is what the list is for. Do not schedule anything under about fifteen minutes; batch the small stuff into one admin block or let it live in the cracks. Do not schedule aspirations without a size (a calendar block called 'get fit' is a mood, not a plan). And do not fill the white space: empty hours in a weekly plan are load-bearing, the difference between a plan that absorbs a surprise and one that shatters on the first.

Recovery deserves its own line here: rest that matters to you, the evening off, the walk, the early night before the heavy day, earns a place on the calendar with the same seriousness as the deadline. A week planned to the edge of capacity is not impressive; it is fragile.

When the week changes mid-week

The plan will meet Tuesday, and Tuesday will have opinions. A child gets ill, a deadline moves, an urgent thing arrives sideways. The method does not break here; this is the moment it exists for. The move is one five-minute midweek replan, not a rebuild: look at what remains of the week's real gaps, re-place the chosen priorities that still matter, and cut by the displacement rule, dropping the least expensive thing rather than silently degrading everything at once.

Two disciplines keep the midweek replan honest. Cut deliberately: one priority consciously moved to next week beats five priorities all quietly failing. And never re-litigate upward on a bad day: a rough Tuesday is a reason to reshape the week, not to rewrite your goals; write the bigger doubt down for the rung above and decide it there, calmly, with more than one day's evidence.

The short version, for the weeks that fall apart

Some weeks arrive broken: illness in the house, a work fire, a bad stretch of sleep, a mind that will not cooperate. The method has a ten-minute version for exactly these, and using it is running the method, not failing it. Write the wall. Choose one priority, the single thing that would keep the most important plate spinning. Add one act of maintenance: the food shop, the early night, the one call. Done. A planned bad week, one priority and the basics protected, beats an abandoned good plan every time, and it keeps the weekly rhythm alive so that next week starts normally instead of from rubble.

If your weeks are often like this because of how your brain works rather than what your calendar holds, the ADHD planning guide takes this short version further, and takes it seriously.

How to run the week without starting from scratch

The part almost everyone skips is the review. Without it, every week is a fresh blank page and the same decisions get re-made from nothing. With it, each week inherits context: what got done, what slipped, what is still load-bearing. Ten minutes at the week's end, four questions, and next week's plan is half-written before you sit down to it; the weekly review guide is that step, done properly.

This is the thinking behind asambl. Last week's context, the carried-over items and whatever keeps slipping, is what the next draft starts from, and the draft reaches the calendar you already use only once you have approved, amended or discarded it. Remembering is the part software is good at. The deciding stays yours, and I would not want it any other way.

A template is a start; a process is the point

This guide ships its template, and a page like it will genuinely carry the method; that is the point of teaching it by hand. What no page can do is remember: carry last week's context into this one, notice what keeps slipping, or hold six areas of life in view at once while you place blocks. Paper runs the week; it cannot learn from it.

What works long-term is the process this page taught, run on a rhythm, supported by something that remembers. Name what matters, draft the week, run it, review it, carry forward. Whether the something is a disciplined folder of weekly pages or a planner built for the job, the process is the asset; the tool's job is to absorb the planning load so the process survives a bad week.