How I Plan My Entire Week in 15 Minutes

I’ve talked before about how I plan my workload, and how you can be smart about planning your time around repeatable cycles that drive you forward

As I was planning my week a few days, ago it occurred to me just how automated this process has become for me. Not in the “AI does this for me” way, but more like “my brain just knows what to do next”.

It usually takes me 10-15 minutes on a Sunday evening to architect the week ahead. Here’s the 6 steps I follow to get it done:

Before I plan everything, I want to see every message that comes my way. Email, Slack, social media, personal notes (past me talking to present me), reminders, project folders.

My goal is for nothing to fall through the proverbial cracks - I don’t focus on organizing anything, but instead my goal is to have everything lined up in front of me so I know what I have to work with.

This is the step most people skip, by the way. They sit down, plan from memory, and then get blindsided on Wednesday by something they forgot was due. Don’t plan from your unreliable memory, scan your actual inputs.

I actually do this as I’m doing the step above, but know it’s a separate activity altogether. As I look at my inputs, I write down every single thing I need to do on one huge list. It’s huge, messy, a raw brain dump of tasks written in shorthand and barely recognizable by anyone.

The goal is to capture everything on one huge list so I can then...

Now that I have everything that needs to get planned in front of me, I can start organizing, and I begin by figuring out what’s urgent. Almost nothing is, if you’re honest, but there’s a scale of urgency, and something has to sit at the top of the scale.

At this stage, I’m essentially running everything through my internal Eisenhower Matrix. It doesn’t need to be official, bureaucratic, just to run down the list and ask:

• Is this urgent AND important? Top of the list.

• Urgent, but not important? Try to delegate it, or save it for a lower priority work block.

• Important, but not urgent? Schedule it farther down the list.

• Neither? Well, this can get done if I get to it.

This is also where I estimate time. And this part is crucial, because some tasks are bottomless pits. You know the kind. You start researching a solution and suddenly it’s 4 hours later and you’ve gone down three rabbit holes and opened 47 browser tabs.

So I cap things. If a task could realistically take 2 hours or 20, I’ll set a 4-hour limit on it and revisit after that. This is not about being rigid. It’s about stopping yourself from spiraling. Give yourself permission to pause, assess, and decide if something deserves more time after you’ve spent a reasonable chunk on it.

As things are sorted, I should have an idea of “the big thing” I want to get done each day

Now, I look at the actual landscape of the upcoming week. What events do I need to plan around? I then move to schedule things that are immovable - fixed meetings, appointments, anything that the rest of my schedule will depend on.

This seems obvious, but the order matters. You sort your tasks first, THEN look at the calendar. If you start with the calendar, you end up planning your week around your meetings instead of around your priorities. Meetings are constraints, not goals.

This is where it all comes together. I look at the open time in my calendar and I schedule work blocks. Not individual tasks. Blocks.

Instead of adding “reply to client email” and “draft proposal intro” and “review contract” as three separate items on my calendar, I’ll block off a 2-hour chunk labeled something like “Client Work” or “Deep Focus.” Inside that block, I know what I’m tackling based on my sorted list.

This does two things. First, it reduces the mental friction of constantly switching contexts. When you sit down for your work block, you know the category of work you’re doing, and you just go. Second, it gives you flexibility within the block. If something takes less time than expected, you naturally flow into the next thing on your list without having to go back and reorganize your calendar.

I also try to match blocks to energy levels. I know I do my best creative and strategic work in the morning, so that’s when deep focus blocks go. Admin, email, and lighter tasks get pushed to the afternoon when my brain is winding down anyway.

I used to get carried away with planning every single chunk of my day down to the minute. The biggest lesson I’ve learned? You must leave room for the unexpected.

Life happens. Anything from a sick kid waking up with a fever to a pipe bursting in the wall can throw a wrench into your perfectly crafted week. If your schedule is packed to the brim, a single disruption causes a cascading failure. Build in buffer blocks. Treat your schedule with a bit of Stoic flexibility: plan for what you can control, and leave breathing room for what you can’t.