Ideal Week & Time Blocking
- Mar 3
- 4 min read
Designing an Ideal Week is not about building a perfect schedule or maximizing productivity. It is about creating a realistic structure that supports your energy, priorities, and real human limits. This exercise helps transform time from something reactive and overwhelming into something intentional and flexible.
Rather than over-planning or trying to optimize every hour, the goal is to practice making quick, good-enough decisions that create supportive scaffolding for your life. Your Ideal Week is a living framework. It will evolve as your needs change, your responsibilities shift, and you learn more about how you actually function day to day.
By grounding your planning in realistic capacity instead of wishful thinking, you create systems that reduce burnout, increase follow-through, and build trust in yourself over time.
Your Ideal Week will evolve over time, so each week it will get better and better, and easier to create. This exercise will help you learn how to make quick decisions to create flexible structure and NOT get caught in overthinking/over-planning.
As we’ve all experienced in the past, when we are overconfident and overbook our time we quickly crash and burn and then loose time in unplanned recovery. The key is to understand and accept that there are certain limitations that, try as we might, cannot be ignored.
The 72-hour Limitation
This one is a hard pill to swallow for some folks who are not ready to admit that EVERY DAY cannot be a “Peak Performance Day”. If we hold ourselves to the “Peak Performance Day” standard for success, we don’t take into account our humanity and things outside of our control. We are also ignoring our own lived experience. When instead we account appropriately for downtime, and limited time available, we set better goals for ourselves that are more attainable. And more attainable goals = more success, and more success = building confidence and trust in ourselves.
24-hours/day - 9-hours/sleep - 3-hours/rest = 12-hours/day “Active”
12-hours/day “Active” * 6-days = 72-hours/week “Active”
The Math:
Available Hours -- There are 24-hours/day
Sleep -- We need roughly 9-hours/day in bed/sleep
Daily Rest/Meals -- Generally speaking, most folks need 3-hours/day for rest, meals, morning routine, evening downtime, etc...
Rest Day -- We also generally need one full day of rest/recovery per week (some call this time “lump time”, “derp days”, “whitespace”, etc…”); we can optionally break this up into two half days when time-blocking in the exercise below.
This leaves 72-hours/week “Active**” for: commitments, responsibilities, work, focus areas, creative practice, exercise, chores, etc…
** Note: The 12-hours/day “Active” also conveniently breaks down into 3x 4-hour “Time Blocks” (Or 6x 2-hours blocks).
Exercise: 1st Draft Ideal Week
This exercise introduces a practical approach to time blocking based on the concept of a weekly capacity limit, recognizing that sustainable productivity requires rest, recovery, and flexibility. By accounting for sleep, daily downtime, and a dedicated rest day, the framework estimates approximately 72 active hours per week available for work, responsibilities, creativity, and personal life.
Step 1. Identify your Time Block “Categories”
How do you spend your time during the week? Loosely categorize your current commitments, responsibilities, classes, work, focus areas, creative practice, projects, social time, etc…
Add categories for: Rest/relax (includes meals), Planning, Exercise, and Social
Pick a color to represent each Category -- Don’t overthink this! You can change your mind later and it can evolve over time, pick something fast and easy.
Step 2. Estimate Time for each Category:
Guesstimate how much time you designate each day/week to each Category
Double-check that your TOTAL hours is LESS THAN 90-hours a week
If your estimates are OVER the 90-hour limitation, it’s time to do some aggressive prioritization.
What Categories can get cut down by a few hours?
What time-blocks can overlap? Example: Getting lunch with friends combines Social and Rest/Meals which saves you an hour.
Step 3. Draw a Simple Weekly Calendar
Create the “scaffolding” of your daily routine -- Add ROUGH times for Wake up; Morning routine; Meals; Wind-down routine; Bed Time; etc...
Next schedule external commitments: work, classes, recurring meetings, etc...
Then block off: Exercise, Creative Practice, Home/Chores, Planning
Lastly, Time-Block your remaining Categories
Example 1: Simple Pencil & Paper
You can do this quick and dirty with just pencil and paper (or in my case a Google Keep note).
Example 2: Google Calendar
You can also utilize Google Calendar or iCal to create your Ideal Week Calendar with recurring events if you would rather have your ideal week available when you are booking appointments on your phone/computer.
I recommend making a NEW calendar so that you can hide/show it as needed rather than cluttering your calendar for appointments/schedules.
Summary
This is not about building the perfect schedule. It is about building something realistic enough that you can actually follow it.
The whole point of the 72 hour framework is to stop pretending that every day can be a peak performance day. When we ignore sleep, rest, and basic human limits, we overbook ourselves, crash, and then lose even more time in recovery. This exercise forces us to look at the math honestly and work within it instead of fighting it.
You start by naming where your time actually goes. Then you estimate. Then you adjust. If you are over 90 hours, something has to give. That is not failure, that is prioritization. Sometimes categories can overlap. Sometimes things need to shrink. The goal is not perfection, it is alignment.
From there, you build simple scaffolding. Wake time. Meals. Wind down. External commitments. Then the things that matter to you. Creative work. Exercise. Planning. Social time. What you are left with becomes intentional instead of accidental.
Your Ideal Week will change. It should change. Each version gets a little more accurate, a little easier to create, and a little kinder to your nervous system. Over time, this builds trust. You start to believe your plans because they are grounded in reality. And that is where real momentum comes from.
Hope you enjoyed adding this tool to your toolbox. Follow along as I continue to make all of my worksheets available for free!
Have a beautiful week!
--Rachel
