How defining your ideal week as a designer can help you reach your goals

In a previous blog, we looked at how a vision board of your ideal life comes into play when it comes to building an aligned business. What is an aligned business?

This is a business that is aligned with who you are and your goals, a business that is sustainable in a way that it’s not only built for the long run but also that if you are not there for a couple of days everything just keeps going and a business that is not overwhelming you because you have a very clear direction; live your life on your terms.

To me, I see a business more as a vehicle to support your life rather than as being the end goal. And don’t get me wrong, I love my business and what I do, I could not imagine going back to a corporate career. So it’s not just a business to make money, not at all. But if you can start from having your life vision and creating a through-line to your business it will really help you to create a business that is aligned with your life and who you are

In this blog, we are using that vision board (the big picture goal) to define your ideal week (breaking it down and being proactive).

So in this blog, I will break this up into 3 sections:

• Why do you need to define your ideal week?
• How can you use theme days and time blocking to structure your week?
• How to define your ideal week

So why do you need to define your ideal week as a designer?

When we decide upfront on how we spend our time, we are working pro-actively towards the ideal vision of our lives.

So why is this so important? Well, because your business can very easily become the opposite of why you started your business. Instead of your business giving you more freedom to travel or spend time with family, it can be that it actually ties you to your desk for 40,60, maybe even 80 hours a week where you’d not just work during the day, but you also work weekends or evenings.

This is something I had as well.

When I started my business, one of the reasons that I moved away from a corporate job is to have more freedom to travel. That’s really important to me, as when I travel, I calm down, can unplug and take a rest. I’m able to step back from my business, or whichever job I was in to come to myself and recharge.

So this was one of the most important reasons for me to start my own business. And I was doing this for a while when I was talking to someone and talking about what my goals were with my business. And she said, If you build your business based on hustle, what is suddenly going to change down the road that will change this for you?

And it made me realise that while I was building my business, and mostly working with one-on-one clients, that I wasn’t really building my business in such a way that it could help me give that freedom to travel. Especially when you’re working with one-on-one clients, which a lot of us do, there’s only so much time in your day or your week. So it limits you in how many clients you can take on at the same time.

And when working only with one-on-one clients, you’re not only limiting yourself in how much you can scale but also in how much or how easily you can scale back in terms of hours as it will impact your income straight away. If you don’t work, you’re not making money.

This conversation really got me thinking; how can I build my business in such a way that it can really support me in my life vision. The answer to this question will be different for everyone. But for me, it came down to working with more people at the same time.

Again, this might look different for you, but when you know what this should look like you can be intentional in how you spend your time. And you start having this purpose as a base that can really help you work proactively, towards your ideal vision.

let’s make this a bit more visual

To make this a little bit more visual, I like to use this image, that comes from Gary Keller’s book, The One Thing that gives you a visual representation of how one thing is built on top of each other.

Looking at this image:

• When you start with purpose, you will know what your priorities are.

• Once you know what your priorities are, this will drive your productivity

• And in the end, this productivity will drive your profit.

So this way, what you do daily is not random, you have mapped it out and it’s tied to a bigger vision. And not just your business goals or vision, but your personal purpose or lives vision.

What I like about building your business in such a way is that it can support your life, because you’re using that as the vision that is driving your action. And it will give you something that you can always fall back on when you don’t know what to focus on or how you spend your time.

All you have to do is go back to that purpose and ask yourself if what you were doing now or the new service that you’re trying to launch or if someone comes to you for collaboration, if that is going to help you get to move the needle and get you closer to living your purpose or in your ideal life or not.

So to conclude, defining your ideal week will;

• Give you a clear structure to work from on a daily base
• Help you to focus on what matters most
• Increase your productivity
• Allows you to be able to do more of what you want

Now let’s have a look at how you can structure your week by using theme days and time blocking.

How can you use theme days and time blocking to structure your week?

This is from the same writer, Gary Keller from The One Thing as I mentioned above who explains it very well in his book. Here he talks about how you can start with the smallest domino (the right thing) to set things in motion to topple the big domino (your goal)

Let’s see our vision as the big domino and look at what the smallest domino can be to get us in motion; our weekly planning that is based on our vision. Because this way you can directly cross off steps 1 and 2 from the above image in regards to purpose, priorities, productivity and profit.

When you have toppled this first domino, you can use the knowledge and experience that you gained here and focus on the next one. Because success builds on top of success.

Before showing you an example of what your week could look like, let’s just have a quick look at some of the definitions.

Time blocking

Something that often happens is that a task will expend itself to fill the time that you have available for its completion. Just think back to a day where you just had 1 task to complete, that you could probably finish in a couple of hours. But because you had nothing else planned it ended up taking up your whole day. This is called Parkinson’s Law

Time blocking helps prevent this as this method divides your day into blocks of time. Each block is dedicated to accomplishing a specific task, or a group of tasks. So it will help you put restrictions in place when it comes to your time.

task batching

The second definition is task batching. With task batching you are focusing your time on a group of similar tasks and doing them all at once.

So instead of planing to create, for example, your social media posts for the next week and it spread over Monday, Tuesday and Friday, you’re going to finish this in one go. When you do this, you’re focused on just getting through this task and it’s helping you to be more concentrated, it minimises your distractions and helps with procrastination.

If you spread similar tasks across the week and have to do 10 different tasks in one day you are actually losing time. Because every time you start a new task or you start to work on something else, you need to refocus again. So if you focus on similar tasks, by batching, you can get much more done.

theme days

This is going a little bit further than task batching because you’re not just clustering tasks but you’re setting an intention or topic for your day. This could be a marketing day and you complete all the tasks that are related to this topic on this day.

How to start defining your ideal week as a designer

So let’s have a look at an example ideal week that I created. In this example, I have combined time blocking, task batching and theme days.

At the top of the calendar, you see the days of the week, and then the different themes for each day:

• Marketing
• Client work
• Meetings
• Second day for client work
• CEO day; a day where you combine things like finance, admin, and CEO tasks.

Sure, you can’t plan for everything. Things happen that you can’t anticipate. But it is a whole lot easier to accomplish what matters most when you are proactive and try to plan ahead than when you let your week run by external influences and are not coming much closer to your goals.

How you batch your days off course depends on your business and what works well for one might not work for you. So this is just an example of how you can cluster your days and through trial and error, you will learn what works best for you.

In this example, I’ve been taking marketing as one day where you concentrate on writing your blog posts, or your social media posts, record videos or a podcast.

I like to create this on a Monday, but not for the week that I’m in but for one week ahead. So it gives you a little bit of time just in case you cannot get through everything on Monday without compromising your consistency.

In the example, I have scheduled client work for Tuesdays & Thursdays where you can just sit down, put your hair in the bun and just focus on that client work.

And then I’ve picked the Wednesday where you can cluster client calls, consultation calls or coffee chats. By clustering this on one day, you don’t have to switch between calls and client work. Or be unproductive because you have these odd 30-minutes in between calls. If you feel that having 1 day to have all your calls is too much you could keep your mornings clear to work on your client work. Then in the afternoon, when you’re a little less focussed you can hold your calls.

And then the Friday is used as a day to work on your business from updating finances & admin to reviewing your workflows or your services. Whatever you need to do to get you closer to your goals.

If you’re noticing that you’re not able to keep within the time blocks that you’ve set I would advise tracking your time. There are lots of different time-tracking tools that you can use. You can write everything down on paper, record it in a spreadsheet, use this Time Tracking Workbook for Designers or use the time tracking that’s within (or one that can be connected to) your project management system

This ideal week was just a business-related example. So let’s have a look at how you can extend this to include your personal life as well as we’re really trying to make sure that business and life work well together.

Ideal week that includes your personal life

So let’s first start with some reflection here. If you’re really thinking about your ideal week

• If money was not an issue, how would this change the way you plan your week? Would you spend more time with your family? Anyone else you want to spend more time with? Be outside more? Travel more often? How about self-care?
• What are your non-negotiables? What things do you need to do every week that you can not / or don’t want to change? No work in the weekends or evenings, exercise, time for family members, eating dinner at a certain time, church, day job, self-care, walk the dog 3x a day
• What is working and what is not working at this moment?

  • Working well: Prepare for your week on Sunday, content plan per quarter, monthly goal review

  • Not working well: client calls on all days of the week, ad-hoc social media posting, no admin days

• What do you want less? Fewer client calls, less time spent on social media, less time on recurring tasks, less admin

Now let’s add this into a new calendar.

Again, it will look differently for everyone. But I added in time here for exercise in the morning, breakfast with the family or lunch with the family, if that is something that you really want to do with everyone at a certain time.

For the weekend I added some quiet time and time to work in and around the house. Maybe you’d like to work in the garden, then make sure you plan these kinds of things.

So there you have it…

… the second step to take when you want to create a more aligned business.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. How do you feel about setting priorities and your productivity? Have you tried using time blocking, task batching or theme days? Comment below and share your story.