Highly effective people begin with the end in mind, according to Habit #2 from Stephen R. Covey’s book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

In 2016 I developed a training program called “The 4 Day Workweek”. The following article provides a sample of one of the ideas I cover in that program for developing high performing corporate athletes.

You can use the following simple, effective “Fill-In-The-Blanks Ideal Week Template” to answer eight important questions to discover how the design of your ideal year shapes the design of your ideal week.

While discovering the design of your ideal week is important, try not to spend too much time on this step. Your ideal week is not a fixed thing – you may need to adapt it from time to time as the main thing you are working on changes by repeating the following exercise.

The 4 Day Workweek – Module 1

High performers don’t perform every week of every year.

“Because energy capacity diminishes both with overuse and with underuse, we must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal.”

Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz
The Power of Full Engagement

Think about your favourite sports team – their time is divided into one or more “on-seasons” and one or more “off-seasons”. Even within their “on-season”, athletes divide their time into three distinct categories:

To discover your ideal week, you first need to discover your ideal year. You need to think about your energy ratio – of expending versus renewing energy.

Will you use the standard ratio, of 48 weeks of work to 4 weeks of holidays (12:1) per year, or something different?

The following questions are designed to help you uncover the design principles that you will use to create a vision for your ideal week – whether that is a “4-day workweek” or something else.

In answering these questions, there is only one rule I need you to follow: DON’T worry about HOW you would change the way you currently live and work. I need you to simply focus on WHAT your ideal week looks like. We’ll get to the HOW later, together. So, for now, simply suspend any concerns (internal dialogue) and be playful. Let’s start with discovering your IDEAL week before we consider whether any compromises should or could be made to your vision.

Resources

Book: Stephen R. Covey – The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Book: Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz – The Power of Full Engagement

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