The Ideal Day / Ideal Week
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
A planning system that replaces five and ten year plans with a single repeatable unit. Bloom's version: write down the elements of an ideal day — not the exact routines or times, but the deconstructed components — then optimise for having one, then another, then another. Stacking ideal days moves you in the right direction without requiring you to predict the future, which Bloom says he has been 'hilariously wrong' about every time he's tried. Ali runs the same idea at week scale: a colour-coded ideal week that is his actual Google Calendar, with recurring anchors — deep work blocks in the morning, a filming block, Tuesday evenings for friends, Wednesday afternoons for calls, gym three times a week. The calendar then doubles as an admissions test: anything with no space in the week has no space in the life.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Abandon the long-range plan
Bloom's starting move is dropping five and ten year plans entirely, on the evidence that every attempt he's made at them has been badly wrong. The planning horizon becomes one repeatable unit instead.
- 2
Write the elements of an ideal day
Not the schedule — the components. 'The core kind of deconstructed elements', as Ali puts it. If you do those things over the course of a day, it scores as a perfect day.
Pro tip Keep it element-level so a travel day or a sick child doesn't automatically void the whole template.
- 3
Expand to an ideal week and put it in the real calendar
Ali's adaptation: the ideal week is colour-coded and lives in his actual Google Calendar, not alongside it. A week contains things a day can't hold — kickboxing, a free weekend, a monthly cadence of friends.
- 4
Assign standing anchors to specific days
Ali's examples: Tuesday evenings for friends over for dinner, Wednesday evenings visiting his mum, Wednesday afternoons for Zoom calls with interesting people, Thursday kickboxing, deep work blocks in the mornings.
Pro tip Attach a forcing function to each anchor — Ali cooks for guests specifically because having friends over makes him practise.
- 5
Debug collisions by moving blocks, not by working more
When Ali complained he wasn't making time to film or write, his team whiteboarded the week and found the fix was moving a Tuesday coaching session to Wednesday so filming had a clean day.
Pro tip Do this with someone else — the obvious swap is usually invisible from inside your own calendar.
- 6
Use the calendar as the yes/no filter
New commitments must fit an actual slot. Ali's rule after burning himself out on three lessons a week each in singing, guitar and art: no space in the calendar means no space in the life.
Watch out Adding commitments without deleting any is how the template silently reverts to an ordinary overloaded week.
In the wild
Ali's ideal week isn't a separate document — it is his live Google Calendar, colour-coded. The Tuesday of this recording ran: a one-on-one with his general manager, three and a half hours of book time, team meetings, a filming block, then this podcast and dinner, because Tuesday evenings are earmarked as default friends time. He says he sticks to it about 90% of the time now, after years of it being a struggle. The second-order effect is that adding anything new becomes a visible trade: after over-committing to singing, guitar and art lessons three times a week each post-quitting his job, he now treats an empty slot as the precondition for a new commitment.
→ Roughly 90% adherence, with deep work, filming, family and friends all reliably present in the same week.
Bloom describes the ideal day as the system that replaced long-range planning for him. He sat down and wrote what the elements of an ideal day are — not the routines or exact timings, but the components. If he hits them, it's a seven-out-of-seven day. His claim is that stacking those days moves him in the direction he wants without any five or ten year forecast, and that it removes an enormous amount of complexity, noise and intimidation from the whole system. Hearing Ali's week-level version, he says he'll go and sit down with it, calling it a good adaptation of the day.
→ A single daily unit to optimise, removing the need for long-range plans he says he's always got wrong.
Common mistakes
Writing times instead of elements
Bloom is explicit that it's not about the exact routines or the precise hour. A time-locked template breaks the first day it's disrupted; an element list survives.
Keeping the ideal week as a separate document
Ali's version works because the ideal week is the real calendar. A parallel aspirational file never competes with the actual one and quietly becomes fiction.
Stacking new interests without removing anything
Ali burned out within about a week after adding nine lessons across singing, guitar and art. The calendar only functions as a filter if you honour it when the answer is no.
From the transcript
“I really struggle with the five and 10 year plans. I don't like thinking that far in advance. Every time I've tried to over the…”
“if I optimize for that, having an ideal day, then having another one, then having another one, and just stacking together ideal days, I will…”
“And now I've decided that like yeah, if there's no space for it in the calendar, that means there's no space for it in my…”
From the episode
9 Systems To Build A Life Of Abundance - Sahil Bloom
Sahil Bloom