The Ideal Week
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
The ideal week extends time blocking beyond work projects to every facet of life. Partaker's premise is that everyone has the same hours, so a large part of why some people achieve more comes down to how deliberately they allocate that resource. The default week starts and you hang on to the back of a train, reacting from one thing to the next. Instead you design a template: workouts and guilt-free leisure go in first as real calendar appointments, then focus blocks for the single most important project, then everything else is consolidated by type. The diagnostic that makes it bite is comparing what you say matters to what is actually on the calendar. If the book needs four hours a day, the four appointments must exist.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
List what a good week must contain
Work through the recurring commitments a well-run week requires: strategic thinking time, reviewing the numbers, one-to-ones with everyone who reports to you, deep work, training, family and friends.
Pro tip Partaker's scaleup assessment surfaces these as weekly action points rather than one-off projects.
- 2
Schedule health first
Workouts go into the calendar as appointments, not intentions. They are the first blocks placed, before any work is arranged around them.
- 3
Schedule guilt-free leisure and relationships next
Dinners, friends, time off and free time get placed early and without guilt, so they are not what gets crushed when the week fills up.
Watch out Leaving leisure unscheduled guarantees it becomes the residual, which is exactly how the home leg of the stool collapses.
- 4
Block focus mornings on the most important project
Assign specific mornings to uninterrupted focus work on whatever is currently the highest-leverage project.
- 5
Consolidate like activities
Group one-to-ones together, batch external meetings, cluster podcasts, cluster filming and content creation, so context switching happens between days rather than between hours.
- 6
Audit stated priority against actual appointments
Ask how many hours a day the top priority ideally needs, then check whether that many calendar appointments exist. If they do not, the priority is a wish.
Pro tip This single question is what moved Ali from stuck to shipping on his book.
In the wild
Ali was struggling to get his book written. Partaker asked how many hours a day he should ideally be writing. Ali said four. Partaker then asked where the calendar appointments were that showed those four scheduled hours per day. There were none. The question was almost too obvious to ask, which is precisely why nobody had asked it.
→ Ali ran with the ideal week, and it became a core part of the productivity systems and tools he now teaches.
Common mistakes
Only blocking work, leaving life to chance
Standard time blocking covers projects and meetings and leaves health, relationships and rest as whatever survives. Partaker's version puts those in first, which is the difference between a productivity tactic and a way of protecting the health and home legs of the stool.
Treating the calendar as a record, not a design
If you only ever put things into the week as they arrive, you are hanging on to the back of a train. The ideal week is a template designed in advance that incoming requests must fit into.
From the transcript
“it's sort of like the week starts and you're just hanging on to the back of a train you know reacting from one thing to…”
“where is your workouts they need to be scheduled they are calendar appointments”
“block out certain mornings for Focus work I'm going to group together you know oneto ones I'm going to do external meetings here I might…”
From the episode
Confronting my CEO coach - Eric Partaker
Eric Partaker