Taking fifteen minutes every Friday has stopped my Mondays feeling like a tsunami of tasks–and made my weeks much gentler.
Monday mornings used to be the moment I hit the ground running and got immediately overwhelmed by my calendar and my to-do list. A couple of years ago I landed on a different approach, and I’ve done my Friday review and plan every week since.
It takes ten to fifteen minutes. It’s not a system, exactly; it’s more like a handful of questions. But it’s been a key routine in making my weeks feel more spacious, and more gentle. And if you’d like to try this yourself, I made a free downloadable for you (scroll down to the bottom for the link).
First, the calendar
The first thing I do is open my calendar and look at the week ahead. (I use Fantastical, which I’ve had for years and love mostly for how well it plays with everything else Apple [affiliate link].)
The questions I ask myself are simple:
What’s actually on my calendar? Not just work—everything. Client calls, our cleaner on Mondays, social things, and during the academic year my teaching job, which takes Mondays and Wednesdays.
Does anything need to move or be delegated?
Does anything need prep? A Substack live means looking at the questions beforehand. A client call means blocking fifteen minutes to reread our previous notes—half an hour if it’s someone new to me.
Does anything need follow-up afterwards? Client calls mean sending notes. A planning call in Grow means light editing, uploading the recording, and emailing round any useful resources.
Any to-dos that pop up go straight to my to-do list while I’m looking at it.
The other thing I’m checking for, and this one matters more than I thought it would: do I have appointments every single day? I’ve noticed that a week with something in it every day, however small, diminishes my capacity for everything else. So I try to not have plans every day of the week.
Then, the to-do list
I use OmniFocus and have done for about fifteen years. I probably don’t use half its features, but I love how well it handles recurring things—including things that recur once or twice a year, like jobs in the garden. It also allows me to create projects with tasks in them, so I can see a whole project at once or just what’s due on a given day.
I check the list against the calendar, day by day, and ask whether each day is actually feasible.
Here’s an example. I recorded this video just before a break, so I looked ahead to my first week back—the week of 17 August, when both my business and my teaching job start again.
Monday is a teaching day, and the cleaner is here in the morning, which is lovely and also takes a bit of capacity. I have a habit of not opening my inbox first thing, and I especially don’t want to start a whole new academic year with email. So Monday is for prepping a course. Email is work too, obviously, but I want to begin with the kind of work that feels like work, not busy work.
Tuesday is a business day: some client check-ins, a reminder about Grow office hours, prep for the Substack live. Looking at it written out, it’s a light day and I could add things. I’ve deliberately not. The live starts at 6pm my time, I’m looking forward to it, but I know I’ll need the extra room around it.
Wednesday is teaching, and the first day I open my teaching job inbox. There’s a small asterisk next to one item—an overview of deadlines for me and my colleagues. The asterisk means: I’d want to do this, but it isn’t time-sensitive or important enough that it has to happen this week. I started doing this a few years ago and it has made a surprising amount of difference. It gives a thing permission to exist without demanding anything.
Thursday I start writing a newsletter. Not write it—start it. It’ll go out the following week, which gives me room.
Friday is a client call in the afternoon, and a bit of time in the morning refreshing my affiliates and resources page.
Protecting buffer space
When I’m moving things around, the priority order is always the same: clients first, then the newsletter, then everything else with a deadline attached. Anything below that can move.
But the real aim of this process is to have buffer space, and I create it in two places.
In the calendar. On my business days there’s a block called “break for movement” and another called “allow for after movement”. I need to lie down around midday—read, doze, sometimes nap. I found it almost impossible to protect when it wasn’t written down, partly because I’d let it slide, and partly because if it isn’t in my calendar people can book over it. So now it’s there. I’ll also add a one-hour buffer before something like that evening live, so nobody can schedule into the hour I need to be quiet in.
On the to-do list. Simply by not filling up days just because I think I can do more. I am allowed to not work.
None of this is about fitting more in, or being productive. It’s about making sure I protect my capacity, and to have some wiggle room when I need to.
Looking ahead
I also use the Friday slot to glance three or four weeks ahead. Mostly I’m looking for that same pattern—appointments creeping into every day—so I can tackle it if needed.
Sometimes I’ll block a day out entirely, either in my scheduling software (affiliate link) so nobody can book it, or just as a note to myself. And looking that far ahead means I can still move things easily: asking a friend to reschedule because that week has become heavy, occasionally moving business or teaching things too.
-> Read more on how I plan my weeks and months: “An anti-hustle approach to planning your weeks and days” and “How to plan your week when standard time management doesn’t work” (post + video).
Something to try
If this short and sweet process resonates with you, I’d love for you to try it–the buffer is often the most powerful for many people. Put one block in next week’s calendar that isn’t for anything, and defend it the way you’d defend a work call.
And I’m genuinely curious: do you plan your weeks deliberately, or are you a bit surprised every Monday by what’s on the list? App or paper? I love talking about this.
Leave a comment here and I’ll reply.
Want to try this yourself? I’ve made a free downloadable that walks you through this process step by step.
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