One of the exercises that I often assign to clients is to create their “ideal week.”

By sitting down and thinking carefully about what you need to get done in a week/month and then blocking off time to get those things done, at a time when you have the optimal energy to complete them, you can massively increase your productivity.

Creating that ideal week also helps you find those things that you don’t want to do and eliminate them from your calendar!

Imagine your worst possible day/week.

What are the things that make your work a drag? Think about times you wanted to quit, or crawl under your desk and take a nap, what was happening on those days?

For me, it would include:

• Business Travel
• Commuting
• Back-to-back meetings
• Getting behind on assignments/to-do’s
• Going back and forth to schedule meetings.
• Missing meetings

So I built a business that includes:

• No business travel.
• I work at home, no commute.
• My assistant books all my meetings and includes 30 minute buffers between meetings. Time for bio-breaks, catching up on to-do’s, etc.

What are the things that you want to eliminate from your job? What are the situations you never want to be in?

How could you build a business or role that does that?

P.S If you like this idea, I borrowed it from Andrew Wilkinson’s Blog “The Power of Anti-Goals” it’s worth a read!