Let's Get Better Life
Worksheet

Weekly Capacity Worksheet

Start with the hours the week appears to offer and take out what is committed before any planning begins. What is left is a budget, and the plan has to fit inside it.

1. The hours you actually have

Use the last two weeks of your calendar, not what you hope this week holds.

2. The work, sized and ranked

List in order of importance, most important first. Tick the two or three that must happen even if the week goes badly.

How it follows the essay

The subtraction comes first: meetings, correspondence, the administrative residue every job carries, and the unplanned work that arrives anyway. On one ordinary calendar a forty-hour week came down to twenty-two plannable hours. Yours will land elsewhere, but rarely far from half.

Close to a fifth of those plannable hours stays deliberately empty, so one difficult morning does not take the rest of the week with it. Every task carries an estimate, and the margin covers the parts estimates leave out: finding where you left off, gathering files, the last pass that turns nearly done into sent. The essay prescribes no figure for that margin; start at 25 percent and adjust it after a few Friday reviews.

When the work is larger than the budget, the worksheet names the casualties from the bottom of your ranked list, never the must-happen items, so the decision is made on Sunday rather than forced on Wednesday.

The method is set out in full in Planning a Week You Can Actually Finish.

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