The model week we build with business owners and executives, laid out hour by hour. Thirty-five working hours, ten of them reserved for the week you actually get.
Your week, after meetings
0 hours
left for everything that isn't a meeting or an interruption. Deep work, admin, email, and the one project that would actually change your position.
Two-page printable and an editable spreadsheet, both sent to your inbox.
What's inside
Most people build a week in the order things ask for it: meetings first, then work in the gaps, then their life in whatever survives. Build it in this order instead and the week holds when something goes wrong.
Dinner, the morning you don't take calls, the standing thing with your kid. It goes down while the week is still empty, before there's any work on the page to build around.
Payroll, the board call, school pickup. The handful of things that genuinely cannot be placed anywhere else.
Two hours a day held for unplanned and unwanted work. Ten of the week's thirty-five hours, reserved for interruptions that haven't happened yet.
Your one leveraged priority, in your peak hours, while you're still expensive. Not at 4pm on Thursday.
Batched into afternoons, into what's left. A week with the first four passes already placed holds fewer of them, and you chose the ones it holds.
Friday, when your energy is lowest and the work is dumb enough to match.
FAQ
A two-page printable plus an editable spreadsheet showing a full working week hour by hour, built from the planning method Demir and Carey Bentley teach business owners and executives. Page one is the model week. Page two is a blank grid you fill in yourself.
A calendar is a container, and whatever goes in first sets the shape of everything after it. Most people place meetings first, their own work in the gaps, and their life in whatever survives. Reverse that order and the same blocks produce a completely different week.
Most templates show a tidy grid where nothing goes wrong, so the first interruption proves the grid was a fantasy and you quit on it by Thursday.
This one budgets for the interruption. Ten of its thirty-five working hours are held for unplanned and unwanted work, so when a client escalates on Tuesday the time comes out of a block that exists for it.
Business owners, executives and managers who run something other people depend on, and whose week fills up with other people's emergencies. It assumes you carry real responsibility rather than that you need to try harder.
Yes. Enter your email and both files are sent to your inbox within seconds. No payment, no trial, and nothing to buy to receive them.
Demir and Carey Bentley, founders of Lifehack Method and WSJ and USA Today bestselling authors of Winning the Week.
Free printable and spreadsheet. Build next week in the order that holds.