We have the opportunity to make every week perfect. Each of our lives is perfectly aligned to achieve our goals. Our job as leaders is to make sure that our time, energy and attention is spent on the things that are most important to us. That requires us to plan our week and make time for our priorities. One of the best ways to identify your priorities is to plan what your perfect week would be.

For me, a perfect week includes many different things.  My perfect work week includes multiple interactions where I make significant differences to the people I am coaching – helping them think, act and be better. My perfect week includes time for special interactions with my family members. It includes interactions with friends. In a perfect week, I exercise four or five times in a very specific way. In a perfect week, I eat the right food and have the right nutrition. In a perfect week, I get the proper amount of rest, relaxation, and sleep.  A perfect week also includes some of my favorite activities, like golf, dinner with friends, and a special dinner with my wife.

Everyone has the same 168 hours in a week, (not counting 5 hours of sleep per night). How do you want to spend your 168 hours?  When doing this activity, take a normal work week and very specifically write down what you would be doing during each of those 168 hours in a perfect week.  You may be surprised to find time you didn’t know you had to schedule what’s important to you.

You get to include the big things into your perfect week, and you should also include the everyday things like driving to and from work and your kids to and from activities, cleaning your house, planning, shopping for and preparing meals, doing laundry … all the things that you do in a week.

You should also include some of the activities that bring meaning to your days, like reading for learning or enjoyment, volunteering, watching your favorite tv shows, attending a religious service or meeting, making that phone call to a family member or friend, perusing social media … whatever is important to you.  Make sure that you take that 168 hours, plan it out and figure out what the perfect week is for you.

If you run out of time in your perfect week, consider ways to double up on activities.  If you know that you drive about 3-4 hours a week for work, you can make that perfect by learning while you’re in your car with audio books or catching up with friends on phone calls or listening to new music you downloaded.   When you try and operationalize your perfect week, it might be difficult to accomplish. However, the process of doing this exercise helps you crystallize what’s important to you and why.

As you realize, you can never have a perfect week if you’ve never planned a perfect week. You don’t know how far away you are from experiencing it if you don’t know what that is. When people say they don’t have time to exercise, or have dinner with their family, or relax, they haven’t planned it. They have used their time to do different things instead.

If your perfect week includes watching your favorite TV show or watching the sunset and if you miss it, then it’s imperfect – plan it in!  A perfect week should be refreshing and positive; it shouldn’t be a drain to do the things you choose to do. During your perfect week you’ll feel high-energy, happy, and motivated. Your perfect week doesn’t take your time, it gives you time.