Make a full plan for next week with outcomes, time blocks and a buffer.
Open your three priorities from lesson 1.3, your weekly time map from lesson 1.4 and your calendar for next week, and set aside 30 minutes. Earlier lessons covered three separate steps: planning a week's outcomes, planning a single day, and building a time-blocked calendar. Now you combine them into one plan for next week. The exercise has two parts. You make the plan now, and on Friday you spend ten minutes comparing it with what actually happened, so the plan for the week after is better.
Your priorities show where the week should go. Your time map shows where weeks like this actually go, and how much room you really have. From the time map, note two numbers: the hours you spent on urgent but not important work, and the hours that served your priorities.
The second number sets your target. Say you did 10 hours of priority work out of 45 last week. In that case, planning 25 hours of priority work next week is not a real plan. A realistic first step is a few more priority hours than last time, plus the time freed by the one task you chose in lesson 1.4 to cut or batch.
Write two to four outcomes for the week, each linked to one of your priorities, using the method from lesson 3.1. Estimate the hours each outcome needs, then add a margin for the planning fallacy from lesson 3.2. If you have done similar work before, use how long that took as your guide.
Put the outcomes on the calendar before anything else. The best slots are usually mornings, or whichever hours your time map showed were least interrupted. Block each one as focus time with a clear label. A two-hour outcome might fit in one block. A six-hour outcome should be spread over two or three days.
Blocking outcomes first is the main point of the method. If you add them after meetings and admin, they land in the leftover gaps, and that is how important work got squeezed out in the first place.
Once the outcomes are in, add these to the calendar:
meetings already booked, with time for prep and travel one or two message and admin blocks a day, as in lesson 3.3 at least one buffer block a day personal commitments that affect your energy or time, such as a late dinner or an early appointment
If the calendar overflows, something has to give. You can move an outcome to the following week, decline or shorten a meeting, or ask your manager which of two things matters more. Make that choice now, while you can still see the whole week. If you leave it, you find out on Thursday night that the week doesn't fit.
A finished plan has your weekly outcomes written at the top with their linked priorities, and a Monday to Friday calendar where the outcomes have blocks, meetings and admin are blocked, and every day has a buffer. On Friday it gains five lines of comparison.
Marcus is an operations team lead (an invented example, and his hours are example figures). His week has about 45 working hours. His time map showed driver issues filling 7 to 9am every day, so he treats that time as a fixed block, meaning a recurring period the time map shows is always taken, which he plans around as a given.
He set three outcomes. The first is for Siti, on his team, to run the roster once with Marcus watching. It is linked to team stability and needs about 3 hours over two sessions. The second is last month's late deliveries listed by cause, with one fix agreed with the warehouse supervisor. It is linked to on-time delivery and needs about 4 hours plus a 1-hour meeting. The third is drafting appraisal comments for Lina, also on his team. It is linked to his team priority and needs about 1.5 hours.
He blocked the outcomes first. The roster sessions went on Tuesday and Thursday at 10am. The late-delivery analysis went on Monday and Wednesday from 10am to noon, and the meeting with the warehouse supervisor on Thursday at 3pm. Lina's comments went on Friday at 10am. After that he added the daily 7 to 9am driver block, message blocks at 1.30pm and 5pm, a buffer from 3.30 to 4.30pm on most days, and his existing meetings.
His outcome blocks total 9.5 hours (3 + 4 + 1 + 1.5 = 9.5). His time map showed only 3 priority hours the week before, so 9.5 hours is still ambitious. He kept the plan because the cut he chose in lesson 1.4, moving the volume report to a simpler format, frees about 3 hours.
On Friday, take ten minutes and write five lines under your plan. Write down which outcomes were done, partly done or not started. Note which blocks held, which were taken over, and what took them over. Compare how long the outcomes really took against your estimates. Record what the buffer was used for. Finally, write one change for next week's plan.
Marcus found that the roster outcome was done. The late-delivery analysis was half done because a customer escalation took up Wednesday, and every buffer block was used. The change he made for next week was to plan two buffers on days with a warehouse audit.
This Friday comparison is the start of the weekly review you will build in module 8.
Now plan your own week, starting with the outcomes, and put a ten-minute reminder on Friday afternoon for the comparison.
Fill in the weekly plan template with your outcomes and time blocks. At the end of the week, write five lines comparing the plan with what happened.
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