🌟 Preview our Weekly Block Blueprint mini-course! We’re sharing a 3ish-minute excerpt from a powerful workshop where Charlie walks through creating a schedule that actually works. While recorded in 2020, these proven principles are more relevant than ever. Paid subscribers get access to the full 24-minute mini-course. Consider upgrading to unlock this and other exclusive resources.
This month, we’ve been focusing on capacity — the time, energy, attention, and resources available for our projects. Understanding capacity isn’t just about counting available hours — it’s about creating a schedule that respects your energy rhythms and aligns with your priorities.
The way we structure our days and weeks has an enormous impact on what we accomplish. Yet most of us haven’t been taught how to create schedules that work with our natural rhythms instead of against them. We end up with calendars that look productive on paper but leave us feeling drained and wondering why our meaningful projects remain untouched.
Or we spend our days in fire-fighting mode, tackling work as it comes, reacting to whatever seems most urgent rather than what’s truly important to us. Our most meaningful work often gets relegated to the “when I have time” bucket, while emergencies, emergent-cies, and other people’s priorities (OPP) fill our days.
I feel like I’m always playing catch-up.
It’s a refrain I (Maghan) hear often when I start working with new clients. And when we dig deeper, the conversation usually goes something like this:
Client: I really want to finish writing my book.
Me: Great! Where is it showing up in your schedule right now?
Client: [Long pause] ... ummm, well…
(Yes, this is a conversation I’ve had with many clients but also one Charlie has had with me a time or two, or three…)
More often than not, this is the real challenge my clients face. They feel perpetually behind. It’s not that they don’t know what matters to them — it’s that they haven’t created the right conditions for that work to happen. When we dig deeper, we typically find that their schedules simply don’t match how they actually work and what truly matters to them.
Creating a schedule that works isn't just about managing time. It’s about managing energy and attention in a way that honors both your priorities and your natural working style.
Beyond Calendar Tetris: What We Get Wrong About Scheduling
When creating schedules, we typically fall into five key traps that sabotage our best intentions:
We treat all time as equal — assuming any open block on our calendar can hold any type of work, regardless of our energy levels. Every minute of every day is not created equal, yet we plan as if they are.
We plan to 100% capacity — leaving no margin for unexpected events or lower energy days. This approach is like planning a road trip that assumes perfect weather, no traffic, and no bathroom breaks — unrealistic and sets us up for frustration.
We expect perfection from the start — forgetting that creating an effective schedule is an iterative process. Your ideal schedule emerges through experimentation, not from perfect planning on the first try.
We treat the schedule as a rigid contract — beating ourselves up when we inevitably deviate from it. A good schedule should be more like a supportive framework than a straitjacket, guiding your days while allowing for the natural unpredictability of life.
We set it and forget it — failing to revisit and adjust our schedules as seasons change, both literally and figuratively. Our energy patterns shift with the seasons, our work responsibilities evolve, and our priorities change over time.
Fortunately, there’s a better approach. By asking yourself six essential questions, you can create a schedule that addresses these challenges and works with your natural rhythms rather than against them. These questions help you design a schedule based on who you actually are, not who you think you should be.
Six Essential Questions for Creating Your Ideal Schedule
Before you start filling in time slots, ask yourself these questions to create a schedule that works with — not against — your natural rhythms:
1. What dimensions of life are you prioritizing?
Your schedule should reflect your current priorities across the dimensions of your life. In “The 10 Dimensions of Life,” we identify ten areas that contribute to our thriving, from Physical and Mental to Professional and Community.
If you’re focusing on your Mental dimension, your schedule might include focus blocks set aside for learning activities during peak cognitive hours. If Community matters most right now, you might schedule social activities when you're most energized for connection.
2. What's your chronotype?
When do you naturally have the best energy? Most of us fall into one of three patterns:
Morning Larks (“early birds”): Peak energy early in the day
Night Owls: Best energy in the evening and nighttime
Afternoon Emus: Hit their stride around midday through early evening
Your chronotype should guide when you schedule different types of blocks. Fighting against your natural rhythm creates unnecessary struggle. I (Maghan) am an Afternoon Emu, so I am hesitant to schedule any deep creative work before 11am or after 6pm.
3. What balance of blocks do you need?
We’ve found it helpful to think about four types of time blocks:
Focus blocks: 90- to 120-minute periods for creative, high-concentration work
Admin blocks: 30- to 60-minute periods for routine tasks and organization
Social blocks: Time dedicated to meetings, collaboration, and human connection
Recovery blocks: Periods that restore your energy (varies by individual)
Charlie emphasizes focusing on recovery and focus blocks first:
Your exercise here, should you choose to accept it, is actually just going to be to focus on your recovery blocks and your focus blocks. Why those two, you asked? Because we know that those are the two that people have the hardest time actually getting on their schedule and honoring.
In the full video, Charlie dives deeper into why these blocks form the foundation of a schedule that works.
4. Where do you work best on what?
Where you work has a big impact on your focus, momentum, and creativity. When building out your ideal schedule, consider not just what you’ll be spending your time on but where that time will be spent.
This includes both physical environments (noise levels, natural light, organization) and digital ones (different devices, apps, or website blockers for different types of work).
Match your environment to the work you’re doing, and you’ll find your schedule naturally becomes more effective.
5. Are some days better for specific kinds of work?
Consider adopting daily themes — dedicating different days to different types of work. Maybe Mondays are for planning, Tuesdays for content creation, Wednesdays for client work, and so on.
These themes become defaults, not rigid requirements. When something more important comes up, you can adjust, but having these anchors creates natural structure. In the full workshop video, Charlie walks through specific examples of how he uses theming in his own weekly schedule and how it creates powerful defaults without becoming restrictive.
6. Do you need different schedules for different seasons or modes?
Our energy and focus change with seasons, both environmental and personal. Your summer schedule might look different from your winter one. Similarly, you might need different schedules for different work modes or life circumstances.
I (Maghan) have found that revisiting my schedule quarterly helps me stay aligned with both nature’s rhythms and the changing demands of work and life. This also helps me identify when I’m in different modes — whether I’m deep in a creative
maker” internal work or focused more on external connections through coaching and facilitation.
Starting Your Weekly Block Blueprint
Now that you’ve explored these six questions and gained insights about your own patterns, it’s time to apply what you’ve learned to create a blueprint for your ideal schedule.
When creating your weekly block blueprint, don’t aim for perfection on the first try. Start by focusing on your recovery and focus blocks — the two types most people struggle to protect. These are essential foundations: focus blocks fuel your best work, while recovery blocks fuel you and your ability to get to that best work (and everything else that comes your way).
As Charlie emphasizes at the start of the workshop, we should take a lighter approach to scheduling:
I want us to be lighter about it. Imagine that we’re creating a schedule that feeds more moments of laughter, that feeds more moments of love, that feeds more moments of wonder — not just another moment where you crank harder and get more done.
Your first go won’t be your final one. Remember challenge #3: expecting perfection from the start? Creating an effective schedule is an iterative process. Treat your first draft as an experiment — a hypothesis about what might work for you. As you live with it, you’ll discover what truly fits your rhythms and what needs adjustment.
One thing I’ve learned working with clients is that rigid adherence to a perfect schedule isn’t the goal (challenge #4). It’s creating a framework that helps you use your energy wisely, accomplish what matters most, and leave room for life’s inevitable surprises.
And remember, unless you’re a hermit living completely outside of society, your schedule will always require negotiation with others: partners, children, colleagues, clients. Build in flexibility for these negotiations, and remember that your schedule is a tool to serve you, not a prison to confine you.
To make this process concrete, we’ve created the Weekly Block Blueprint tool to help you map out your ideal week. You can also access it in Charlie’s post: “How to Be A Productive Powerhouse Using Time Blocking”, which provides additional context on the four blocks. This simple one-page worksheet will help you transform these insights into a visual plan for your week.
Want to dive deeper into creating a weekly schedule that honors your energy patterns while maximizing productivity? Upgrade your subscription today to access our exclusive mini-course, where Charlie walks through each question in detail and demonstrates how to create a personalized Weekly Block Blueprint.
Paid subscribers, you’ll have access to the full mini-course video, plus additional resources below. Please be sure you’re logged in to your paid account.
