You find many examples of these three kinds of time.
For an actor or a musician, it could be:
Time spend on stage in front of audiences
Time spent on rehearsing
Time for free days and vacations
For a sports professional:
Gametime
Practice time
Time for rest - no game, no practice
For any professional:
Focus days, some call them push-days: Days for your most important work. These are activities that generate the most direct value.
It can be days of sales meetings for a salesperson. Days of surgery for a surgeon.
Days spent empowering people or other critical activities in the production of you are a production manager.
And so on...
Buffer days, some call them prep days or admin days.
These are days for preparing, planning, and doing things that do not demand so much energy and attention.
These days usually take less energy and have less tension in them but are essential to perform well in your Focus days.
Free days.
These are days with no work, no thinking of work, no reading books about work, no peeking in the mailbox, or checking texts on your phone. Here, YOU GIVE YOUR BRAIN TIME TO REST!
What you will notice if you get more rigorous with your Free days is that you get more productive during your Push and Prepare days.
So this weekend - I invite you to be rigorous with your time off work - in a way that works for you.
You know what works best for you! The point is to increase the time and quality of time you are not engaged in work and notice what happens.
If you need to work this weekend. Try doing it first thing Saturday and get it out of the way instead of thinking of it 27 times Saturday and Sunday and only get to it Sunday evening.
Or do what I did for years, think of things that I should do over the weekend. Don’t do them on Saturday, don´t do them on Sunday either, spend the weekend thinking I should do things, not do them, and experiencing neither working or fully enjoying my free time. Not very smart!
My weekend this weekend?
I´ll work up until noon on Saturday*
Doing some shopping for our new apartment in the afternoon. Birthday dinner (yes mine, hurrah!), on Saturday evening.
Sunday… hmm.. probably packing a lot of things in boxes, since we're moving in 10 days and workout at the Healthclub in the afternoon.
No intentional thoughts of work from Saturday lunch onwards!
Full focus again Monday morning prepping for a group training on personal leadership in Copenhagen next week.
Enjoy your weekend.
/Wilhelm
After the video page you can also book a time for a call with me if you want to talk about how to expand you personal leadership, find better focus and be fully free on your free time.
• My Saturday morning this week is buffer time: Reflecting, summing up the week, planning next week's activities. Happy to do this Saturday when a lot of people are out doing errands in the crowded stores. I was out in the stores Wednesday afternoon when there were way fewer people, lots of parking places, staff in the stores were available, and no lines at the cashier. Doing things when other people don´t do them is a topic for another blogpost some time...
/W
