Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 269 | How to Craft Your Ideal Week and its Energy Output

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Ep. 269 | How to Craft Your Ideal Week and its Energy Output · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  Try to find what works for you. And so that could be a hump like ours, you know, or it can be even more like a wave. What's up guys, welcome to Five Minute Fatherhood. Wanted to talk about how you craft
• 0:16
  Your ideal week in terms of the kind of productivity flow or even the energy output of your week. And Jeff, I noticed you and Alyssa talked about this and then April and I talked about this a little bit. I wrote about it in the Jeremy's Journal email that we sent out family teams and that is...
• 0:33
  designing what you guys referred to, which I loved, was like a hump-shaped week. And we've been living into that for a long time, but that's a great way to put it, which is that you kind of build up to a sort of a peak. For us, it's usually Tuesday.
• 0:51
  And then you start to come down a little bit and sort of gently arrive into your Sabbath day. So we've been sort of tweaking our weekly rhythm for many, many years. And we discovered that when you work six days and rest one, what I think I initially assumed was that you would have like maximum productivity Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and then rest.
• 1:17
  But when you live into weekly rhythm, it actually starts to make a lot of sense to sort of like build up to like a peak and then they sort of come down. I found that that actually maximizes productivity and utilizes energy even better. And so for us, what that looks like is we call Sunday soft launch Sunday, which is sort of like slowly are building up.
• 1:41
  And then our peak really happens on what we call Tough Tuesday. And then we start to come down. And we usually have kind of almost like another little peak on Thursday. Wednesday is usually a little bit easier day. Our media night's on a Wednesday night. But Tuesday night, we usually host something pretty intense at our house in the evening. And then Thursday night, we also host something.
• 2:03
  And so those are busier nights for us, and they tend to be 12 to 16-hour workdays. And then we really come down. And then Monday, Wednesday, Friday tend to be a lot easier workdays where we just chill in the evening and have stuff we just do with our family. And then we just rest. But, yeah, Jeff, how have you guys thought about this? I would love to, you know, even with a family with young kids who thinks about, okay, how do I think about designing the ideal week from an energy productivity perspective?
• 2:32
  Yeah. So there's a couple different ways, but I think, uh, yeah, it's like, try to find what works for you. Um, and so that could be a hump like ours, you know, or it can be even more like a wave, you know, like it can go up and down, up and down, or it can be like a, you know, a wave that's going down. I don't, you know, or it can be a particle. I don't know. You know, I just waves and particles. I was, they put those together. Um, what was that famous theory of like when you, when, when something's observed and it changes from a wave to a particle, you know? Yeah. I just love that stuff.
• 2:58
  Yeah, exactly. So your week can be like that. If you observe it, it turns to a particle. But I think there's a lot of different ways. Give yourself grace, tweak it, and then just kind of like experiment. That's what it comes down to us. We're fairly actually new to this. I would say only this last year we've really kind of tried to, I feel like we've done it naturally or just by default, but then to really step into it, call it out and name it just really recent. And so step into that.
• 3:20
  And that can mean a lot of things like, you know, it's easy to understand what this means when you maybe work from home. So all of us can understand that right now or maybe have a self-employed lifestyle. But when we go back to work, I think and maybe people still have, you know, they have to go to an office or a certain place at a certain time. That doesn't negate you from living this. We don't just mean like, oh, your work. I think we mean just like the spirit and tone of the entire household. So even if you have a normal nine to five, I still think there's a level of up and down or parabola like nature that you want to put to your week for energy sake.
• 3:50
  Um, whether that's, you know, your most intense days of hospitality in the middle of the week and naming that maybe it's your most intense days of like family connection in the middle of the week and naming that I know for us, the most helpful thing about it is, is an end from, from an energy standpoint. So there's a different bunch of different reasons for us. I think understanding that we're kind of easing back down into the week, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Um,
• 4:12
  helps us front load our week better. So we actually almost sometimes even peak on Monday sometimes because like, we almost want to start and then fade out rather than what used to happen is we would get to Friday and I still had a lot of work to do. And so then I would just be like trying to like, you know, go crazy before Sabbath. And what I realized is I could tell myself to shut off at five o'clock on Friday, but my body wasn't ready to shut off at five o'clock on Friday. You
• 4:39
  And so I realized my body literally needs an off ramp and, and giving my body an off ramp really changed a lot of things from an energy standpoint and just being able to truly enter into rest. So that's what I would say.
• 4:50
  That's really good. So you guys have kind of like a ski slope week. Yeah, exactly. The Monday. Yes. That's cool. Yeah. And you guys, this just takes time to like kind of iterate on as a family and figure out, like Jeff said, what works for you and what sort of maximizes your week and the way your family is wired. And usually the first place where people start to tweak this is if you're working full time outside the home or whatever is how you steward your evenings.
• 5:19
  Um, one of the, you know, do you do two evenings or three evenings out of the house back to back? Well, that's going to create a certain shape to your week and maybe it's too intense and you need to like make it more of a hump or more of a wave or more of a ski slope. Um, and if all of this sounds new to you guys, um, we really encourage you to go to family teams.com and check out the seven day family. Um,
• 5:39
  What we talk about, April and I and Jeff and Alyssa walk you guys through how you set up your seven-day rhythm as a family. And this has been incredibly helpful for us and for the Bethkes and for many other families just to try to figure out, like, what does it look like to balance all of the demands together?
• 5:59
  that are on a family, and how do you improve that over time? And so we feel like the best sort of framework for that was given to us in Genesis chapter 1. God gave us the week as a gift for us to order our lives by, and if you're not taking advantage of that gift, you're going to
• 6:20
  It's very difficult to get that balance right unless you construct intentionally a seven-day rhythm. And so go check that out, familyteams.com. One of my favorite things that we have on there, you guys, is that we have a bundle that bundles the seven-day family course with the family plan calendar, which is where you can see your entire week in one large sort of paper calendar where you can work it out with your kids, with your spouse. So go to familyteams.com and check that out.