383: How to Plan Your Week Around Your Energy and Capacity Instead of Your To-Do List

383: How to Plan Your Week Around Your Energy and Capacity Instead of Your To-Do List

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[00:00:00] If you've ever created the perfect weekly to-do list on a Sunday afternoon or a Monday morning only to feel behind by Tuesday, then this episode is for you. I work with grad students, postdocs, faculty, and professionals from many different backgrounds. Many of them are first-gen scholars or children of immigrants. Many are balancing multiple roles and responsibilities as students, employees, parents, caregivers, partners, and community members. Some are also navigating disability, chronic illness, or their neurodivergence. Many are also dealing with exhausting systemic barriers like racism, sexism, ableism, and financial stress, among others.

All of those realities shape how much capacity you may have in any given week. [00:01:00] So it's no surprise then that many people come to me feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, and wondering why they can't seem to keep up like everyone else around them. They know something needs to change. Something is up. And what often comes up is that their weekly planning system isn't accounting for everything that they're dealing with on a regular basis.

Their planner is only accounting for work-related tasks instead of accounting for their life and their capacity too. So today, I want to introduce you to a different way of thinking about weekly planning. This will be a way that honors both your humanity and your workload, and also recognizes that your work exists within the context of your life.

It's not separate from it. I'm gonna explain why traditional weekly planning often falls short. I'll introduce the difference between time, [00:02:00] energy, and capacity, and I'm also gonna share a practical way that you can plan more sustainable weeks. Let's get into it.

Welcome to the award-winning Grad School Femtoring Podcast, the place where first generation BIPOC students and professionals can listen in on inclusive grad school stories and gain practical tools for sustainable success. This is Doctora Yvette Martinez-Vu, a certified coach, consultant, author, and speaker.

I will be serving as your femtor, providing you with insider knowledge to help you thrive in grad school and beyond.

Welcome back everyone to another episode of the Grad School Femtoring Podcast.

This is [00:03:00] your host, Doctora Yvette, and let's get started with why traditional planning often falls short for so many of us. So when you think about planning, a lot of times the first thing that comes to mind is your to-do list and your calendar.

A traditional to-do list can treat every task as if it's equally important or that it's completely possible to get done. But what it doesn't do is that it often doesn't recognize that writing something like a book chapter or a dissertation requires a different kind of energy than responding to a few emails.

It also doesn't account for maybe you're someone with a chronic illness. Let's say you have migraine days, or you've got medical appointment and bureaucracy days, or you're dealing with family emergencies more often than others. Or you are navigating [00:04:00] environments where you're the only one, and so you feel like you have to constantly prove yourself, explain yourself, and mask who you are.

All of this taps and drains your capacity. And then if your stress, sleep, and emotions impact your ability to sustain attention, to remember things, to get work done, it's no wonder you may be dealing with a brain that doesn't function the same way each day. I can tell you from experience that there are days that I'm dealing with more stress, and those also happen to be the days when it's the hardest to do the most important but cognitively draining work.

In fact, I'm having one of those days right now, if I'm being honest with you. And that's why I'm recording the episode, because recording an episode for me is a low lift. It's fun, and I have been avoiding, again, the more cognitively draining work. And so all this to say that if [00:05:00] you are planning as though you can do the same thing every day, then you are creating unrealistic expectations for yourself, which can quickly turn to you feeling disappointed, frustrated, and guilty. So this brings me to talking about knowing the difference between time, energy, and capacity.

This is gonna sound really basic, but I do wanna make that distinction, and I do think it's important. So when we think about time, we're thinking about a clock that's running, and we're thinking about hours in any day or in a week, and this is the most objective of the three. A lot of times folks will think about how they might only have eight hours a day to work, or if we're being honest, it's more like three to four hours a day because most people can't work beyond that when you're doing knowledge work, cognitively draining work. So time is how much time you have, [00:06:00] hours, minutes in a day or a week. Energy refers to your mental, physical, and emotional resources, how much of that you have available in any given moment. And your energy fluctuates, so it can change from day to day, from month to month, season to season, even moment to moment, and this affects your attention, your working memory, your cognitive flexibility, which impacts how much work you can get done and what type of work you can get done.

Next is capacity, and this is your usable ability to take on work right now after you have accounted for all your other competing demands and also accounted for your recovery needs. We all need recovery time, and some of us need more recovery time than others. And I know, yes, if you're one of those people like me, it can be very frustrating. [00:07:00] If you're thinking about this from a planning and organizational context, capacity is often discussed as your maximum amount that you can realistically handle in any given period of time.

So let's go back to thinking about time. Imagine you have eight open hours on your calendar, but you've just had a demanding week with caregiving or multiple nights of poor sleep. I'm thinking of my newborn mamas. I've got some clients who have babies, who have newborns and infants, and you're probably not getting a full eight hours of sleep that are uninterrupted.

And so yeah, you might have eight hours of time, but your capacity for doing cognitively demanding work may be much smaller. If you're planning eight hours of writing just because the calendar is free, it might not happen because you're ignoring the context of [00:08:00] your body and your brain, and that's the context that you're working with right now.

So that mismatch can create a sense of frustration that has very little to do with how brilliant you are. You're brilliant. That's why you are pursuing the goals that you're pursuing. So that is a given. But what's not a given is the capacity, the energy that you're working with in any given point of time.

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Together, we can create action plans that align with your capacity, your responsibilities, and your long-term vision. Clients often come to [00:09:00] coaching when they are preparing for major milestones like qualifying exams, defending a proposal, finishing dissertations, exploring new career paths, or building sustainable systems that work for them.

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Let's talk about a capacity-aware planning process. Now, this is just one process, right? There are many other ways you can do this, but I'm recommending one so that you can test it out and see if it works for you. And if it doesn't, that's okay. That's why I have over 380 episodes at this point, [00:10:00] and dozens of them are on the topic of sustainable productivity.

I will also link other similar episodes, and if you're on my newsletter, I will be telling you about other similar episodes as I release episodes. So there's gonna be something for you. But for today, I want you to open up your planner or your calendar, wherever you're planning your time, and then pause and ask yourself, "How much capacity do I realistically have this week?"

And you do need to be honest. Think about your stress levels, think about your sleep, think about how much else you have on your plate, think about what else is coming up for you this week. You can think about other meetings. You can think about if you have travel coming up, if you have specific deadlines.

You can even think about the emotional labor that you are doing all of the time, and this doesn't even have to do [00:11:00] with being a parent or a mother. Emotional labor can impact a lot of us, especially if you have more familial responsibilities or if you are of a specific gender. Like, there's just certain individuals that might have more emotional labor than others.

So anyway, think about all the things that are competing for your attention. And then you wanna assign the week with the type of capacity you have. Is this a high capacity week, a medium capacity week, or a low capacity week? And think about different weeks. Think about just examples of other weeks you've had in the past.

There might be weeks that you have a lot going on, there might be weeks that you don't have much going on, and there might be something in the middle. Ideally, you wanna have a balance, but we know that balance is unrealistic. But be honest about it. Are you typically working with a lower capacity? If so, state that.

And then you wanna identify two to three [00:12:00] meaningful, urgent, and/or important outcomes instead of just filling out a page with a dozen tasks. I feel like every time we just fill out a bunch of tasks and you only get one thing done, if any, it's just setting yourself up for failure and frustration and guilt.

So yes, you can have a separate to-do list where you write down everything that you have to get done, but for this week, you only need to look at and focus on two to three. And I mention that number because many people can complete dozens of tasks in a week, but usually you're only making substantial progress on a few major outcomes.

So that's why these two to three things, if they're the only things that you can get done, they need to be worthwhile. Those outcomes, those two to three things that you identified as meaningful, urgent, or important, they're your outcomes that are the priorities for the week, [00:13:00] and for any other tasks that you have done, they should be supporting those main priorities.

So now that you have your priorities, you wanna match your work to your energy. So you wanna save the writing, the analytical work, the strategic thinking work for your highest energy periods, highest energy moments, or highest energy days. So start to notice how your energy fluctuates day to day, week to week, or even certain days of the week you might have more energy than others.

Then use your lower energy moments for lower energy tasks. I've said this before, and I'm going to say it again, and I'm going to keep referencing this older episode. It's an oldie but a goodie on the ABC method of time management because it works. So match things based on your energy level. Something that's usually low energy is checking emails or scheduling a meeting or doing any kind of admin work.

So do that [00:14:00] when you have less energy. And then here's another thing, and I would say this is just as important, if not more important as everything else that you do when it comes to planning your week. Please, please, please protect your buffer time or what I call your wiggle room or your cushion time.

Add that to your calendar. Why do I say this? Because there is such a thing called a planning fallacy. Many of us fall victim to it. This means that we are overly optimistic about how much work we can get done, which then means that we will underestimate how long work will take. It happens over and over and over again.

That's why it's a phenomenon, because it comes up, and I'm probably calling you out right now 'cause you're probably doing this every single week. You sit down and you say, "I'm gonna do this, this, this, and this," and then every week you're like, "Oh no, I [00:15:00] didn't get all those things done." So how do you avoid the planning fallacy?

By leaving unscheduled time in your calendar. Yes, empty blocks of time. I mean it. You want breaks, you want buffers because why? It doesn't make you lazy. In fact, I don't believe in laziness. If you believe laziness is a thing, you have to read the book Laziness Does Not Exist. It's a great read. Go ahead. I highly recommend it.

But yes, leave some breaks. Leave some buffer time. This is gonna account for interruptions, for unexpected opportunities that might come up, and it's also gonna give you some recovery time. And I should say recovery time should be a separate part of your weekly planning, too. It shouldn't just be, I'm gonna squeeze in recovery time during my buffer time.

No. You want it to have a proper entry in your weekly planning system, too, because [00:16:00] that's how you keep your work sustainable. The more you support your wellbeing, the more likely you'll be able to sustain this cognitively demanding work that grad school and knowledge work requires. And I wanna mention something right now because I want to acknowledge that it's not easy, right?

I'm gonna share some reflective questions after this, but before I go into that, I know that, me encouraging you to do less, me encouraging you to add some blank space into your calendar, this is all great. It helps you to be more self-aware, it helps you to be more self-compassionate with yourself, and it is often not easy.

Why? Because I work with so many individuals. Y'all have so many things going on in your lives. You play so many roles. And we are living in some messy, messy systems that it means you may be trying to survive under [00:17:00] conditions that make it either difficult or nearly impossible to plan around your capacity.

So maybe you're someone who's working multiple jobs while going to school. Maybe you're a caregiver to both your children and your elderly parents. Maybe you're navigating chronic illness, disability, or a mental health condition. Maybe you're living with a lot of financial insecurity or housing instability, or maybe you're experiencing discrimination in your workplace or in your grad program.

Under these circumstances, there might be little room for you to rearrange your schedule or protect your energy. I know this. I work with full-time employees who are also navigating grad school. I'm having to carve out time for them that works with their schedule. And they sometimes only have one or two-hour blocks of time that I can see them because their schedule is so jam-packed.

So I have [00:18:00] an understanding, right? And the challenge in this case isn't that you haven't found the right planner or you haven't found the right productivity app. I do get a little bit annoyed when people ask me, like, "What's your preferred app?" Because more often than not that's not the issue, right?

You can find all these fancy tools and apps, and they can help to some extent. But the core issue, if it's not addressed, you're still gonna have the same issue. All this to say that I want you to give yourself credit because you're probably already doing your best within institutions and circumstances that place extraordinary demands on you.

And my hope is that what I shared earlier about how to plan your week will give you a different way of thinking about your week. Even if you can't change all of your circumstances, you might still be able to notice your capacity more and to do that with more compassion.

You might be able to adjust your expectations where [00:19:00] you can, so you're not so hard on yourself. Maybe it might encourage you to ask for help or support if and when that's available. And hopefully it will also help you recognize that your worth has never been determined by how much you can accomplish.

You're already probably doing way too much and not giving yourself enough credit for it. And so all of this is tied to this work that I do practically preaching about sustainable productivity because I'm not trying to have you do more work. I'm just trying to help you to do work that matters, and to do it in a way where you learn to work with yourself, and you also learn to recognize the barriers that you're navigating.

And that you start to recognize that you are part of a larger system, and that sometimes an individual planning system isn't always going to solve that, right? So [00:20:00] I wanna recognize that, that yes, I'm sharing these tips, these strategies, resources, insights, and at the same time, it might still be hard. It might still be challenging.

And I'm raising my hand because I too have felt, have especially felt the hard this year. So let's give you some reflective questions because I want you to keep thinking about this, and I want you to keep finding ways, even if they are baby steps, micro steps, to make things more manageable for yourself in any given week.

So the first question I'm gonna ask you to ask yourself is, when during the week do you consistently have the most mental energy? Maybe it's on a Monday because you've just had the weekend to decompress, or maybe, you do too much on the weekends, so Mondays are draining. So maybe it's on a Wednesday or a Thursday, or maybe it's a Friday or [00:21:00] a Saturday.

You name it. When do you have the most mental energy? What responsibilities regularly reduce or drain your capacity? Just think about that. Acknowledge it. I'm not telling you to change it, but just be aware. Which expectations about your workload and your productivity did you inherit from academic culture, maybe from your home and your family's culture, from your workplace, or from broader societal US American messaging?

And if you're in another country, you can think about your own country's messaging as well. Which aspects of my current workload are within my control, and which of them are shaped by systems or circumstances that are beyond my control, where I can give myself more compassion instead of self-judgment?

And what would your week look like if it reflected your actual [00:22:00] capacity rather than an idealized version of yourself? What I find interesting is that I see that a lot of folks will over-plan, and they'll think about this ideal week in their head of like, "Oh, I'll have all the time and energy. I'll feel great.

I'm gonna do this and this and this," instead of coming up with an ideal schedule. And it doesn't mean you're going to be able to match that ideal schedule, but that ideal schedule would mean doing less, having more empty space, resting more, having more leisurely time, or having more time to do things that align with your values.

So what would it look like if you went through that exercise of designing your ideal schedule if you had the choice, right? If you didn't have to deal with all your current circumstances, if you had all the money in the world, if you had all the resources in the world... We weren't living in this messy, messy country that we live in.

I'm assuming most of y'all are in the US. But if things were better [00:23:00] right now for you in your life, like what would your ideal week look like? Go through that process. And maybe it's impossible to get to that type of ideal schedule now, but there might be something small that you could do that still can match it in some way.

Maybe it's taking a nap. And I don't know why I said that because I hate taking naps. Or maybe it's, "You know what? I'm gonna block out something fun. I'm actually gonna put something fun on my calendar and my to-do list because I've just been focusing on work stuff that's been draining me, and I wanna do something that energizes me."

You name it, right? Think about that. Think about what would it look like to plan my week around my actual capacity and my ideal circumstances. Okay, let's get ready to wrap things up. So just to leave you with a final reminder, it's that your planning system should support your work and your life. It should reflect your [00:24:00] values, your goals, and the reality of your current capacity.

It is possible to find ways to work toward your future goals in more sustainable forms. That's possible. And if this episode resonated with you, like I say all the time, share it with a friend, share it with someone who's being too hard on themselves, and go back and listen to it every now and then when you need this reminder.

And if you're ready to create your own planning system with individualized support, if you want someone who can help you around your goals, your values, rethinking your capacity, please reach out and check out the link in my show notes to learn more about my services. That's it for today. And as always, I'll talk to you all next time.

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