Index

Index ............................................................................................................................... 1
Introduction to CreateYourWeek A Short Handbook ................................................... 2
Start seeing your Time Differently .................................................................................. 3
The First Chunk: How to take advantage of the Early Morning Hours ............................. 4
How to Prioritize your Work-day and Gain the Clarity you need ..................................... 6
Work with Greater Focus and Energy using the Flexible Pomodoro Technique .............. 8
Get Motivated for Each Week using the Weekly Hourly Target Technique ................... 10
The Fourth Chunk Reward Yourself ............................................................................ 11
Recommended Software Tools for your Work .............................................................. 12
The 7 Habits to Having an Amazingly Productive and Joyful Work Week ...................... 12
Start Creating Your Ideal Week ..................................................................................... 13
Sources ......................................................................................................................... 13
Bonus.................................................................................................................................................................. 14

Estimated Reading Time: 15mins

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 Introduction to CreateYourWeek A Short
Handbook

T he quality of your life will be, to a great degree, measured by the positive
habits you have. Over the years, Ive learnt some of the routines that can lead
to making the most of your time. Ive read hundreds of books and articles on
positive psychology and time-management, taken different courses and
experimented with a hundred different habits.
Yet, Ive struggled with laziness and a lack of focus. My biggest frustration used to be
not knowing how to balance being grateful for what I had as I tried to work towards
what I wanted. It was a hard balancing act I was always unsatisfied, but thankfully,
I'm a lot better at it now because of the ideas in this little book.

This book is for freelancers, entrepreneurs, and employees who have to use their
creativity on the job. Its for the person whos looking to make a living outside the
cultural norms of what a work-day is. Its for someone who is fascinated by the
idea of designing their life.
Youll find a culmination of some of the most important and easy-to-apply strategies
- so that you can get more done faster and more effortlessly. You CAN curate and
design your week so that you can experience a little more joy and gratitude, every
single work day - whilst moving closer to your professional goals.

A question to ponder: How will you make the rest of your weeks more beautiful this
year?

2
 Start seeing your Time Differently

There are fifty-two empty chapters in a given year, and just by focusing on putting in
intelligent effort, repeating what works, continually leaving out what doesnt as you
experiment with adding new habits; you can have a far better life.
Of course, youll always make mistakes; have bad moments, doubts, and struggles.
But, after repeating something close to your best week again and again, continually
making adjustments where fit, youll be consistently living closer to your full
potential.
We all receive the same 24 hours in a day. But when you take away eight hours for a
good night's sleep, two hours for all of your meals, two hours perhaps for your
morning and evening routine; you're left with just 12 hours.
Everyone from the Full-time employee, to the University student or Athlete gets
just 84 hours per week to make their life what they want it to be!
That time can slip through anyones fingers if theyre not careful. Considering most of
us spend 40 hours working, it makes sense to pay as much attention as possible to
getting the most out of this half of our lives, so that we can create the best
experience for ourselves and those around us.

We rise every day Monday with the gift of a blank new week. And because it is given
to us freely; we rarely recognise or appreciate that we have a beautiful canvas, from
which we can shape our lives with.

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 Divide your Work Day into 4 Simple Chunks
A work-day on its own can feel overwhelming sometimes. But by breaking your day
into four chunks, allotted to clearly defined themes, you can begin experiencing
greater peace of mind.
The day automatically no longer feels like a slog, but more like a compartmentalised
set of windows where you know exactly what you need to accomplish. While
chunking is deceptively simple, its also incredibly liberating.

The Four Chunks:

1st: Morning Routine (0.5H-XH)
2nd: Most Important Work Tasks (4H)
3rd: Least Important Work Tasks (1-3H)
4th: Reward (0.5H-3H)

Note: You can switch the order of the last two chunks if you have the flexibility to do
so.

The First Chunk: How to take advantage of the Early Morning Hours
Take a moment to think about what the ideal first hour or so to the perfect day looks
like for you. Below, youll find some ideas. Use whats valuable, add whats uniquely
your own, and discard the rest.
Take care of you Mind
Listening to peaceful music - 5mins
Writing a journal to calm your worries - 20mins
Reading a great, immersive book 20mins

Awaken your Body

A Hot/Cold Shower to get your energy up - 20mins
A Home stretching routine to liberate your body - 20mins
A short home workout to get the blood flowing 10mins

Energise your Spirit

Meditation to embrace your stillness 15mins
Prayer to remind yourself of whats important - 5mins
Morning affirmations to instil positive energy 5mins

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By adding in positive rituals to your morning, with time, youll build the perfect start
to the day1 and the long term pay-off to your levels of emotional, mental, spiritual,
and physical health - will be tremendous. Feel free to adjust the length of these
routines to whatever serves you best.
Starting the morning the right way puts you in the best position to experience a great
work-day. Yet, there are going to be times where your morning routine wont go
smoothly i.e. when you wake up later than planned or an appointment comes up.
Accept that this is going to happen some of the time.
But if you wake up early enough to do your morning routine most days, youll be
getting to work with greater joy and gratitude. Additionally, youll be making fewer
choices every day since your morning is automated.
In preserving your mental energy youll be able to make wiser choices later on in the
day2. Now, think of the cumulative effect of the simple change of having a morning
routine over the course of a year and a lifetime
Action step: Write a list of everything you want to do in your morning routine
- refer to it often so that you never forget it. Do it in whatever order you want
for variety each day

How you spend your morning can often tell what kind of day you are going to
have. L. Snicket

1
How long it takes to build a habit: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/02/how-long-it-takes-to-
form-a-new-habit/
2
TED Talk on the Paradox of Choice and why you want to reduce the amount of choices you make on a
daily basis: https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice?language=en

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 How to Prioritize your Work-day and Gain the
Clarity you need
The Second Chunk of the day
The first three-four hours of your work-day, after your morning routine, form your
peak period of productivity.3 Naturally, anything thats challenging and requires
creativity should be done then. To get some clarity before you start working, write
your most important tasks on a piece of paper or sticky note.
You want to schedule as much important work as you can in advance so that we have
a map to follow. To help, you might want to plan deep work in advance on your
calendar, on paper, or a digital sticky note.
Example: Calendar Block

Check email or social media only once or twice during the second chunk. Looking for
updates repeatedly, only wires you to seek instant gratification more often.
Especially considering it takes a while to regain your momentum after an online
interruption4.
Sometimes, despite your best attempts, you wont be able to stop yourself from
checking your email often - just do your best to make it less of a habit.
After youve completed your most important work in the first three to four hours of
the day, celebrate a little by taking a full twenty-thirty mins break. If the time
coincides with your lunch-hour break, then you could also do that.

3
Willpower and decision fatigue: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-
from-decision-fatigue.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
4
Examining the nature of fragmented work: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/CHI2005.pdf

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The Third Chunk of the day
After your well-deserved break or lunch hour, the third chunk of the day begins (rest
of your work day), and it will be spent working on the less cognitively demanding
work. Or what I like to call LITs (Least Important Tasks). This is a good time to
schedule meetings if you have the liberty to do so.
What most people do: Often, people do the easiest stuff first due to procrastination,
leaving the hard stuff for when theyre feeling the least focused (usually after lunch).
This is a recipe for poor productivity.
If you however do the most important tasks in the first chunk, every work-day, youll
accomplish far more than you ever have. A big part of great daily productivity is: a
beautiful Morning routine, MITs in the first chunk of the day done with
determination, and easier stuff in the third chunk of the day.
With that said, this method of prioritising your work isnt nearly as effective if you
don't have a positive work environment, and don't eat and sleep well.
Try to avoid heavy foods before work and if your job environment is too distracting,
or you simply have trouble quieting your mind during office hours, listen to ambient
music.
With all of that said, theres still a missing piece to the puzzle. How do we stay
focused and manage our energy effectively throughout all the hours were working?

"Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished" - Lao Tzu.

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 Work with Greater Focus and Energy using the
Flexible Pomodoro Technique
Many of us tend to on stay the PC for hours at a time and switch tasks often. But by
focusing on one major objective for thirty-sixty minutes, with a planned short
strategic break at the end of each time block, youll be far likelier to rejoice in your
work.
Use timed 0.5-1H Blocks with short breaks
With this technique, after each half-hour or hour, you would take a 1-15mins break,
dependent on how you feel. The method of using a timer while working was
originally invented by Francesco Cirillo.
Example: Timer on the bottom left corner

Setting the timer to thirty minutes to an hour gives you enough time to get into a
state of flow and remember the hours you put in. Compared to working in blocks of
25mins for example, this approach is also a lot more sustainable.

Key tip: If you dont like using a timer, you can note the time on a digital sticky note
before you start work and refer back to it so you remember to take a break.

Example: Sticky Note

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The Incredible benefits of using this practice
The benefits of applying this method to your workday are: better attention, a little
more physical movement (due to breaks), and based on research and personal
experience, far greater productivity due to the extra focus youll have.5

This modified version of the Pomodoro framework is made to be a little more flexible
meaning feel free to switch tasks within your hour block, whilst making sure to not
leave things half done. You can also choose to work for thirty or sixty minutes,
depending on the energy you feel.
Focus on improvement not perfection
During your timed blocks, on the occasions that you feel tired and browse sites that
dont necessarily help your work objective, dont beat yourself up, keep regaining
focus.
Distraction is bound to happen sometimes; you don't want to aim for perfection.
Fortunately, knowing you only having a certain amount of time which you can see
ticking down, means you have greater positive pressure to accomplish your
objective.
I bet you can do the same if not more work in four focused hours compared to six
distracted ones using this technique. Soon, youll begin to realise just how much
more time you can have in your work day.
You can use your new found spare time to:
Spend time learning new material in your industry to improve your
knowledge.
Get far more work done than you ever have.

Youll soon be conquering your way through work.

5
A look into Parkinsons law: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01bctk3 and
http://www.economist.com/node/14116121

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 Get Motivated for Each Week using the Weekly
Hourly Target Technique
If youre an employee perhaps youre not clear on where all your time is going. As a
freelancer or aspiring entrepreneur, theres a possibility that you may have less work
lined up than youd want. Still, aim to use your time constructively by working on
your branding, promoting yourself, or asking for more responsibility and working the
same hours regardless.
To avoid procrastination, I invite you to track how many hours of work you
accomplish. This will keep you accountable, and clearer on where your time is going.
I call this the weekly hourly target technique. It starts with setting a weekly target
e.g. 32 hours of focused work (minus breaks).
If for whatever reason you dont hit your target number of hours by the end of the
week, then youll know something needs to change. But you wouldn't have gotten
that insight had you not made a commitment to tracking the time youve worked.
Below youll find an example of a system you can use to track your hours.

6-Day Work Week-Example using the Weekly Hourly Target Technique

What gets measured gets managed. Peter Drucker

*Target. In this example you can see improvement every week. There are two
instances where the Freelancer only did 2 hours of work (Friday on Week 1 and
Tuesday on Week 3); yet she still managed to do an average of 32 hours per week!
At the end of each day, make a note of the hours youve accomplished, and when
youre done working for that week, add up the total. You can do this in a notebook or
on a Google spreadsheet as shown above.
With time, youll start to see a correlation between doing quality work in a good
numbers of hours, and the happiness that you experience in a week. After all, how
can you be truly happy if you know youre not working close to your full potential?

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In essence, this system allows you to see whether youre working as much as you
can. As a freelancer, perhaps you exercise your flexibility a little too much and avoid
working. This technique provides you with the kind of accountability that you need.
As an employee, perhaps you could put in more effort. This system gives you the
feedback to continually improve.
At the end of every week, I invite you to review how many hours youve worked and
evaluate how you feel its been working for you. This will ensure that youre
motivated to produce better (and possibly more) work every time Monday rolls
around.

The Fourth Chunk Reward Yourself

Based on ground-breaking research by Teresa Amabile in her book The Progress
Principle, noting and sharing your small wins can ignite greater joy, creativity, and
engagement. So write three to five things youre proud of accomplishing and share
them with someone at the end of each work-day.

If you prefer, you can do this once at the end of each week writing down the best
things you experienced and accomplished.
How do I get the best out of the 4th chunk of the day?
Youll likely need to do some chores in this part of the day. But in managing your
energy effectively, tracking your hours, and having a morning routine; youll be
stepping into the fourth chunk of the day feeling far more satisfied with your life.
You could read a book, enjoy the company of your family or friends, watch a great TV
Show, go out with your romantic partner, enjoy your sport or any number of
activities. In short - whatever you find fun and comforting.

Life gets better when you make hard work easier.

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 Recommended Software Tools for your Work
1. Tomighty Desktop Timer Use this timer to remember to take a break after
every hour: http://www.tomighty.org/
2. F.lux Filters out the blue light spectrum after sunset, meaning youll be
more likely to fall asleep after evening computer usage:
https://justgetflux.com/
3. Momentum Adds a visual element to Chrome that makes you more mindful
before you head over on to a new site: https://momentumdash.com/
4. Di.fm Ambient music with lots of variety to help you focus in an
environment full of noise: www.di.fm
5. Idonethis.com Note your small wins daily so you can share and celebrate
them: www.idonethis.com

The 7 Habits to Having an Amazingly Productive

and Joyful Work Week
1. Build a great morning routine that fulfils the mental, spiritual, and physical
faculties of your life. Sometimes, it will take longer to finish, sometimes it will
be quicker. Dont expect to do it every single day, but do it most days.
2. Following your morning routine, work on the most important tasks for the
first four hours of your work day.
3. Check email/social media once or twice at during the first four hours of your
work day.
4. Schedule your less demanding tasks for after the first four hours of your work
day i.e. meetings, research, and low priority calls.
5. Work in blocks of 30-60mins (depending on your energy) using a timer, taking
short 1-15mins breaks every hour based on how you feel.
6. Remind yourself that the only thing thats truly within your control is the week
in front of you. Nothing else. Do everything you can to block out distraction,
and work on what matters most.
7. Write down what youre grateful for accomplishing each work day (or at the
end of every week). Share the wins with a friend, Facebook group, or family
member.

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 Start Creating Your Ideal Week
Many of us have been enticed into making long-term goals, of having a dream or a
vision of what we want to become. And theres nothing wrong with that. In fact,
having a vision of our ideal life is helpful.
But if were lucky to have a salary thats greater than $25,000 per month; lets
remind ourselves that were in the top 1.88% of richest people in the world (Source:
www.globalrichlist.net). Considering that half the world lives one less than $2.50 lets
try to exchange a little part of our grandiose visions for just a little more
appreciation.
Whats more important than seeking a certain position or lifestyle, is putting focus
and taking action in the week using the right strategies, whilst still being grateful for
what we have. In essence, the dream/vision/long term goal should only serve as a
compass on our journey.
So often we want things to happen a certain way, but we squander the process,
while we lust for our vision of the future and throw away the opportunity to enjoy
and take intelligent advantage of the opportunity thats been given to us every week.
But you can be different by applying the several timeless strategies provided in
CreateYourWeek A Short Handbook. Youll soon be well on your way to being far
more productive, focused, and grateful - and achieve your work goals faster than
youd ever imagined.
Thank you for taking the time to read this book. If you enjoyed the read and want to
learn more, please share your insights with me at: samy@createyourweek.com.

Sources
1
How long it takes to build a habit: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/02/how-long-it-takes-to-form-a-
new-habit/
2
TED Talk on the Paradox of Choice and why you want to reduce the amount of choices you make on a daily
basis: https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice?language=en
3
Willpower and decision fatigue: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-
decision-fatigue.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
4
Examining the nature of fragmented work: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/CHI2005.pdf
5
A look into Parkinsons Law: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01bctk3 and
http://www.economist.com/node/14116121

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 Bonus
If youre serious about your growth, you can book a free coaching call with me.
Below, Ive provided a screenshot of how I manage some of my habits. In our call, Ill
teach you how to:

Instil the mind-set you need to beautifully create your week to for the best year
Give you the list of Apps and Sheets that will take your game to a whole other level
Master your Daily and Weekly Routine by setting up something similar to below

To book a free coaching session with me click here: Meetme.so/samyfelice

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