Balancing work, household responsibilities, and professional growth during school hours is a challenge. I want a system to focus me on a few key things, track progress and build habits to increase my productivity even more. Inspired by How to Make Doing Hard Things Easier, I created a weekly/daily plan and printable sheet to track and reflect on my progress.

Weekly

Each week I focus on 1-2 projects and professional development. That limit forces me to prioritise and prevents spreading effort too thin. During weekdays I will take advantage of what time I have available outside of looking after my boys and chores to work on projects and learn more. Every weekend I review my work projects and pick a focus theme for next week.

Additionally, I can track extra project work that I pick up through the week.

Daily

8:00-8:30: Startup & Focus Prep; Review the day’s goals and choose a max of 3; Do a 5-minute “activation” (coffee, short walk, upbeat music).
8:30-10:30: Deep Work Block 1; 2 × 50-minute sprints with 10-min breaks.; Focus on the important creative project work here (coding, writing, design).; This is when my energy is highest, so I put the hardest work here.; End by committing code.
10:30-11:30: Chores / Movement; Do household chores, errands, or exercise.; I can skill stack by listening to podcasts and audiobooks related to software engineering.
11:30-1:00: Deep Work Block 2; 2 × 30-40 minute sprints.; Pick a skill-building focus (e.g., practicing algorithms, reading source code, learning a new framework).; End with writing a blog post on what I learned (builds memory and reinforces dopamine).
1:00-1:30: Lunch + Reset; Eat, go outside, walk if possible. No screens if I can avoid them.
1:30-2:15: Shallow Work / Admin; Respond to emails, organize code repos, small bug fixes, plan tomorrow.; Keep it light but useful.
2:15-2:30: Wrap-up Ritual; Look at my 3 goals from the morning.; Check off what I did.; For a smoother start tomorrow: write the top tasks in advance.

Building a physical page to track

A paper planner pulls me away from screens and makes progress visible, even when the computer is off. I built a simple weekly worksheet in LaTeX that reflects this system. I started by modifying a LaTeX document supplied by ChatGPT and ended up with this file: weekly-plan.tex

To compile the PDF:

brew install basictex
# reload terminal
xelatex weekly-plan.tex

Here is the result: