When I first went freelance, I had three clients inside two months.
My instinct was to separate everything cleanly. One client on Monday and Tuesday. Another on Wednesday and Thursday. Fridays for admin, proposals, the business side of things.
Three clients. Five days. Neat boxes.
It worked for about a month.
Then a client needed something on a Thursday. Another pushed a deadline to the following Monday. The system I’d built assumed the work would respect the calendar. It didn’t.
Every time something shifted, the whole week collapsed.
I spent more energy rearranging the boxes than doing the actual work.
What I learned, slowly and through a lot of wasted Sundays, is that time blocking doesn’t work if everything is negotiable. The calendar fills up. Something always feels more urgent. The blocks move, and then they disappear.
The only thing that actually holds is protecting the minimum non-negotiable for each thing that matters.
Not a full day. Not a morning.
One moment. One slot. Immovable.
For the newsletter: Tuesday evening, diagram first. If the diagram exists by Tuesday night, the week has a centre.
For the data science work: the first two hours of the morning, before anything else loads in.
For consulting: one fixed client call day, everything else asynchronous.
For rest: Saturday morning, untouched. Non-negotiable in the same way the others are.
The rest of the week can flex around those anchors.
When a client pushes a deadline, I know what I’m protecting and what can move. When a week gets complicated, the minimum still happens. The newsletter still goes out. The deep work still gets its two hours.
The mistake most people make is treating their whole week as schedulable. They try to plan everything and protect nothing.
The week you plan in full is the week that falls apart. The week built on protected minimums is the one that holds.
It took me longer to learn this than it should have.
One non-negotiable per thing. Everything else finds its place around them.
— Josep
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