The one-week sprint
Recently I’ve been working in one-week sprints, and I’ve really enjoyed it! Tl;dr I need to do a lot of creative knowledge work, and have recently fallen into a routine which IMO is pretty good at facilitating that.
The week
Monday and Tuesday — intense new work. I’m recharged and high-energy, and ready to grind very hard! I try to keep the whole day free: one contiguous, uninterrupted stretch of deep work, 12 hours or more. I aggressively clear meetings out of this space — a 15-minute standup is ok but not more.
Wednesday — recovery. I’m tired after 2 hard days. I also want to let the work settle: gain some distance, see if my perspective changes. I spend a little time writing up what I did so I don’t forget it, but I don’t take on substantial new work. Sometimes it’s a half day, or less. Ample time blocked for restorative activities—calls with friends, work out, reading.
Thursday — consolidation. Writing up, dissemination, generating ideas, planning what’s next, reflection, process improvement. It has to be Thursday, because I won’t feel like doing any of it on Friday. That also makes Thursday the right day for meetings and all-hands.
Friday — slack. Whatever I meant to get done earlier in the week but didn’t, I do now. The buffer keeps the rest of the week from having to be perfect.
Saturday and Sunday — rest. For fun and recharging, so Monday can be intense again.
Notes
One intense sprint per week. This routine is designed around creating ideal conditions for one stretch of highly intense work each week, while leaving room for everything else I need to get done.
Two days is about the right length for an intense sprint — for me, anyway. Past that I hit diminishing returns: my energy drops and I’m just less productive, and the marginal value of more new work falls below the value of stopping to consolidate and reorient.
Rest is part of the routine, not what’s left over. It’s very tempting to keep adding things in. I need to actively maintain negative space in my schedule so I can rest and let new ideas emerge.
Meta: I’ve found it to be worth optimizing how I work, not just what I work on. There are large gains here, and I think they’re underrated.
Caveats
This is tuned to the kind of work I do. My guess is it generalizes reasonably well to most knowledge work, but I could be wrong, and you’d want to adapt the specifics to your own energy and constraints.
That said — I’ve been enjoying it a lot, and I’d recommend giving it a try. :)
So, the conclusion is that a 2-day workweek is more productive than a 5-day one?
More seriously, I agree that intense work on some days, and freeing your mind to produce ideas on another day, is much better than trying to have a mix of intense work and planning and meetings and whatever every day. That way, each day has a different flavor, and you are not constantly interrupted by the clock.
More specifically − 2 days of ~100% really intense work is more productive than 5 days where I don’t manage to get in much deep work. The schedule is mostly set up to protect my ability to do deep work while still doing the other things I have to do
Yeah, I fully agree with that, and it’s great that you have the option to set up your schedule accordingly.
Thanks for sharing this Daniel! It’s nice to see how different workflows fit other people, and healthy to break the conventional and unproductive norms around work (which fortunately aren’t very within this community to begin with).
Interested to hear how you approach breaks? I’ve noticed I need plenty of breaks and especially a longer lunch break with a walk to keep my afternoon more productive.
(Then again, my need for breaks during intense work has diminished somewhat with agentic AI as a) there are more micro breaks after prompting (as long as I don’t context switch) and b) coding agents doing the heavy lifting of nitty-gritty work while I can stay on the conceptual level. Some of my Claude Code sessions have spanned several hours of continuous work due to those reasons, which is otherwise very rare for me.)
I’ve had benefit in doing this sort of thing over the course of a day.