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“Oh, it’s such a per­fect day. I’m glad I spent it…” ​“at work” is not what Lou Reed sings in the song ​”Per­fect day”. Why? Prob­a­bly because work­days are rarely the ones we would describe as shim­mer­ing, delight­ful and perfect.

Per­haps we do not per­ceive our days as ​”per­fect” due to what we have cho­sen to do dur­ing them. Speak­ing for myself, some days are great and I get the feel­ing that noth­ing can go wrong, while oth­ers are noth­ing spe­cial and ​”just anoth­er day at work”.

The rea­son for things being the way they are

When I look back at a day that was not very good, it was often due to some prob­lem aris­ing. Some­thing in my plan­ning went wrong, some­thing unex­pect­ed occurred, and had I only tak­en pre­cau­tions in advance, the day would have turned out more to my liking.

So, to be quite hon­est, we are not all that help­less and at the mer­cy of cir­cum­stance, but can with our good struc­ture at least increase our chances of deal­ing with mat­ters that arise, dodge the bul­lets, and have more days that feel good and are in line with how we want our work­days to be.

Adjust your knobs and levers

But how? What tools do we have at our disposal?

Here are six com­po­nents we can exper­i­ment with to con­struct and com­pose the per­fect day.

• How you start your day. Think about what you would describe as a ​”good start to the day”. Find a morn­ing rou­tine and clar­i­fy it to your­self by for exam­ple writ­ing it down. If ​”rou­tine” feels too big a step, just decide on one thing that you resolve to do every morn­ing when you get to work, and write it some­where where you will see it dai­ly — on a note, on your com­put­er desk­top, or in an eas­i­ly acces­si­ble dig­i­tal doc­u­ment. Deter­mine how many days you will test it out and see if it makes any dif­fer­ence to you, for exam­ple two weeks. Begin your new habit tomor­row morning.


• Take advan­tage of your nat­ur­al rhythm. Some of us have most ener­gy dur­ing the morn­ing, and oth­ers dur­ing the after­noon. Some get most done in silence while oth­ers find that they are more pro­duc­tive whilst in the mid­dle of a crowd­ed room accom­pa­nied by a pleas­ant mur­mur of col­leagues talk­ing. Cat­e­go­rize your to-do-tasks by what sit­u­a­tion you feel most com­fort­able doing each one of them in. The cat­e­gories could for exam­ple be ​”AM”, ​”PM”, Ener­gized”, ​”Tired”, ​”Silent”, ​”In the mid­dle of things”, and so on. Choose what to-do-task to do next pri­mar­i­ly based on in what con­text, mode or sit­u­a­tion you are in. If it is morn­ing, choose to do one of the tasks you pre­fer doing in the morn­ing and which you there­fore have labeled ​”AM”.


• How you take breaks. When is a good time for you to take a break? How long do they need to be and how often do you need them? Make an edu­cat­ed guess of what would be your ide­al break, and try it out for a few days. At the moment I am test­ing a rhythm of work­ing 50 min and then rest­ing com­plete­ly for 10 min­utes, when I have work to do for longer stretch­es of time by the com­put­er. Since I tend to get engulfed by the task I am work­ing on and for­get my breaks, I set a timer for 50 min and then 10 min. So far it is feel­ing good.


• How many meet­ings do you have ener­gy for in a day? Cre­ate your own rule-of-thumb regard­ing how many meet­ings you can bear in a day. Two? Four? More? Few­er? When you see that a day in your cal­en­dar has been filled with the max­i­mum num­ber of meet­ings, block all the remain­ing time so that you are not tempt­ed to sched­ule more, and so that you are not avail­able for more requests in case oth­ers have access to your cal­en­dar as well.


• How much time alone you have every week. Take a moment to con­sid­er how many hours you need to work alone each week, when you do not have any meet­ings or oth­er dis­trac­tions, in order to fin­ish all your tasks. Nine hours? More or less? Sched­ule recur­ring meet­ings with your­self at the times which oth­ers are least like­ly to require your atten­tion. If you want to, read about how you can play 15-puz­zle with your alone-time in a pre­vi­ous blog­post, and there­by stick to the num­ber of hours you need to your­self every week.


• How you want to spend your lunchtime? What will you have for lunch on your per­fect work­day? What will make you feel good even after lunch and through­out the after­noon? With who do you want to eat? Some­one in par­tic­u­lar who inspires you, or with sev­er­al peo­ple at once? Some­one you can speak freely with, share what­ev­er you are going through at the moment, and give you the sup­port you need? If you do not have one of those ide­al lunch­es sched­uled at the moment, con­tact the per­son you pre­fer hav­ing lunch with and sug­gest a time and place.

These were some of the knobs and levers you could pull and tweak, but­tons you could push and aspects of your day you could adjust in order to make improve­ments, but I am sure your can think of a few more to alter and make your day into some­thing clos­er to what you would describe as perfect.

Do this

If you want to, choose one of the aspects described above to adjust (or some oth­er, com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent, but to you more rel­e­vant aspect) and decide on how you want your next few days ahead to be in terms of the aspect you have cho­sen to adjust.

If you need to do some­thing as a first step in order to make this change hap­pen, either do it right away or for­mu­late a to-do-task and add it to your list. Sched­ule that lunch, set your work/rest-timer, sched­ule time alone, write down the max­i­mum num­ber of meet­ings you will allow your­self in a day, author the embryo to the morn­ing rou­tine you wish to imple­ment even­tu­al­ly, or what­ev­er you might need to do.

Refine and adjust — again and again

If you want the days to come to be more in accor­dance to you pref­er­ences and choos­ing, do some­thing sim­ple along the lines of my sug­ges­tions, and you will find that your days will improve, even if ever so slight­ly. You might not have cov­ered all bases and pre­vent­ed all unex­pect­ed events that might come to pass, but you will at least have made it pos­si­ble to dodge one or two unpleas­ant sur­pris­es. If you con­tin­ue to refine and adjust the out­line of your aver­age day fre­quent­ly and in small steps, they will become more to your liking.

And, just as Lou Reed end­ed his song, ​“You’re going to reap just what you sow”.

What knobs or levers do you turn?

Can you think of anoth­er aspect one might tweak or improve upon in order to design your own per­fect day? Share your thoughts with me.