Show notes
Good morning.
The last week of November, 1996. My very first Strategic Coach workshop in Toronto.
That's the day Dan Sullivan started me on a 30-year habit he calls thinking about your thinking.
I'm looking back at the notes I took in that first room. An industrial part of the city, beautiful old brick buildings, lofty loft spaces. Everything about it was built to make you think bigger.
And on day one, Dan laid out something I still run my whole life by. He calls it the entrepreneurial time system.
The idea is that an entrepreneur's time works like an athlete's or an entertainer's. You've got game days, practice days and off days.
Dan renames them. Focus days, free days and buffer days.
Focus days are easy to picture. They're the days you do the money-getting thing. Workshops, clients, coaching, whatever you actually get paid for.
Free days are the ones most people get wrong. Dan means a full 24 hours completely disconnected from work. Not slipping out at lunch for a movie and feeling like you got away with something. The day off is the whole point of the day.
Mine evolved into what I call super happy fun days. You orchestrate the whole thing, start to finish, filled with the stuff you love. Breakfast at your favorite place. A round of golf with a good friend. Lunch at the club. A movie. Dinner. A spa. All in one day.
But a day like that doesn't happen by accident. And that's where the underrated one comes in.
The buffer day.
I used to treat buffer days as the junk drawer of the week. The in-between. Catch up, do whatever's left over, whatever needs doing.
I had it backwards. The buffer day is the power move.
A buffer day is where you proactively plan and set up your focus days and your free days so they actually land. It's where the thinking about your thinking happens.
That's why I spend so much time in my journals. I'm sitting on a buffer day, drawing out the things I'll do on my focus days and lining up the things I want on my free days.
One thing I love to do is make a list of 26 things that bring me joy. There's no magic to 26. It's just the number of lines on a page in my journal.
Put a constraint on it and your brain gets to work. It does what you ask it to do.
Now that list is a menu. On a buffer day you pick from it, put it on the calendar, and enroll the people you want there with you. That gives everybody something to look forward to.
If you want an on-ramp to all this, don't try to build your perfect week this week.
Treat your calendar like the weather forecast.
You're a storm of activity moving through the days. You know exactly what today and tomorrow hold, same as a meteorologist knows the next couple of days cold.
But go out 14 days and it opens up. Pick three Tuesdays from now and it's easy to drop a beacon in there. A super happy fun day. A real buffer day. Once it's on the calendar, everything else works around it.
My friend Taki Moore calls it spanxing your calendar. Squeeze all your focus days into Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and let the rest breathe.
I got a funny email from Rick the other day. "Dean, are you saying you can teach me to make fat stacks by hanging out at a pub drinking coffee like you?"
I laughed, because... yes. That's exactly what I do.
Every idea I've had and every dollar I've made in 30 years went through my brain, down my pen, onto a page in my journal, before it ever went out into the world.
So here's your nudge for today.
Stop treating the buffer day like a throwaway.
Give it a job. Use it to plan the days that actually matter... and watch how much better the rest of your week gets.
Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/049-the-most-underrated-day-in-your-week/
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