The everything week

Work isn't the only thing that will take your calendar. Sometimes the sky does it too.

We left Phoenix at 114 degrees. My mother is 88, and I flew her out of that heat so she could spend the rest of the summer at my cabin in northern Minnesota, somewhere she could actually breathe.

We landed at the Hibbing airport, birthplace of Bob Dylan, and stepped off the plane into 99 degrees.

Four days before we landed, a violent lightning storm rolled through the Superior National Forest, the wilderness I live inside of. It sparked fourteen wildfires in and around the Boundary Waters. By the time our plane touched down, that number was seventeen. Tens of thousands of acres gone. These fires are burning hot enough to go three and a half feet into the ground, and nothing puts that kind of fire out but snow. The air quality is off any chart I’ve seen.

We stepped out of the pan and into the fire. Literally.

Here’s the part I didn’t expect. My calendar didn’t ask permission before it got rewritten. Wednesday is my writing day for this publication, the day I draft, edit, and publish one issue, start to finish. This past Wednesday I was getting my mother settled into a house that smelled like a campfire that wouldn’t quit, in a town I’d just landed in, with air quality warnings hitting my phone every twenty minutes. The issue didn’t get written. I let it slip.

I’ve written before about the calendar, in issue 004, “Your calendar is not yours.” The diagnosis there was that work will fill any open hour you don’t claim first. Theme your days, block your priorities in advance, and work stops deciding your week for you.

That diagnosis still holds. But it assumes the thing competing for your attention is work. This week it wasn’t. It was my 88-year-old mother’s health, a wildfire complex bigger than most counties, and an air quality reading that made “go outside” a real medical question. None of those things emailed me first. None of them cared what day I’d themed for them.

I call this the Everything Week. It’s the week every category of your life, family, health, weather, business, and the feed on your phone that wants a reaction from you about all of it, files a claim on the same seventy-two hours at once. A normal week tests whether you have a schedule. An everything week tests whether you have a system.

Here’s the plain version of it: a calendar that only survives a good week isn’t a system. It’s a guess. It only proves itself the week everything hits at once.

My structure held better than it would have five years ago, but it didn’t hold perfectly. The writing slipped two days. My mother did not. That’s the actual test of a themed week, not whether every box gets checked, but whether you can tell, under real pressure, which commitments were load-bearing and which ones were just habit.

A friend told me a line this week that’s been rattling around in my head since. Your first attempt at anything is like cooking pancakes, you always throw the first one out. This is my first everything week running this particular structure against this particular kind of disaster. The first pancake was ugly. I’m not throwing out the griddle over it. I’m cooking the next one better, starting with this issue, two days late and still on the plate.

The prescription is not “protect your calendar better.” You already know that. The prescription is to stress-test the calendar you built for a normal week against the week you hope never comes. A family emergency. A health scare. A literal fire. If your themed days, your priorities, your whole decision-in-advance structure would collapse the moment two of those things landed in the same week, you don’t have a system. You have a system that has never been tested.

Test it on paper before life tests it for you. Ask which commitments would survive if three things broke at once, and which ones were only ever surviving because nothing had pushed on them yet.

The wheel that rolls is the one you balanced on purpose. Just make sure you built it to survive more than one direction of wind.

Richard D. Stuart
The Weekly Prescription

P.S. If your business currently runs because you personally hold every plate in the air, that’s worth a conversation before your own everything week arrives. Start with a free 20-minute working call at yourwebguy.org/become-a-client. No pitch. Just an honest read on what would actually break first.