Your calendar is not yours
Work doesn't take over your calendar. You hand it the keys.
A few years after the dot-com bubble burst, my friend Gordon resigned from the agency he had cofounded.
Rhino Internet was the 800-pound gorilla in Phoenix full-stack web development. Forty-plus staff. Gordon was the COO. When he walked, news spread fast.
About a month later he rented an auditorium in downtown Phoenix and invited a hundred or so of his former colleagues, friends, and professional associates. My fellow attendee that night was Jeff, Gordon’s cofounder. Neither of us knew what we were walking into.
What we walked into was Robin Sharma.
Gordon’s Canadian in-laws had given him a thin book the previous Christmas, picked up from a small bookshop in Toronto: The Saint, the Surfer, and the CEO.
Gordon was a weekend surfer, rock climber, a practicing Buddhist, and the most grounded COO I have ever known. He read it and could not put it down. He flew to Toronto, told Robin he wanted to help grow his publishing career, and would not take no for an answer.
That night in Phoenix, they handed out free copies of the book. Jeff and I walked to the car in silence, got in, looked at each other, and said the same thing at the same time: I get it.
I read everything Robin had published after that. A few years later I bought myself a ticket to one of his weekend retreats in Toronto.
The idea that changed how I run my week came out of that work.
DIAGNOSIS: Work will fill the void
Robin’s framework is called the 8 Forms of Wealth. The premise is simple: money is one column on an eight-column ledger. The other seven are inner wealth, physical health, family and social connection, career, your circle of genius, adventure, and the impact you leave behind.
Robin laid the original foundation. What I use today is my version of it, shaped by fifteen years of running it against real life.
The exercise is to rate yourself in each column on a scale of one to ten. What Robin observed (and what I confirmed in my own life) is that most capable people are not failing across the board. They are wildly uneven. A 7, a 3, a 5, an 8. Which means they are not rolling. They are bouncing. The goal is not a perfect ten in every column. It is a wheel that rolls.
Here is where the calendar comes in.
If you want balance across eight dimensions, you have to assign time to each one. Not theoretically. On the calendar. In advance. Before the week starts and before work starts filling the open space. I did exactly this. My themed days are locked into my operating system as a non-negotiable. Not a goal. Not an intention. A rule I set once and do not renegotiate.
Because work will fill the open space. Every time.
I theme my days. Monday is for new client development. Tuesday is for existing clients. Wednesday is bookkeeping and publishing. Thursday is research and professional development. Friday is for building relationships in my community. Saturday I roll up my sleeves. Sunday I reflect, plan, and rest.
That structure is not a schedule. It is a decision made before the week starts about what matters and in what order. When a request comes in that does not fit the day, the theme already made the decision. I do not have to negotiate with myself.
The Sabbath is baked in. One day a week that belongs to something larger than work. That rhythm is not background detail. The rest of the structure grows from it.
I put the framework into a one-page worksheet you can download and fill in, below.
The prescription: rate yourself across all eight. Find the columns that are starving. Block time for each one before work claims the week. A themed calendar is not a productivity system. It is a decision made in advance about the kind of life you are building.
The wheel that rolls is the one you balanced on purpose.
Richard D. Stuart
The Weekly Prescription
P.S. Be sure to add your themes as non-negotiables to your Instructions for Claude and your Cowork Global instructions.