I’m a fan of the principle of iterative development, and I like my development cycles as short as possible.

My productive week starts on Wednesdays and ends on Tuesdays. Each week, I reflect on what I’ve achieved during the last productive week, if my assumptions of what I could get done were realistic, and if they weren’t, what tripped me up. I would then, on Wednesday, plan my next week, just as I did the previous one.

Here’s what makes it so interesting: when I’m planning a week, I’m eyeballing the”value points” of each task and sum the values up to form the overall productive points of the week. I started out with about 4 points for a full business day, but over the time it has evolved to a merely abstract, gut feeling amount of points per task.

What unit the points refer to really doesn’t matter, as long as you stay consistent at your eyeballing.

This way, it has turned out that I can achieve about 15 points each week consistently without signs of drain and exhaustion, and I can easily identify “slow” weeks as well as stretches of highly productive, deadline-driven weeks.

So I know that at crunch time I can do two or three consecutive weeks with up to 30 points, but I also know that I will have to do at least one slow week afterwards to keep my pace and refill my batteries.