Monday Open, Friday Close: Planned Week vs. the One You Got

This one is for the leader whose Monday plan never survives to Friday, and who is not sure anymore whether the problem is the plan or the week. It comes from The Part That Doesn’t Fit, the work I do with leaders whose wiring runs a little different, and it is a tool called Monday Open / Friday Close.

Here is the idea underneath it. The week you planned and the week you got are 2 different weeks. Everybody knows that. What almost nobody measures is the gap, and for a lot of wiring, the gap is where the energy goes. Not the work itself. The rebuilding. The plan breaks on Tuesday, and you spend Tuesday afternoon building a new one, and Wednesday breaks that. By Friday you have done 5 days of work and 4 days of replanning, and the replanning is the part that left you empty.

So the tool. It takes about 4 minutes. First, 3 scales, 1 to 5. How structured is your week right now? How clear is what is expected of you? And how much energy does maintaining that structure cost you? Second, the honest question: what happens when the plan changes? You lose the rest of the day. You scramble to rebuild. You overcompensate with control. Or you adapt, and it costs more than anyone around you realizes. Third, name the most ambiguous part of your role, the piece nobody ever quite defined. And last, if you could add one structure, one system, one routine to your week, what would it be?

The read comes back in one of 2 shapes. One is the cost of control: you have built plenty of structure, and holding it together is costing more than it saves. The other is missing structure: you are rebuilding the plan every day and calling it flexibility, when it is a tax on every decision you make.

Then the move. Build the one thing you named. Not 3 things. One. A Monday open that takes 10 minutes and writes down what must be true by Friday. Or a Friday close that takes 10 minutes and records what broke, so next Monday starts from reality instead of hope. One routine, 2 weeks, then come back and run it again.

The point was never to make the plan survive. Plans do not. The point is that when it breaks, you know exactly what to rebuild, and it does not cost you the day.

The Part That Doesn’t Fit. Working with your wiring, not against it. www.thepartthatdoesntfit.com/the-book