Whatever Color Fills Your Week Is Your Career
A calendar trick shared by Dan Martell, built for CEOs, turned into a test for the first decade of your working life.
Your busiest week vs. your best week
You already know this. You have had weeks where you barely sat down, answered everything, showed up to all of it, and still ended Friday with the odd feeling that you built nothing. The week was full. You were not.
An email from Dan Martell landed in my inbox this week, from his newsletter, with a fix for the first half of that problem. Years ago, he handed his calendar to an assistant, and it turned into fourteen meetings a day, a wall of grey boxes, no way to tell a call worth real money from a chat that should have been an email. So he did one small thing. He gave every event a color.
Red for client calls. Purple for paid speaking. Blue for deep work. Now he glances at his phone and knows in three seconds whether the week will make money or waste it.
It is a good trick. I want to hand it to the person starting off to build a career. Bear with me.
The CEO asks a different question than you should
Martell colors his week to protect revenue. Fair enough. He runs companies. His calendar is a profit-and-loss statement, with time as the currency.
You are earlier than that. The role you hold today is not the thing you are protecting. The role is rented. Someone else owns it, and they can take it back whenever they choose.
So your colors have to answer a different question. Not “which of these boxes pays me this week.” The real question is “which of these boxes is building something I will still own when this job ends?”
That is a harder thing to see. And your calendar is hiding the answer in plain sight.
Color your week by what it does to you, not by the task
Forget sorting by activity. Sort by what time does to your future. Four colors are plenty to start.
Green is growth. The hours that make you measurably better at something hard, a skill you did not have last quarter. Reps at the edge of your ability, not the comfortable middle.
Blue is position. The work that makes you known and trusted by people who are not your manager. The talk. The written piece. The relationship is one rung up. The project that puts your name on something visible.
Yellow is delivery. The actual job. What you are paid to do today. This is not the villain. It is most of the week for everyone. But it is rented time. It keeps you employed. On its own, it does not make you harder to replace.
Grey is maintenance. Status meetings, inbox, the recurring call nobody remembers agreeing to. It has to happen. It builds nothing.
Now open the next seven days and color them honestly.
The color you see most is the direction you are heading
Here is the part that stings.
For most people in the first decade of work, the week is a wall of yellow and grey with a thin thread of green on Tuesday morning, if that. The rented hours and the wasted ones.
Which means the two colors that actually build a career, growth, and position are the ones that get canceled first. They are never urgent. Nobody escalates because you skipped the thing that would have made you better. So, it moves. And moves again. And a year goes by.
Whatever color you see the most is not a description of your week. It is a forecast of your career.
I would love to be there when you open your calendar and look at it this way for the first time. The reaction is most likely going to be quiet. As you expected to find growth. You are likely to find a wall of yellow.
The two colors nobody schedules
Growth and position share the same weakness. They are never the loudest thing on Monday, so they lose every fight for your attention.
So do exactly what Martell does for them for revenue. Put them on the calendar first, in ink, before the week fills in around them.
One green block. Two hours, protected, on the hardest skill you are building, set for your best morning, not the leftovers of your day. Martell protects his mornings for deep work. Yours are worth even more because you are still forming.
One blue block. Ninety minutes a week aimed at being seen. The draft, the post, the coffee with someone a level above you, the small piece of visible work that carries your name.
That is three and a half hours out of a forty-hour week. Under ten percent. If you cannot find ten percent of your week to build the only asset that is actually yours, that is not a scheduling problem. That is the finding.
The colors do not lie, and neither will this
Martell is right about one thing above all else. The colors do not lie.
You think your mornings go to deep work. Color them and find out. You think you are growing. Point to the green. You think you are building a reputation. Point to the blue. If you cannot point to it, it is not happening, no matter how tired you are on Friday.
Tired is not the same as building. A grey and yellow week can flatten you completely and leave you exactly where you started. That is the cruel maths of the rented hour. You spend all the energy and keep none of the equity.
Your calendar is the cheapest diagnostic you own. It is already tracking everything you do. You just have to give it color and be willing to look.
Do this before Monday
Open your calendar. Color the next seven days with four colors: growth, position, delivery, and maintenance.
Then count. If growth and position together come to less than one box in ten, you have your answer. And you have it while there is still time to change it.
This is the core idea behind how we think about careers at RISEUP@work. Your career is the asset you carry from one role to the next. The role is rented. The colors on your calendar are the truest record you have of whether you are building the asset or just paying the rent.
So open the calendar. Not to feel busy. To find out. Whatever color you see the most, that is not this week. That is you, a decade from now, already in motion.
Credit where it is due. The color-coded calendar is Dan Martell’s idea, shared in his newsletter. I have only changed the question it is built to answer.
Dr. Deepak Bhootra is the founder of RISEUP@work, a career operating system for the first decade of your working life. He is an ICF-certified coach, the author of four books on careers, and has held senior leadership roles at Fortune 100 companies across four countries.
If this was useful, subscribe at riseupatwork.substack.com. It is where I write about building the career that no employer can take back. And do visit wefunder.com/riseupatwork to see our investor page, where we are raising capital for deploying RISEUP@work.