Think Week

A course in 17 chapters · about 75 minutes

Think Week

Life, work and bets in the AI era

Start with chapter 1 →

This is a course built from one Think Week: a week away from normal work, spent reading, thinking and deciding. It started with two books about limited time and ended with a concrete plan for a business. In between, it tries to answer one question:

An 80-year life is about 4,000 weeks. AI now makes doing almost free. So what is still worth my weeks?

The course moves in five parts, from the widest frame to the most concrete:

  1. Time. You can't do everything, so choose on purpose. Two books, a practice, and a model of how actions lead to success.
  2. The AI shift. What became cheap and what became scarce, and why your job moves from building to judging.
  3. Choosing a bet. Marketing as a database query, timing, 12 repeatable "moves" behind real successes, and how to rank ideas by speed and by safety.
  4. Applying it. One real case worked through end to end: a WordPress theme maker deciding what to build next, which audience to hold, and how to structure a family of brands.
  5. Toolkit. 20 key ideas, each as a formula plus its trade-off, and a one-page cheat sheet.

How to read it

Each chapter stands alone, but the chapters build on each other. Formulas are in boxes, and every chapter ends with takeaways. Some chapters have small interactive tools: a life-in-weeks grid, an idea scorer and a durability test. Nothing you type in them leaves your browser.

Part IV is a real case study, not a hypothetical. Its numbers and names are the author's own business, as decided during the week. Read it as a worked example of the method in Parts I–III.

Part I · Time

01Four thousand weeksYou will never have enough time to do everything. Once you stop fighting that, you are free to spend your time on what matters.4 min02How to run a Think WeekNormal weeks are for doing things right. A Think Week is for checking you're doing the right things.3 min03Algorithms to live byComputers face the same problems we do: limited time, limited memory, incomplete information. Their answers can help us choose.3 min04The success treeFix a date, work backwards, weight each action. Then find out why "cut everything else" fails.6 min

Part II · The AI shift

05What got cheap, what got scarceWhen one input gets cheap, the things it depends on get expensive. Ten shifts most people haven't priced in yet.5 min06Judge, don't buildWhen AI does the building, your job is taste and judgment. Here's how to decide where to interfere, using formal math as the example.4 min

Part III · Choosing a bet

07Marketing is a queryThink of 8 billion people as a database. Marketing is the SQL query. The hard part is that the search space is infinite.5 min08Timing, and ten more factorsThe right moment can make a bet 2–20× easier. Here's what's hidden inside "timing", and the other dimensions that change the game.4 min09Sweet spots: 12 movesDon't search empty space. Start from a proven success and apply one move to it. Twelve moves, with real cases, and what the AI era broke.8 min10Speed vs safetyWhich moves pay the first dollar fastest, and which ones last? The two rankings are almost opposite, so you have to chain them.4 min11What's stable, what's slowOver two years, the question changes from "what will win?" to "what will surely still be true?" And the world adopts AI much more slowly than AI improves.4 min

Part IV · Applying it

12Scoring a real idea"A publishing ecosystem for WordPress: as easy as Ghost or Substack, with WordPress's freedom." Every dimension from Part III, applied.4 min13Legacy and the audience you holdShould you keep the old products or start fresh? Keep the assets, drop the code. And hold the people, not the platform.5 min14A house of brandsOne product, one mission. An umbrella that holds the audience. Stage gates so the plan doesn't turn back into "fits everything, fits nothing".4 min15Product X: Buttondown in WordPressWhat a Buttondown-style newsletter needs, what WordPress already gives you free, and who you can sell it to first.5 min

Part V · Toolkit

1620 ideas, as formulasIn this phase, understanding matters more than execution. Each idea below is an abstraction, a formula, and the trade-off it hides.5 min17The one-page memoEvery formula and test from the course on one page, plus the decisions this Think Week produced and a template for your own.2 min