My mentor gave me a test back in 2007. I didn't like what it revealed.
He asked me to pull up my calendar and look at my last month of credit card charges. Then he asked one question: “You say family is your number one value. Show me where that shows up here.”
I couldn't.
At the time, I was working 60, maybe 70 hours a week. Asian Efficiency was growing fast, and I was all in. Family was supposedly the most important thing to me. But when I looked at the evidence… There was basically no family time blocked. I had stopped exercising. No growth activities. No margin for anything that wasn't work.
He said it directly: “Thanh, you're living out of alignment.”
That phrase has been rattling around in my head ever since. Because he was right. And because I see the same gap in almost everyone I coach.
The Two Sets of Values Problem
Most of us carry around two sets of values at all times.
The first set is the one we say out loud or write down in our journals. Family. Health. Growth. Balance. These feel real because we've articulated them.
The second set is the one revealed by our behavior. Where we actually put our time. What we actually spend money on. These are our real values right now, whether we like it or not.
The uncomfortable truth is that these two sets rarely match.
I worked with a coaching client not long ago who said fitness was a top priority. When we looked at her calendar, there wasn't a single workout scheduled in the past four weeks. When we looked at her spending, nothing was going toward healthy food or gym fees. She had the intention of making fitness a priority. But intentions aren't values. Scheduled time is.
The Calendar-Credit Card Test
Here's the test my mentor taught me. It takes about five minutes.
Pull up your last 30 days of calendar entries and your last 30 days of expenses. Write down your top three or four stated values — the things you'd say matter most if someone asked.
Now look for evidence of each value in those two documents.
Not a vague sense of it. Actual proof. A recurring workout block. A dinner out with family. A book you bought on something you care about. A therapist appointment you kept.
If a value shows up zero times across both documents, it's an aspiration. Not an actual priority.
This isn't meant to make you feel bad. The point is clarity. You can't fix a gap you haven't named.
What Designing an Ideal Week Actually Means
At Asian Efficiency, we teach something called the Ideal Week. A lot of people assume it's about making a perfect schedule or color-coding your calendar in a way that looks productive.
That's not what it is.
The Ideal Week is about reverse-engineering your calendar from your stated values. If health matters, there are workouts on the calendar before other things get scheduled. If deep work matters, there are protected blocks that don't get traded away for meetings. If family matters, Saturday morning is not a default work session.
The architecture of your week should reflect what you actually care about. When it doesn't, every week feels slightly off… even when you get a lot done.
I've noticed something with clients who have a strong gap between stated and actual values: they tend to feel chronically behind, even when they're working hard. The reason is usually that they're grinding on things that don't connect to what they actually care about. The work isn't wrong. The alignment is.
The Fix Isn't Discipline
When I was working 70-hour weeks saying family was my top value, the answer wasn't to “try harder” at balance. It was to make a real decision: either family is my top value and my calendar changes, or it's not and I stop saying it is.
That sounds harsh. But false values are more draining than honest ones.
I've been working from home since 2009. One of the things I learned fast is that when you don't have clear boundaries on your time, you end up feeling permanently “on.” No clear start, no clear stop. The work just bleeds into everything. That's not alignment. That's drift.
The one calendar edit that changes everything is usually simple. Block the thing you say you care about. Actually protect it. See how it feels to live that way for two weeks.
You don't need to redesign your whole life. Just close the gap by one inch.
Start Here
If you want to run the calendar-credit card test today, here's how to do it quickly:
- Write down your top 3 stated values (what you'd tell a friend you prioritize)
- Open your calendar for the past 30 days
- For each value, count how many times you see evidence of it on the calendar
- Do the same for your bank or credit card statement
- Wherever the count is zero… that's the gap
Then pick one. Just one. And block one hour of time for it next week.
Small, consistent edits to your Ideal Week add up fast. You don't need a big transformation. You need a small, honest one.
If you want help designing a weekly structure that actually reflects your priorities, check out our weekly review — it's the simplest tool we've made for this.
