How to structure your week and retainers

One of the biggest adjustments in a fractional career is learning to manage your time across multiple clients. Instead of one boss or team demanding your attention, you might have 3, 4, or more clients concurrently – all with pressing needs. How do you structure your week to keep everyone (including yourself) happy? How do you design retainers that allow flexibility but prevent overload? In this post, we’ll dive into tactical time management strategies, tips for handling multiple clients and avoiding scope creep, ideas for tiered retainer setups, and even a sample “week in the life” of a well-structured fractional executive. The goal: help you maintain sanity, deliver quality work, and enjoy the fractional lifestyle.

Create a consistent weekly schedule

Start by recognising that you control your schedule – or at least, you should strive to. A common mistake for new fractionals is to be completely reactive, scheduling things ad-hoc for each client as requests come in. Instead, take a more proactive approach: design an ideal template for your week, allocating blocks of time to each client and to other necessary activities (like admin or business development).

For example:

• Mondays: 9am-12pm Client A team meeting & planning; 1pm-3pm Client B work; 3pm-5pm catch up on emails for all clients.

• Tuesdays: Dedicated mostly to Client B (e.g., on-site or deep work day for Client B).

• Wednesdays: AM for Client C, midday for internal/admin or networking, PM for Client A.

• Thursdays: Heavily focused on Client A (if that’s a bigger client).

• Fridays: Buffer day – catch up on any outstanding tasks, lighter check-ins, and an hour of your own business development or learning.

This is just an illustration – your schedule will depend on how many clients and how many days/hours each. Some fractionals prefer to assign specific days to specific clients (e.g., Monday/Wednesday for Client X, Tuesday for Client Y, etc.), which gives a clean separation. Others might divide days into morning/afternoon blocks for different clients. The key is to avoid constant context switching within a single day – that kills productivity - unless you’re me. As a project manager, a lot of my “upsell” is I can constantly context switch, and I only map out my time by client meetings, and focused work, but I don’t make it prescriptive. Monkey-see, not monkey-do.

As one fractional CMO recounted, if you stack meetings for different clients back-to-back all day, “you may attend a lot of meetings, but you won’t get anything done.”​

Bundling time for each client allows you to fully focus and actually move the needle. For instance, try to schedule a client’s meetings adjacent to some solo work time for that same client. If you have a 1-hour call with Client A, maybe block the next hour to do follow-up work or planning for Client A while your mind is on it. This prevents the inefficiency of jumping to a completely unrelated task right after. Note: I do actively try and do this at least!

Also, protect certain times for deep work. It can be tempting to let each client fill your calendar with their meetings, since you want to be service-oriented. But remember you also have deliverables to produce. It’s okay (even necessary) to block off, say, 2-3 hour chunks of “focus time” where you don’t take calls. You can communicate to clients that those times are when you’re working on their projects behind the scenes.

Another tip is to implement a morning routine for planning/triage. Setting aside even 30 minutes every morning to review your task list and emails across all clients can help you prioritise the day​. Some fractionals treat this like a daily briefing – checking each client’s needs, deadlines, any overnight emails, and adjusting the day’s plan accordingly. By doing this first thing, you avoid nasty surprises and you can reassure yourself that nothing critical is slipping through cracks.

Contrarian tip: While one reason to go fractional is flexibility, don’t ditch all structure. Ironically, a bit of rigid scheduling can increase your overall flexibility. If you know exactly what’s on your plate and when, you’ll find it easier to reschedule or adapt when an emergency pops up, and you’ll experience less stress. Total free-form chaos, on the other hand, will have you working nights and weekends to catch up. So embrace some structure as your friend, not foe.

Manage time and communication across multiple clients

Juggling multiple clients is an art of prioritisation and communication. Here are some tactical strategies to stay on top of everything: