Put a countdown timer on anything and it suddenly feels urgent. Most pressure is just a visible clock.

Pressure is mostly a visible clock. Put a countdown on an ordinary task and your body treats it as an emergency, even though nothing about the task changed, which tells you how much of urgency is decoration. Some deadlines are real and worth respecting. A lot of what makes a week feel frantic is just numbers in your line of sight, chosen by somebody else, counting down at you.

Sort your week into deadlines that are genuinely fixed and ones that only look fixed. Move or mute one of the fake ones and see what happens, which is usually nothing.