Planning an Ideal Week
As I’ve worked on self improvement over the past six months, I’ve tried to spend time on 7 key disciplines—reading, journaling, studying Mandarin, building new relationships and strengthening old ones, completing web-development projects and blogging. I’ve noticed that each time I begin to thrive in one area, another area starts to fall apart. I’m really struggling to find consistency and balance across all these important aspects of my life, and I don’t think I’m alone in this struggle.
While mulling this over in my mind, I keep coming back to a podcast that I listened to by Michael Hyatt. If you’d like to listen to the full podcast, it can be found here: This Is Your Life: Episode #081.
The main point that I took away from the aforementioned episode is creating a blueprint for an ideal week. We all have some sort of schedule whether it is written down or not, and usually it’s filled with too much of some things and not enough of others.
Creating a blueprint can be done simply in Excel, Numbers or whatever calendar software you use. Just block out each day’s time beginning with what is most important and remember to leave some buffer for when things run long or traffic is bad. Obviously, some weeks will not fit into this mold, but having a blueprint makes us better able to prioritize our time and shows us when we need to say “no.”
I’ve just finished filling out a first draft blueprint for my ideal week (pictured above), and I’ll begin trying to live it tomorrow. My template is free and available below for Excel, Numbers and as a PDF for printing.
Michael suggests creating themes for each day of the week (pictured above), and he even breaks each part of the day into themes. I’ve found themes to be a bit much in my planning, so I didn’t include them. If you’d like to try out themes in your blueprint, I’ve also included links to his free template.
Downloads
Download My PDF Template for Printing
Questions
What areas of your life do you struggle to keep balanced?
Is this something that you're going to try?
What benefits do you think will come from this approach?
Which download template/format do you prefer?
P.S. If you run into any issues downloading the templates, let me know. This is my first time offering a free download of any kind.