Quote: Richard Foster

Simplicty is the only thing that can sufficiently reorient our lives so that possessions can be genuinely enjoyed without destroying us.

-Richard Foster

Author of "Freedom of Simplicity"

Quote: Duane Elgin

The making of money and the accumulation of things should not smother  the purity of the soul, the life of the mind, the cohesion of the family, or the good of the society.

-Duane Elgin

Author of "Voluntary Simplicity"

Making Your Life Plan - Phase 3 - The Art of Scheduling

Today we'll be talking about Phase 3 of making your Life Plan.

Each of us is given a gift every week. We're all given the same exact gift, and what we do with it will determine our success or our failure.

We are all given 10,080 minutes. That's how much time there is in a week. We ALL have the same amount of time, and how we use it is the key to flyin' high or crash and burn.


Scheduling is a discipline that can be a real challenge for a lot of people. If you are not a detail oriented person, it is really a difficult thing to live by a detailed schedule.


Once you have made your goals, you need to look at your time like a budget.

Make a chart, Monday through Sunday at the top, and 6am (or about two hours from your normal wake up time) until midnight (or a little after your normal bed time)

Plot out BLOCKS of time that recur ever week, or everyday.
Do you work a 9-5? Plot it out. Are you a swing shifter? Than you'll need to plot this out for each different shift.

Now, determine what time you want to go to bed and wake up. Sleep is vital to healthy operations. Your brain won't function well if you don't sleep. Write it down.

Do you plan on working out everyday? or several days a week? Plot them out.
Swimming lessons?
Drama Practice?
Church?
Coffee with Grandma?
Date Night?

Whatever recurring weekly or daily things you have to do, you need to draw them on your chart.

Just for the record, I use paper as my first draft for PLOTTING these things, but I go digital when it comes to officially scheduling.

You can use a paper calendar, or a planner if you like, but I prefer Google Calendar. It's free, it's easy to use, and I can set it up to send me SMS reminders, email reminders. I can access it from any computer, at work, at home, at my mom's house.

I can send a TXT message to update my calendar if I'm out on the street and someone wants to schedule an appointment.

My wife has a separate calendar, and we can share access to each other's calendars with whoever we wish, making changes that we both can see. Her items are color coded differently than mine.

I can set up certain recurring events weekly, daily, monthly, etc, making it really easy to program it.

And I get a daily agenda in my email inbox every morning.

Be sure to schedule EVERYTHING you do. If you like a little spontaneity, you can be flexible, but things like payday, bill paying days, trash day, work outs, grocery shopping, and anything that is routine needs to be on a schedule. It take discipline to make it, and even more discipline to stick with it.


Since you've made your NEXT STEPS on your goals, did you set milemarkers for some of them? Plot your milemarkers on your calendar so that you can see them along

Making Your Life Plan - Phase 2 - Next Steps

In our last installment of Making Your Life Plan, we talked about Setting Goals.

Today we're going to talk about Next Steps.

Remember that great movie What About Bob? Richard Dreyfus told Bill Murray he needed to take BABY STEPS.

So let's take that master sheet of goals, and break them down into "baby steps" or Next Steps.

Let's say one of your goals for this year is to get out of debt.
That is going to take a series of next steps.
Let's break it down.

Get out of Debt:
1. Get A Copy of my Credit Report
2. Contact my Creditors and try to work out a payment plan
3. Revisit my monthly budget, and start paying $20 extra monthly on my credit card
4. Consolidate Student Loans
5. Increase Car Payment
6. Cancel Cable TV to free up income


Let's say your goal is to Lose Weight:

1. Find a Diet Plan
2. Call the YMCA to ask about membership
3. Talk to Justin to see if he will be my partner for accountability
4. Work out M - W - F after work.


You've got to break down those goals into next steps, baby steps that you can manage!

Making Your Life Plan - Phase 1 - Setting Goals

It's a new year, and it's time to sit down and put together a Life Plan.

What's that you ask?

Simple. It's a plan for life.
If you hop in your car and head off on a trip to Disneyland, how will get there?
Sure, you could just start heading south, and look for road signs.

But without a roadmap, and a plan, it's going to be difficult to get there.

In fact, it's going to be much less efficient and affordable, and you could have long sections of the trip where you are lost, and not quite sure where you are! You might know where you're going, but how to get there? Not a clue.

I recommend at least once a year to sit down and determine your goals for the new year.
I like to work with Flow Charts and Bubble Graphs. So I start with a great big piece of paper. (At work we have some old continuous computer paper for an old fashioned tractor printer. We use it for scratch paper, and I can have a great big workspace to brainstorm.)

I break up my life into a few areas:

Personal
Employment
Business

Then I break them down into subcategories:
Personal>
Family - Spiritual - Physical - Educational

Under each of these, I make a list of what I hope to accomplish this year. Don't set an easy goal. Set yourself several goals, some that are easy to accomplish, some that are lofty.
For example, under "Physical" I determined that this year I hope to:
1. Get myself trained to work out three-four times a week.
2. Lose 100 pounds

Under Educational, I hope to:
1. Learn Wordpress coding
2. Read "Foxe's Book of Martyrs"
3. Read at least one blog post a day on freelancing

Employment>
At the moment for me this is only at the local community Center, so I make a list of my work goals for the coming year.



For some, this spreadsheet/graph/flowchart will take up more paper than others. I filled about six pages of standard size paper just on my goals for the coming year. For others, it might be much more simple.

When I'm done, I type them up, and post them in a visible place.

But if you don't write them down, if they're just a dream in your head, you'll never reach it.
It's like getting in the car, and saying, Disneyland would be a nice place to go, and then never even trying to go that direction!

New Year's Resolution - Sparkpeople.com

Sparkpeople.com is a great way to help you lose weight.
It simplifies your weight loss system by giving you a place to track, measure, and monitor your success, as well as giving you the workouts, diet plans, and more to help you with the weight.

It also has an online community where you can interact with others, on your journey...

Quote: Henry David Thoreau

Our lives are frittered away by detail; simplify, simplify.

-Henry David Thoreau

(11817-1862)