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