As a small business owner, it’s hard to juggle everything, but having a weekly planning calendar helps. It’s easy to feel busy without making progress on what’s most important. You can get to the end of the week and wonder what happened.
Are you putting your time where your goals are? This is the most precious investment and many of us do it without great intention or conviction. We wouldn’t throw our money away like, and we can actually make more money. Be particular with your time, too.
I don’t mean you have to work 100 hours per week, or sacrifice your health or your relationships. In fact, I’m guessing you may need more time on those latter parts of your life. Especially now, when we have to plan to be “social”– with virtual hangouts or social distancing get togethers.
I wish I could remember who used the term “Miracle Device” to describe a calendar, but I don’t. The idea is that if you have goals, but no time devoted to working towards them, they are just dreams. But if you can devote time to the journey, you will get there.
As a small business owner, it’s hard to juggle many different responsibilities, especially including family, your own health, and in the midst of a global pandemic. I realized that I wasn’t carving out enough time for important stuff, sacrificing it to the seemingly urgent.
So I created a simple calendar in a spreadsheet to suggest how I should spend my time. (Then I block off chunks of time in my actual calendar for these activities.) I have to adjust between school time and non school time (and all those pesky “half days”), and of course, again when school went remote. It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than acting without intention.
Here’s a calendar you can copy and adjust to your purposes. (Go to the File menu and click Make a Copy to create a version you can edit.)
Just go through and select which activities you want to do in which blocks of time. (You can adjust the list on the Options tab.) Then you can see the weekly totals and daily averages on the right.
If your big priority is health, for example, but you have 1 hour of exercise per week, that’s a problem. If your big issue is leads, but you spend 0 time marketing and calling contacts, that’s a problem. How would your health change if you increased sleep and exercise time? How would your funnel change if you spent 3 hours per week on marketing, and even an hour a day calling your network?
A few tips:
- Make sure you sleep, eat, etc. That’s important time, too.
- Check your weekly totals and daily averages. Are they realistic? Balanced across what you care about?
- Leave some slack time in the schedule, so when life happens, you don’t completely lose your momentum.
- Make sure you’re doing something for business development every [week]day. Just get in the habit.
- Make sure you schedule your most important stuff first. There’s always more to do– don’t fill your schedule with busy work.
- Don’t be too hard on yourself if you don’t stick to your schedule exactly. Don’t expect that the world will suddenly start revolving around your schedule. If your schedule is completely full, you’ll get frustrated when life throws its curveballs.
You can also check out this post on scheduling at an even finer grain.
Want to figure out your weekly schedule?
Want to see if your investment in your time aligns with your goals?
Give this Weekly Schedule Planner a whirl.