It’s amazing to be living in an age when we have so many options available to us. Everything from clothes to education to toothpaste presents us with hundreds, if not thousands, of options.
But when you’re trying to lead a God-honoring life, optionality can be paralyzing.
Even when it comes to what to do today, often, the possibilities are dizzying. You may have your to-do list, your calendar, and your projects all neat and organized, but what should you do first?
This is where I have been greatly helped by keeping a weekly schedule. I’ve mentioned this in passing in two recent videos, but I thought I’d explain a little more about how it works for you here.
Now, by weekly schedule, I’m not talking about a list of appointments; that’s what my calendar is for. I mean a general plan for how I plan to divide up my time and attention on a normal week.
Here’s what my weekly schedule looks like:
That may be hard to read, but here are a couple points of interest:
- Every day has a theme (e.g., Tuesday, I write this newsletter, Wednesday, I record and edit videos)
- I’m giving time to every domain of stewardship (that’s what the color coding is indicating, time for family, work, health, etc.)
- I have a bedtime (If you’ve never seen your sleep schedule on paper, you may not realize how inconsistent it is)
Obviously, every week doesn’t go as planned. But having a definition of a “normal week” prevents you from coming to those paralyzing moments where you look at all you could be doing and ask yourself, “What should I do next?”
Just follow the schedule.
One of the nice features of the little Google sheet I made for this is that you can categorize how you spend your time, and it will automatically tally it up and give you a nice pie graph.
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The point of this isn’t to get you to make the pie perfectly even but to give you some visibility on where you might be spending too much or too little time.
If you’re interested, you can duplicate a blank version of my template here (just click, “File -> Make a copy” to copy it to your own Google drive).
I also made a new course that goes really deep into how to optimize your week using this template and some other materials. It’s called Optimize Your Week. And it covers:
- Auditing your current schedule
- Creating your ideal weekly schedule
- Planning around your energy levels
- Defending & modifying that schedule
- And more
It also has loads of bonus videos where we explore example schedules for a pastor, homemaker, and student.
The course is already available to members of our Redeeming Productivity Academy (along with the rest of our courses) if you want to dive in that way.
But I decided to run a special offer for those of you who just want the course and not the whole academy.
You can grab lifetime access to this course for just $29 this week by using code “IDEALWEEK” at checkout. That’s 38% off the regular price.
Learn more about Optimize Your Week here.
