A Clever Planning Sheet to Make Your Life Easier

Joe Martin
9 min readMar 31, 2020

In the 3+ years that my team worked for 6 weeks and took 2 off, this spreadsheet helped us improve communication, increase productivity, and strengthen our culture. Here’s how we use the sheet and why I think it can help you.

Trying to plan tasks on your calendar is awful

Daily tasks move too much to be on your Apple or Google calendar. When we attempted to schedule our tasks on a calendar, it felt like a collapsing waterfall. If one thing went wrong, it messed up everything else.

So, we started to plan in a spreadsheet instead.
This Weekly Planning Google Spreadsheet.
You can make a copy of it and start to plan your week right now.

The biggest benefit — it allowed us to see how many hours of work we had lined up. Not just open space in our calendar to say “sure, we can take another meeting.” We needed to understand that scheduling another meeting meant we were adding more hours of work onto our day.

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Joe Martin
Joe Martin

Written by Joe Martin

Entrepreneur, author, and TEDx Speaker who believes real world interactions are more valuable than digital ones.