A Clever Planning Sheet to Make Your Life Easier
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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.
And when that happened, we needed to rearrange tasks, sometimes moving those tasks between days. But when we did that — we wanted to move things based on the number of hours a task required. Not by how much open calendar space it looked like we had in our day.
This spreadsheet allowed us to do that.
Plans don’t always work out
The goal with this sheet is not to have a perfect week, where everything goes according to plan. Instead, it’s about having a framework in place that allows you to accomplish your tasks while accounting for…well, life.
Things happen.
Every day.
Whether it’s COVID-19 or a client emergency, something will always come along that attempts to…
