Happy New Year Yoprolibrary followers! I’m going to skip the 2020 jokes if it’s all the same to you. All I want to say is that I love you all very much, and to please share this stuff with your friends.
This piece is about a scheduling system that will help you find peace and balance in your life. Use it and love it.
-Cal
How To Display Balance In 2021 With A Schedule Focused On You
When I was in college, my friends and I often spoke of a sacred triangle: a hypothetical ternary graph where each point represented either grades, health, or girls. Focus too much on homework, and your dating life suffers. Spend too much time with your girlfriend and kiss your scholarship goodbye.
Because I also played a sport, my triangle turned into a four-legged barstool made of paint chipped plywood and rusty nails. I didn’t know how to prioritize, and everything suffered as a result.
I figured it out post-graduation. It took time, but through observing mentors, reading, and experience, I learned that the whole sacred triangle thing was just fraternity BS.
It Is Possible To Find Balance In Life
Balance starts with schedule building. You might think that elementary, but even the most disciplined person can forget their priorities.
Without schedules, we are lost souls crunching leaves in a forest, praying to find a trail or that someone finds us.
Without schedules, we are leaving our futures to chance.
My weekly scheduling system was frankensteined together with advice received from executives I’ve met, trial and error, and Stephen Covey’s time management matrix from 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
This system will help you articulate the roles you play in life, so you can allocate appropriate time to high-value activities, which means you can live a more balanced, productive, and purposeful life.
Take it into 2021. Use it and love it.
Step 1.) Identify The Roles You Play
When discussing the impact of 2020 with friends and family, a commonality emerges. That despite its challenges, the year has given us time to reconsider what’s important — like waking from a sleepwalk right before falling off a cliff.
Stephen Covey wrote that the problem we have when organizing our lives is that we “don’t think broadly enough.” We get consumed by work and neglect the other areas that bring us joy and reprieve.
We each have a number of roles we play in our lives — responsibilities or titles that align with our future selves or who we want to become.
At the start of each week, I write the following roles for myself.
Individual: The part of me that aims for self-improvement.
Friend, Brother, Son: My responsibility to be a good person towards friends and family.
Commercial Real Estate Broker: My occupation.
Social Media Guy: Posting consistent and positive content is a high priority of mine.
Writer: Improving my writing skills is also a high priority.
Athlete: My fitness goals. Everyone should treat their body like an athlete.
Your roles will not be the same as mine. It’s a big game of self-awareness, what positions do you own that take you closer to your ideal self?
Step 2.) Write Down The Goals That Boost Your Life’s Roles
The next step to identify 2–3 goals you wish to accomplish under each role over the course of the next seven days.
If you’re having trouble with this step, try brainstorming at least five measurable and actionable activities that will improve your capacity to carry out that role. Rank those five from most valuable to least valuable and let that guide your weekly goals.
The author of Grit, Angela Duckworth, calls these activities “deliberate practice,” or a results-oriented task that allows you to measure and react to the outcomes.
Step 3.) Plug-In Time To Complete Each Goal
Next, look at your week and schedule time to achieve each goal.
You may notice that your schedule is full of non-moveable appointments: team meetings, zoom calls, dentists’ appointments. That’s ok! Keep those where they are. Plug-in your goals around the hard appointments, or delegate them if necessary.
Let’s discuss how to make your schedule accessible and tangible.
Step 4.) Use Evernote to Build Your Timetable
Most of us don’t have mind palaces like Sherlock Holmes to store our schedules. You will need an accessible timetable that you can refer to when lost.
Stephen Covey used a pen and a pocket-sized planner. But that was the 80s, and this article is for Medium.
There are several note-taking apps that make for excellent scheduling tools: Google Sheets, Ulysses, and OneNote, to name a few. But I recommend Evernote. They offer a simple table creating function with color-coded boxes and dropdowns — all designed with scheduling in mind.
Start by inserting an 8 * 30 table. Each column heading will represent a day of the week, and the rows will represent the day broken into 30-minute intervals. Next, place your fixed appointments in their time slots. Then fill in the rest of your schedule with weekly goals. I like to color-code each goal according to their specific role.
Step 5.) Take A Few Minutes To Review How You Did
Just as a golfer watches his swing in slow motion and looks for faults, use the weekly review as a time to find the cracks in your schedule.
It’s not lost on me that weekly reviews are an annoyance. You worked so hard during the week, and now you’re ready to move on. Who cares about the past.
I agree. That’s why this step shouldn’t be time-consuming.
Under each of your roles, write one area you feel confident, and one area of weakness. It might be oversimplified to some, but a quick mental exercise of identifying your weak points will help you formulate a plan for next week.
Step 6.) Run The Program
Emotions run amuck in college. We are stretched in so many directions with little in the way of experience or mentors. It’s not surprising that fraternities lose hope and begin to worship nonsense like the sacred triangle.
Stephen Covey likes to relate humans to computers. As if each of us were cybernetic terminators capable of production detached from emotions.
I don’t hate the analogy. Investing time to build a weekly schedule does resemble a developer banging out code for a shuttle launch.
But it’s up to us to run the code.
Thank You and Please Share with Your Networks!
Thank you for reading the whole damn thing! If you liked what you read and find it valuable, please share it with your social media feeds and help get the word. A little love goes a long way.