Techniques of Highly Productive People: Daily and Weekly Schedules

A simple productivity technique used by many highly productive and successful people is the daily and weekly schedule. For example, Bob Bly, a well known & highly successful copywriter, mentions how powerful scheduling your time is in his book 101 Ways to make Every Second Count. Taking the effort to schedule your time helps you stay on track. I usually write my daily schedule first thing in the morning when I get to the office. The idea is not necessarily to rigidly follow your schedule — during the course of a day, other things may come up that you have to deal with. When this happens, I rewrite my schedule for the remainder of the day. Similarly, I’ve started making a weekly schedule or plan. I use this to map out specific tasks that need to be completed or which I’d like to make significant headway on during the course of the week.

You can find many templates for weekly & daily schedules on the Web. Below are the templates I created for myself. The point of my templates is to be as simple as possible — the simpler an organizational system is, the more likely you are to use it and stick with it. The daily schedule begins at 8:30 and ends at 22:30 in one hour intervals. The weekly schedule begins on Monday and ends on Sunday. You’ll notice on the weekly schedule that the check-mark column is the second column. The reason for this is if I have several scheduled goals to accomplish on a given day, I can check off each as I go along. The templates are available in Open Office format & as PDFs. I usually print several off at a time on scrap paper that I’ve accumulated. As I do most of my work almost exclusively on the computer, it’s nice to pick up a pen in the morning and map out my day. Note that I’ve used small margins in order to help maximize the page real-estate for schedule items. Feel free to adapt the templates to fit your needs. Please let me know if you find them useful.

• Daily Schedule: OpenOffice (52Kb), PDF (48KB)
• Weekly Schedule: OpenOffice (48KB), PDF (44KB)

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