You will want to make a fast and simple strategic calendar to match your fast and simple paper calendar system. To do this, you are simply going to make a mock schedule for how you generally would like to spend your week. It doesn’t have to be perfect; it simply needs to help you budget time for everything that is important.
Not In Your Daily Schedule
Don’t make your strategic calendar in your daily schedule. Your daily schedule may vary from you strategic calendar, and that is okay. You want to make a separate sheet of paper that you can either hang by your desk or carry with you. It should be one sheet of paper, separate from your schedule.
- Pick a method for making your strategic calendar.
You need some kind of weekly-schedule-format sheet for your strategic calendar. the following are a few ideas of what you might use:- An unused week from your schedule book
- Electronic calendar (such as Outlook) that can print a 7-day week
- A free, printable online calendar like those at Vertex42.com and elsewhere
- A spreadsheet program, such as Excel
- A word processor that can create tables, such as MS Word
- A sheet of blank paper with a ruler and colored pencils
- Set up a blank 7-day calendar.
Your calendar should have the following characteristics:- 8 columns: 1 to list time-of-day and 1 for each day of the week.
- Have as many lines each day as there are half-hours while you are awake. If you are making the calendar yourself, make sure you have 35 lines: 1 header plus lines for 14 hours.
- Label each day and label each hour.
- Make the week-long strategic calendar fit on one page.
By this point, you should be looking at a blank 7-day calendar that has the hours marked out from when you wake up to the time you go to sleep. If that is what you have, you are ready to finish filling out your strategic calendar.
See Your Strategic Calendar for the remaining instructions for filling it out.
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