A small gift : Weekly life-planner
Dear all,
I would like to give you a small gift that, hopefully, you will find useful. This is a ‘weekly life planner’ that I created in 2018 with the urge to better organise my tasks and thoughts. I’ve been testing it since then and I can say that this A4 paper improved my life a great deal. I managed to get many things done while keeping my mind space calm and focused.
What problem?
Last few years, I felt like I was chronically lacking time to do what I needed to do. Most of the time, I was feeling overwhelmed and frustrated because I could not put all my ideas, inspirations into action. The day is only 24 hours and I really need my 8 hours of sleep. Under these constraints, I was looking for a way to make the most of my ‘awake’ time.
What solution?
Being a natural-born pragmatic, I first tried daily meditation as a solution. Although, meditation has considerably eased my anxiety, it did not made me ‘wiser enough’ to prioritise or better organise my life. After reading through zillions of personal development and life couching books, I realised that my solution lied in a ‘perfect’ life planner!
What kind of planner?
To fit my purpose, the planner needed to be compact and cover all the different aspects of my daily life (e.g. work, organisational tasks, social interactions, shopping, cooking ideas, inspirations, mindfulness, learning, longer-term goals).
The truth was that (despite my efforts at the beginning of each year), I was incapable of carrying around a notebook planner. Thus, I always ended-up having 4-5 different topical to-do lists that I randomly put in my pockets and handbags. There is no surprise that most of them ended up lost (perhaps stolen!) or totally outdated.
I decided to do it different in 2018. I finally designed a life planner that I could fold into quarters and slip in my wallet to carry around with me all the time. For me and my ‘lucky’ friends who had the ‘honour’ to test it, the experience turned out to be a game changer!
Why did-it work?
I list here some of the reported benefits of the planner based on my experience and the feedback from friends and brave followers 🙂
The weekly life planner helps to:
-have more control over your life and be less frustrated with the lack of time
–connect your daily actions to a meaning
–focus on what really matters and prioritise tasks accordingly
-have a clear overview of what you have already achieved
-not to lose sight of your inspirations and how you want to feel
-allocate more time to productive or fun activities
– have a road-map when confronted to stressful situations
-have more action in administrative/organisational tasks
-to realise when you go off-track and waste time in a counter-productive way (e.g. being obsessed to reach a call centre)
– spend more quality time with friends; optimise “non-voluntary” social interactions
–relieve stress because of having a clear overview of the tasks ahead
How does it work?
Just to give you an idea, I show below how I use the planner in my everyday life. Of course, you can be more creative and customise it to fit your own purpose and life style.
I join here two versions of the planner :
-What I am using WLE life planner 1
-More masculine & corporate version WLE life planner 2
The files are in .docx format, so that you can adjust page margins according to your printer settings.
All you need is to print them (2-sided in A4) and then fold and keep with you all the time!
I hope you will find this small gift useful. I am looking forward to hearing your feedback and suggestions.
Now that we have the planner, I hope we can simply keep calm and make most of our dreams come true ?
All the best,
Selin