5 Key Reasons Why You Must Create and Stick to a Weekly Schedule

One of the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs and small business owners is finding the time to do it all. One thing I have learned is that the time will never magically appear you have to create it. Calendaring and clustering are essential to finding time to accomplish what you need. Calendaring means to schedule something and clustering means to group like tasks/projects together.

It is important to create your schedule to ensure that you don’t experience burnout. Also, as your life and routine changes your schedule will more than likely need to change. For instance, if you have a second child or start to travel more your normal schedule will not work. Let’s go over the steps for creating your weekly schedule:

• First, find a calendaring system that works for you. Some people prefer to use Google calendar or Microsoft Outlook where you can synchronize your desktop calendar with your phone. That’s what I prefer, but make sure that you synch all of your calendars so you know exactly what you are supposed to do. I don’t know how many times I have had people to reschedule appointments because they were looking at the wrong calendar when they made the original appointment. Has that happened to you? If you prefer to use an old fashioned calendar where you write stuff in then do that. Just make sure that you don’t skip this step because it is important.

• Next, start putting everything in your calendar. This includes personal appointments, time to work on personal development, self-care, marketing, client work, family time, etc. Make sure that you schedule in time to catch up. As an entrepreneur our to-do list is never finished. That’s why it is important to schedule in specific days and times to do catch-up work.

• Third, you must schedule time for yourself. Take time to celebrate an accomplishment, work out or simply pamper yourself. In order to sustain in your business self-care must be a priority.

• Fourth, determine your optimum time to work during the day. Is it going to be 9:00am – 12:00pm, 1:00pm – 4:00pm, etc. Determine the hours that you are most productive. Plan key events or important projects when your energy is highest. Do you need to get up an hour earlier if you are a morning person to have some focused time on your business or maybe go to bed an hour later if you are a night owl.

• Fifth, create a weekly schedule that tells you exactly what you need to do. For example: Monday/Wednesday is marketing, Tuesday/Thursday is for clients and Friday is a personal day.
Now that you have the five steps for creating a weekly schedule take some time to create your schedule and organize your days to increase your productivity.