I recently summed up the entire month of October 2017 as “trying to shove ten pounds of shit into a five pound bag”. How I’ve been planning my days has gotten entirely out of control which was painfully obvious during October.
Asana is fabulous for keeping track of our tasks but it isn’t quite what I want for planning my day to day work. I have a tendency to over-schedule because I don’t have a good way to visualize all of the pieces that need to fit into any particular day. (including eating lunch!)
I’ve tried to work with other planners, I really have! But there are things I want and need that mean more to me and my business. The most notable being I really needed to know how much of my “working” day is truly billable.
That lead me to create a daily planner for virtual assistants on November 1, 2016. I’ve made a lot of changes and tweaks to it since then and I’ll continue to do so. I also intend to go more in-depth (in a future blog post) on why I started tracking my own time as though I were a client.
This daily planner for Virtual Assistants includes:
- Start and End Time which calculates the hours I spent at my desk
- Enter in your billable hour figure and you’ll get the billable percent of your day
- 30-minute slots from 8 am until 8 pm
- Notes/Reminders area
- Area for daily stretches or other goals (we’re talking getting out of your comfort zone type of stretches)
As a bonus, I’ve included a separate tab that is designed to keep track of weekly billable hours and estimated income.
The purchased file is very easy to modify including renaming column headers, colors, etc. At the end of the demo video I also show a quick “how to upload Excel sheets as a Google Spreadsheet” so you can easily make this file a cloud-based version (which is how I originally designed it for my own use).
Resources discussed in the video:
- Freshbooks (Read: 10 Reasons You Should Consider Freshbooks)
- A fun writing journal where I record my daily stretches and asks into for later review (I need an easy way to look back at my accomplishments so I transfer things at the end of the day to the paper journal)
- The book I mention in the video that challenged readers to do daily stretches (NOTE: This book is one of the six I mention here)
I’d love to hear your feedback on how you further customized this daily planner for your own use.