Weekly Personal Schedule Template to Simplify Your Life

Easy tips for how to make a weekly personal schedule to free up hours of wasted time & de-clutter your life. Get more stuff done in less time & have more time for yourself!

Here’s a tip I learned from personal experience: you need a weekly personal schedule. Why, you ask? Because getting caught up in the whirlwind of the daily grind can be exhausting – going to bed each night feeling like you gave your everything and still things are a bit of a mess and there’s a dozen things that you forgot or didn’t have time to do today, so you have a bad feeling that you’ll start the next day feeling anxious as well. Sound familiar?

Trust me, I know what that feels like. Our family used to have no pre-planning whatsoever in our daily lifestyle, and looking back now, I can clearly see the problems that were caused by the lack of any kind of structure. We used up all our free time together running around taking care of random errands, going grocery shopping almost every day and just plowing forward taking each day as it came.

Every day we felt guilty about not spending enough quality time together and stressing out over the feeling of not having a good grip on how we organized our lives.

So we decided to get organized, once and for all. Every Sunday we sit down and take our personal planners out (his a mobile app, mine an old-fashioned planner) and go over the upcoming week, drafting our weekly personal schedule. We plan for meals, appointments, errands, grocery shopping, things to buy and others to take care of and assign each item a specific day and time.

I can’t even begin to tell you how much of a positive effect this simple Sunday planning session has had on our lives. There is so much less frantic running around trying to get things done and much more time when we can just focus on spending time together and unwinding. I once did the math and came up with at least 7 hours of previously wasted time that we were now free to use however we wanted. That’s almost a full workday’s worth of extra time!

Previously, I felt like I had two working days crammed into one: the first was my actual work day at my job and the second begun when I got home. I’m not proud to admit it, but being home with the family had actually started to feel like a job, which is why we wanted to make a big change. And it was so worth it. I wish I could go back in time and just tell myself “this is how to manage your time efficiently, go do it girl! It’s not that hard!”.

De-cluttering and managing your schedule on a weekly basis will give you more time and will allow you to be free from the stress of trying to do a million things simultaneously and achieving little.

So give your fried brain a break. I will walk you through a simple system for managing time that I personally use and have found effective. All you need to do is sit down next Sunday, grab a glass of whatever takes off the edge for you and plan the week ahead using the easy-to-follow tips for how to to make an effective weekly personal schedule below.

If you follow the system, I promise you that by next Sunday, you will have more free time to do stuff you actually enjoy and less stress about just barely getting through each day without pulling your hair out from all the anxiety that bad time management causes.

So to offer you some personal time and schedule management tips for one busy gal to another, here is my simple plan for a weekly time management strategy:

Weekly Personal Schedule Template

Below is a 3-step plan that I use, feel free to modify it according to your personal time management needs. At the bottom of the post you will also find the free printable template for your weekly personal schedule.

So on a Sunday, grab your weekly planner (or my handy dandy printable template below) and first make a list of the things that you spend time on during your free time. Then prioritize that list. Start from the ones that absolutely must be done like grocery shopping and important errands  that need to be taken care  of during next week.

However, if you keep filling up that schedule with stuff that is not essential, you won’t benefit from it. With every item you are about to add to the schedule, ask yourself if it really is absolutely necessary.

Can you still be happy if you don’t go hunting for that trendy clothing item/make-up shade/new kitchen gadget? Chances are, you can.  Keep the list short and sweet, and you will see that de-cluttering your week becomes much easier.

The idea is not to deprave yourself and strip life down to bare necessities, but choosing when to do the stuff that needs to be done, so you’ll have more time to actually do whatever you want.

1. MEALS & GROCERIES. Write down the specific meals you will make for each day, then write a grocery shopping list based on these meals. Decide the weekday that you will go buy these items (usually Monday) and then one more day later in the week to stock up on things like milk (Thursday is a good option).

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2. IMPORTANT APPOINTMENTS & ERRANDS. Assign specific days (for us it’s Wednesdays and Saturdays) for appointments, home repairs, necessary shopping or anything else that absolutely has to be done this week. Try to fit multiple things on two or three days, so you will have these days assigned for taking care of errands. This category includes plans with friends and hobbies as well. Because sometimes getting a glass of wine with a friend really is absolutely necessary.

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3. FREE DAYS. This is where you get to decide when the schedule stays empty. We have three free days per week (Tu, Fri & Sun) and it works out great. For us, it is important to have a couple of free days on the weeknights, so that we can just unwind after busy workdays. The free day system makes sure we make the other stuff happen on the days we assign them to so we can relax and have pancake parties on our free days, completely guilt-free.If you want to make sure there are always free days on your weekly schedule, start the planning process with this step. Once you get used to having those lovely free days, it becomes easier to leave out the stuff that really isn’t that important, because you will not want to sacrifice those days. De-cluttering made easy!

And here’s that free printable template I promised you, just click below and print it up:

FREE PRINTABLE TEMPLATE FOR A WEEKLY PERSONAL SCHEDULE

Hopefully you got some personal time management tips from this post – this system really works for me and my family, which is why I wanted to share it. Do visit the comments section if you found it helpful!

De-stressing hugs,
Sera xx