Daily schedule template

You make a daily schedule by writing in your wake-up time and bedtime first, and then filling in the day between them. It takes about ten minutes.

1. Start with sleep. Write the time you get up and the time you go to bed. The CDC, a US health agency, says adults need 7 or more hours of sleep a night.
2. Put in what has a fixed time. Work or classes, travel and meals go in next, because you cannot move them.
3. Give your three things a start time. Look at the gaps that are left. Put the hardest of the three in the part of the day when you feel most awake.
4. Leave some time empty. If every minute is taken, one late bus pushes back everything after it.

At night, tick what you did. For a page with one row for every hour, use the hourly planner template. To plan seven days at once, use the weekly planner template.

A good daily routine is a short list of things you do every day at about the same time: get up, eat, work, move, wind down, sleep. A daily schedule is that routine with a clock time on each part, plus the things that belong to one day only, like a meeting.

The morning routine page and the night routine page each have one to copy. To give each task in the middle of the day its own block of time, read about time blocking.

A paper schedule shows what you planned. It cannot show what you really did, and by the evening that is hard to remember.

A good way to check a schedule is to count the hours of the day you really had, from what you write or say about it. Most journaling apps only ask how the day felt. They do not show how many hours went to work, to meals or to your phone.

One app built for this is Think in Numbers, a smart journaling app with time tracking built in.

You write or say your day in your own words, as it happens or all at once. The app reads what you wrote and counts the hours that went to each part of it: work or study, sleep, meals, getting around, your phone, and the time you never mentioned (shown as unaccounted). Then it shows those hours over days and weeks. So you can see how many hours each part of your schedule really got. The app also has a weekly plan and targets. Add the parts you mean to keep, like exercise after work, as daily habits, and the app ticks them off when what you write shows you did them.

1. You write your day

2. It counts the hours

• Exercise0m
• Work0m
• Sleep0m
• Unaccounted24h

3. It shows your week

S

M

T

W

T

F

S

Exercise this week: 0m

On 6 of 7 days. The gap is the day without it.

An example day and week.

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Write my first day

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For iPhone and Android. Try it on your own day before you pay.