Bonus Tips & Ideas

We recommend setting up your weekly dashboard on a Sunday evening or Monday morning. This proactive 20-minute strategy window where you write out your intentions is incredibly powerful in terms of moving you from thought to action. In the same way, taking 5-10 minutes at the start and end of each day to reflect on your priority tasks will do wonders for boosting your daily productivity.

When it comes to building up your planning compartments, try to focus on the 20% of actions that will make your week as productive and purposeful as possible. Compartmentalizing your to-do lists in this way forces the brain to really concentrate on each bucket in turn, rather than it simply being a last-minute, jumbled brain dump for the day ahead.

The “Not-To-Do” list is a mindful reminder of the behavior blind spots that we try hard to minimize. We all have them, and until we become proactive about managing them, it's hard to avoid automatically responding to the triggers for those behaviors. We recommend writing 2-3 negative habits that you know you're guilty of and consciously working to keep those in check during your week.

Before populating the Priority Actions section, start by flipping back to the previous week. Do a visual review of the week gone by and migrate any key actions that you didn't complete, over into each relevant planning compartment. A simple bullet journal style productivity key to track your tasks is a simple way to provide visual cues to track your actions.

When it comes to following through with your daily habits, prepping in advance (planning weekly meals on a Sunday, keeping the dental floss by the toothbrush, setting out multivitamins at breakfast) is a great way to ensure you follow through.

As the week progresses, track your sleep and water intake and experience a little burst of pleasure every time a priority task or habit is checked off. Using this holistic approach to manage your week will begin to shift your outlook on productivity, from one that may have been focused on work and time to one that is now focused on meaningful output. Having that clarity of how you intended to spend your week, and in turn how you actually spent your week, will help to reduce the overwhelm and give you a sense of control over how purposefully you spent your time.

When designing the Purpose Planner, an important consideration was that we didn't want to lose the touch and feel of a high-quality notebook. We love the flexibility of the quiet dot grid pattern, which lends itself perfectly to free form notes and sketches, and is also ideal when you want to create new trackers or templates. We chose thicker 100gsm paper to ensure that when you use ink and colour, it doesn't soak through to the other side.

There are 93 numbered blank pages in the Purpose Planner, interspersed between the planning dashboards and at the end of the journal, with a notes index upfront so you never lose track of your notes. We recommend giving each of your notes, templates or drawings a topic and jotting that into your notes index together with the corresponding page number. It's always satisfying to be able to flip through old Purpose Planners and quickly find what you're looking for.