How To Get Started With The Passion Planner Weekly
Maybe you’ve just bought your first Passion Planner, or maybe you’re trying to decide if the Passion Planner is the right personal planner for you. Either way, you’ve come to the right place! In this post, we’ll go over how the Passion Planner is set up and how you can use the Passion Planner to build habits to create the life you’ve always wanted.
Passion Planner Setup
It’s important to understand how the Passion Planner is set up because every part of the planner is integral to your overall success. The Passion Planner is broken down into five major features: the Passion Planner Roadmap, the GameChanger, monthly layouts, weekly layouts, and monthly reflections. Let’s dive into each of those sections together.
1. The Passion Roadmap: Dream Big
The most important part of your planner is the Passion Roadmap, which is designed to help you realize your long-term goals and work towards them each day. It’s our version of a vision board but for the big goals in your life.
1. As you sit down to start your Passion Roadmap, set a timer for five minutes. As the timer ticks, write out all the things you want to accomplish in your lifetime. The goal of this space is to help you realize what your true ambitions are in life. Don’t stress yourself out, just write what comes to mind naturally.
To simplify this process, the Roadmap is broken down into sections based on how soon you want to accomplish your goal. Write out your dreams organized into the next three months, one year, three years, and lifetime.
Example: If you want to get in shape, that could be a three-month goal or a one-year goal. If you want to buy a house, that could be a three-year goal or a lifetime goal.
2. Once you have all of your goals on paper, set a new timer for one minute. Then, go through each of the four time frames and circle the one goal that would have the biggest positive impact on your life. You should have four goals circled at the end of this process.
Don’t worry too much about the details of each step. Remember, this is supposed to be fun!
2. The GameChanger: Break Down Your Goals
The next section of the Passion Planner is the ‘GameChanger’ section. Aptly named, as this is where you figure out exactly what you need to do to accomplish one of your biggest goals. This section helps you turn your big goals into actionable steps.
Let’s focus on the goal of ‘Getting Healthy’. If your goal is to get healthy, what will you need to accomplish to achieve that goal? Write those tasks down. These will be your tangible actions to accomplish getting healthy. This may include: meal prepping, running, going to the gym, sleeping, and meditating.
Once your tangible actions have been determined, write out what you need to do to accomplish each of those actions. Then, create deadlines for each of those tasks. When do you want to achieve your goal by?
Example: If one of the focuses of getting healthy is to get more sleep, your tasks could include going to bed before 11pm, getting 8 hours of sleep a night, and/or putting your phone away at 9pm.
Once you write out your goals and break each one down into steps, you’ll see how easy it is to reach them!
3. Monthly Layouts: Think Big Picture
Congratulations! You’ve now figured out what your lifetime goals are and have broken those goals into smaller milestones that you can reach through the year. Now, let’s talk about how to schedule those milestones into your life.
Each monthly planner layout has a space for you to write your focus for your personal life and your work life for the month. Reflect on the goals you set for your GameChanger project and incorporate those into your focuses for each month.
Additionally, you can fill in sections that include people you want to see that month, places you want to go, and things you want to focus on not doing. As soon as your monthly priorities are in place, you can use additional sections to write out your personal and work projects based on priority and due date.
Being able to plan ahead and see what your month will look like will help you build effective habits to reach your long term goals. Think of it this way - as you plan each month, you’re planning for your future. You’re working towards the goals that you set in your Passion Roadmap at the beginning of your planner in each and every day.
4. Weekly Layout: Work At It
It’s important to set a time each week to check in with yourself and plan ahead to make sure you’re staying goal-oriented as you work through the month. The Passion Planner weekly layouts simplify your monthly goals into a daily planner that you can digest. Break down the daily tasks you need to complete in order to stay the course for your monthly goals. Incorporate those daily tasks into your personal and work to-do lists to ensure you stay focused.
Tip - Create a Planning Habit: Sunday is the best day to sit down to input your responsibilities because it prepares you for the week ahead. With that in mind, every Sunday, input all of your mandatory daily responsibilities into your weekly layout. This would include work hours, class times, and appointments. Then, add additional things you need to get done to your to-do list in order of importance.
Once you can see everything that you have to do, add in weekly and daily focuses that match the goals you created in your Passion Roadmap. If your goal is to get fit, schedule in gym time. If your goal is to eat better, be sure to add space for meal prepping into your schedule.
We also include a Space of Infinite Possibility each week to allow you to embrace your creativity through doodles, note-taking, or stickers. If you want to truly customize your planner, you can print out our free downloadable PDF inserts for this area that will help you track your finances, track your workouts, or collect contact information from new friends you make throughout the school year. To make sure you stay grounded in gratitude, there’s also space for you to write out the good things that happened each week.
Planner Hack: Color code the tasks you complete daily to analyze what you’re spending your time on. Sound complicated? We know. That’s why our CEO made a video to demystify color coding your Passion Planner.
5. Reflection Pages: Time to Reflect
At the end of each month, you will have the opportunity to complete a monthly reflection where you can see how close you came to achieving your goals. This section is laid out so that you have seven journal prompts to answer, as well as three checklist questions to make sure you realign your focus for the upcoming month.
This is a time for you to reflect on the good things that happened last month, the progress you made, and the areas you can improve on next month. Think of this monthly reflection section as the area where you can hold yourself accountable. Identify how productive you were last month and move forward setting goals for the upcoming month.
The eight monthly reflection question prompts are:
- What was the most memorable part of this past month? Describe it.
- What were the three biggest lessons you’ve learned in this past month?
- Review your planner for the past month and assess your priorities. Are you happy with how you spent your time? If not, what steps can you take next month to adjust them?
- What did you accomplish this past month? What are you most proud of?
- How are you different between this past month and the month before it?
- What or who are you especially grateful for this past month?
- Name three things you can improve on this upcoming month. What concrete actions can you take to work towards these improvements?
- From 1-10, how do you feel about this past month?
The end of the month checklist includes:
- Highlight Your Accomplishments: Go back to your Passion Roadmap and highlight any goals you reached or steps you completed.
- Reform: Choose this month’s GameChanger from your Roadmap. Use the space on the bottom right of your monthly layout to break the goal down into smaller steps and assign deadlines for each step.
- Set Checkpoints: Move these steps into their respective weekly layouts as checkpoints to track progress.
Make sure you go back to your Passion Roadmap after you complete each monthly reflection to see if there are any goals you can check off! Need some inspo? See how our CEO, Angelia Trinidad, does her monthly reflections in this video.
6. Blank and Dotted Pages: Express Yourself
At the very back of your planner, there is extra space for you to jot down all of your thoughts or doodle fun designs. If you don’t have enough space to write out your wildest dreams, you can always download free graph paper or dotted inserts to add to your Passion Planner! Or, print out a free habit tracker PDF and track how often you sleep, workout, or walk your dog.
Remember that the Passion Planner only works if you do, too.
The Passion Planner is an incredible tool to hold yourself accountable and manage all of the projects in your life. It’s your chance to create the life you’ve always wanted. Remember, big things happen one day at a time, so plan accordingly!