delivering grace: The 7 Minute Life-a review

Tuesday, 16 September 2014

The 7 Minute Life-a review

If, like me, you constantly struggle with time management then there is a great attraction in having a new planner to help. The 7 Minute Life's aim is to prioritize, organize and simplify your life.
In order to achieve this, a 90 day planner is used-The 7 Minute Life™ Daily Planner.

The planner is a spiral bound book protected by transparent protective covers measuring 7.3" by 8.5" (about 19cm x 22.5cm).

The Company helpfully produced a video which explains more about using the planner. This video takes about 12 minutes but there are shorter videos explaining about individual components of the planner.

The 7 Minute Life Daily Planner is designed for adults trying to organise life at work and at home.

Before using the Planner on a daily basis, I worked on some of the tasks at the start of the book. Please note that this part of using the Planner takes more than 7 minutes. Once the Planner is up and running, planning for a new day only takes around 7 minutes but the initial work does take a little longer. I discovered that the more effort that I put into this, the better the Planner worked for me. These tasks included

prioritisng aspects of life such as faith, relationships, tradition, success and a whole long list of other parts of life.
writing down a purpose in life.
a page about what is loved about work, strengths and "high value activities."
mental clutter list-those things that never get done or cause clutter and stress.
90 day goals including breaking these down into actions.
life goals
lists for unfinished work and home tasks

home repair contact list
grocery list
address book pages
annual, 90 and monthly calendar.
meeting planner.

It is important to at least start to fill these in before going onto the daily planner. I found the 90 day goal list and pages of lists of unfinished tasks particularly useful whereas the life goals page was a bit overwhelming. I don't know exactly what God wants me to do for the rest of my life so it felt difficult to fill in this section.

The daily progress report is a double page spread for each day. The picture below is of the left hand side.

The right hand side has space for

appointments
thank you notes
voice mail and notes

The aim is to spend 7 minutes a day planning the next day and, in particular, five things that will be done before 11am in order to further aims.

How did this work for me?

It was helpful to make a list of things that had been nagging me or I had put off doing.
Thinking through my purpose in life and 90 goals was helpful. I think that I have been more organised about winter wardrobes and it has lead to me planning an educational trip which might otherwise not have happened.
The unfinished tasks list was usually sadly full but pulling five out did mean that I tackled some otherwise neglected jobs.
This planner seems to have been primarily designed for the business world and not for home educating mothers. I have virtually no voice mails but many emails. I didn't write these into the voice mail column as dealing with them direct seemed more efficient. Again, I didn't list my daily contacts: I didn't quite see the point as a home educating mother. Perhaps, I could have put them down as a prayer list.
Working through five tasks before 11am worked reasonably well during the holidays but once we started back with our home education timetable, this became difficult. Either, I put items on the list which tend to happen anyway: make the children's breakfast, start home educating for the day (a bit before 11am-I hope!), open the door for the carer, make Grandma's breakfast, put the washing on etc. Not really much point writing these, however, if I wrote in items that I really wanted to sort out, there just wasn't time in these hours. Five before 11pm might work better while we are home educating.
It was helpful to have a reminder to write thank you notes.
I used the space for notes on a fair few days. It was helpful to have this space to start planning out ideas and saved mislaid sheets of paper.

Overall, I found that having to work through aims and goals was helpful but the planner would be even more useful if it could be customised for home educators.