Build Your 365-Day Calendar

To help you map out and become proactive about the next 365 days of your life, we’ve created a spreadsheet that helps you map out your whole year. This spreadsheet gives you a MACRO view of your 365 days, instead of being zoomed in to just this week -- or, even worse, just today — which is how we often approach our calendars. Using this spreadsheet, you’ll be able to take a step back and ask yourself some important questions:

  1. How many days of the next 365 are already committed? (hint: More than you think.)

  2. How many of those commitments are actually important?

  3. How many days have I set aside and committed to accomplishing my life goals?

  4. How do I plan out the next 8, 12, even 24 weeks of my life so that I know to prioritize and be PROACTIVE about the most important things?

Once you’ve completed this exercise, you’ll have realized and sorted through a few key things:

  1. First, 365 days, or a year, feels like a long time. But when you really break it down, out of the 365 days, there are only 261 working days when you can actively work toward your goals both personal and professional. When you take away vacation days, you’re down to 247 working days. And when you subtract sick days, down time, and family commitments, you’re left with a mere 220 days, or roughly seven-and-a-half months out of every year to really take action on your goals.

  2. Second, when we don’t take a proactive approach to the 365 days, many decisions are made for us. We find ourselves signed up for a ton of commitments that take away even more of those 220 golden working days. It’s no wonder we ask ourselves after a year of not hitting our goals: “Where did all the time go?!” Truth is there wasn’t a lot of time to begin with, and after that, others took the remaining time away from us, to be spent on activities that weren’t necessarily aligned to our own goals.

  3. Most importantly, you’ll start to feel a sense of calm and control from having been able to hit head-on some of the tough questions about how you want to spend your year. I always share this spreadsheet with my loved ones so that we can have a discussion about how we want to collectively take on the year. Negotiations on “which parent’s house” we need to spend Thanksgiving in become easier; having vacations planned ahead of time gives us something to count down to as we’re grinding through the days to work on our goals; and, most importantly, we’re able to keep ourselves honest regarding whether we are taking on and prioritizing the right goals for the year.

I open up my 365-day proactive calendar every week during Unstoppable Sundays, to review what's ahead and course-correct as I learn more. Most importantly, it always gives my family and me a sense of calm, because there is a real plan that everyone can rally around and look forward to. No one ever freaks out when there is a plan in place!

Now remember what we said about this book! This book is not meant to be a piece of art that sits on your bookshelf or one that just gets forgotten. So grab a pen, and let’s work through what you’ve processed through this chapter.