After searching for years, I realized this best way to find a ministry planner that could work for me was to combine the way I had been taking notes by hand, with my daysheet and the creation of additional templates. This helps me not have known things slip through cracks and intentionally work on developing new skills in leadership.
What was once all private is now out into the world!
The course cart will be open until Monday, May 27th, and you will have lifetime access to the content.
This pdf is the basic building block of my working notebook. It is one week worth of my primary templates.
• Weekly Planning
• Weekly Dumping Ground
• Four days of daysheets
• Weekly Review sheet
I generally print out 4-6 copies of this (each copy is one week), and use that to start building out my next cycle.
I don't want you to just use my templates. I would LOVE to see you making your own. Here's how I do it.
Let's walk through each template included in the course. I explain why I made each one and how I use it.
At it's most basic form, a working notebook is a strategy to use one notebook (either analog or digital) each month to do almost all of your work in. Once the month is over, it is filed away for reference and a new one is started.
Days are when healthy ministry happens. Here are the templates I use every day as part of my working notebook.
The Week is where we win. Weeks are a big part of the ministry productivity ecosystem. From planning to reviewing, and designing your idea week.
Months might be the most strategic side of your productivity. You can stagger approaches to weeks, and chip away at larger goals. Included in this module are tools for scheduling AND strategically planning your time.
The further we stretch from "the day", the less our work becomes about actually doing the work, and the more it turns into thinking through our projects, normal tasks, and the work of ministry. This module has templates for both thinking through the quarter strategically, but also working through our year AND handling basic project design and management.
A few years ago, I realized I wasn't terribly good at both leading AND being in meetings. So I started creating templates to make sure things were accomplished, as well as remember what I had said I would do during the meeting.
I've also put in two different templates for staff accountability, both in one-on-one meetings and a record of the projects staff members are working on.
My planning templates are the basic way to design and organize projects.