The Seven-Minute Life Daily Planner (TOS Review)

As much as I like planning my kids' school year, I find when it comes to my own personal life I tend to avoid it. I was intrigued when I came across the opportunity to review The 7 Minute Life Daily Planner from The 7 Minute Life.


The 7 Minute Life Daily Planner is a unique planner that was designed by Allyson Lewis, the author of The Seven Minute Difference, as a personal training tool to help her take charge of her to-do lists and endless tasks that faced her. So what is the purpose of the planner and how is it used?


The goal of The 7 Minute Life is to provide strategies to Prioritize, Organize, and Simplify your life at work and home. The 7 Minute Life Planner is a tool to help you to identify your purpose and goals in life and then to actually implement and do them. To get started you begin by thinking about your purpose by finding out what your values and priorities are. You then write these goals down and put them into doable action tasks. Finally, you work on these tasks daily.

The beginning of the planner takes you step by step with detailed explanations through each worksheet. These include: ranking your priorities, discovering your purpose in life, articulating what you love to do, your strengths, getting rid of mental clutter, setting 90 day personal and work goals, writing down action steps, making financial goals and life goals along with action steps, and writing down unfinished work tasks along with home tasks and repairs. Also included are pages to write down a list of people you want to stay connected with along with annual projects & tasks, undated 90 day calendar worksheets and monthly calendars, and meeting planner worksheets.


Next comes the Daily Progress Report which is a two spread page the covers 90 days. It takes everything you have worked through--values, goals, unfinished tasks, etc. and helps your structure them into daily activities and action steps. The page is broken down into these sections:

• 5 before 11 - to record your highest-value activities for the day
• "7-Minute Life" Connections - list 3 people you want to be in contact
• Make Daily Contacts - Contact to help your business
• Appointments - Track your appointments or how you spent your day
• Thank You Notes - Record hand written notes that you have written
• Voice Mail - A place to record all voice mails you have received
• Notes - a place to record daily information
• A place to track your intake of water, food, sleep, exercise, reflection, and reading
• A check box answer the question "Did I do what I said I would do today?"

When I first got the planner I spent a few days working through the descriptions and then filling out the worksheets. I will admit that I didn't find this very easy to do. I then began using the daily progress report. I was most successful with the "5 before 11" though I still struggled at times to get everything finished. I begin implementing the planner before we started school and I did really well getting my 5 items done before 11 and then school happened and I was challenged to finish up my "5 before 11" in the evening!

This planner focuses a lot on making contact with other people and though I am involved in a homeschool co-op, and am a pastor's wife, plus work a small job outside the home, I just didn't have that many people I need to contact everyday. Many times these portions stayed blank or I just used it to list other things. I found many of the different sections listed were either unnecessary or hard to implement for my life at this time.

 I will admit that I really struggle to use any kind of planner. I am always leaving it upstairs or downstairs or at home or--you get the picture, I'm sure. I will also admit that though I found this hard to use, I did enjoy the ideas that she shared and have been mulling on how I can make this fit my lifestyle better.

I had written down some 90 day goals I wanted to get done and yet looking through my planning I hadn't really implemented them into my day. I believe they areto be worked on through the "5 before 11" portion, but on my "5 before 11" list I was just putting tasks down the would keep life going smoothly.

I loved the idea behind The 7-Minute Daily Planner and even though I struggled overall with the planner I know that the "5 before 11" will be something I will rely on. I do think this is an excellent resource for someone who is working (whether at a workplace or home) and wanting to implement better time management into their daily life.

The 7 Minute Life Daily Planner is available through The 7 Minute Life for $24.95 (90 days). Also, check out the Getting Started video along with these videos which help in understanding and implementing this system.

The 7 Minute Life on Social Media:
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Twitter - https://twitter.com/allyson7minutes 
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You Tube - https://www.youtube.com/user/AllysonLewis