David Seah released a new form for a balanced life under a creative commons license and called for people to modify it. Working towards balance is nice, but I’d rather work towards awesomeness.

The 10,000 Hour Rule

I’ve previously mentioned Malcolm Gladwell for his first book, The Tipping Point. I’ve since been reading one his other books, Outliers, which discusses the circumstances that surround extraordinary individuals. One condition that is common for many successful individuals is they have amassed enough experience to become a master of a particular skill. This makes them perform unlike any other. The magical number appears to be around 10,000 hours.

I’ve been thinking about a systematic method to keep my focus on the skills that I desire to master. As luck would have it, I saw hope in David Seah’s approach to find balance in his life. Using a visual representation of the hours in a day makes planning my life tangible and gives the sense of order.

Revisiting an Old Form

I actually made a similar form about a year and a half ago, so I had a sense of things I wanted to change from David Seah’s form. The biggest changes from my old form is dropping enhancers/annoyances to focus on skills and adding a way to record time spent pursuing mastery of those skills.

This Week’s Big Three Skills

Originally, David Seah used this section for the top three tasks to accomplish for the week. I use this section for the (up to) three skills that I want to focus on for the week. This gives the week a theme, where all other actions for the week will flow from.

Each skill is labeled A, B, or C to be used later in the form. It also has a nifty bubble system for recording total time spent towards the skill per week via David’s original design.

Actionable Items

Once you list the target skills for the week, you can use this section to list actual tasks that can be done this week in order to gain experience. Towards the end are bubbles labeled A, B, C, or O. You use these to mark which skill (A, B, C) the activity will contribute towards. Inevitably, there are also actions you need to do throughout the week that contribute to none, so you mark them as “O”.

I’ve also included a space for a due date. Sometimes I don’t need to do the action right away, so it is useful for prioritizing which actions to do. When you have completed the task, there is a bubble on the left, so you can check it off. I love checking off items from my list.

Daily Overview

In my original form, I used this space for calendar items: appointments, important dates, things that needed to be done on a certain day, etc. I’ve also added 24 bubbles to create expectations on time to devote to a certain skill.

12 of the bubbles are blue and 12 are gray. The blue bubbles are for planning, while the gray bubbles are there in case I exceeded my initial expectations. I intentionally allowed only 12 bubbles to plan because I felt it is unrealistic for me to plan out every minute of my day and actually stick to the plan.

Beneath the 24 bubbles are 3 buckets, labeled A, B, and C. Once the day is over, I calculate how much experience I gained for each skill (A, B, and C). This is to make it easier to calculate the grand total at the end of the week and fill in the first section.

Download and Try It!

This form is free for you to download and try out. You can also customize it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Please keep both David Seah’s and my contact info and link intact.

The form is in a 300ppi PNG format:

Download the Weekly Awesomeness Form