In May 2009 I started to explore what work-life balance meant to me in terms of day-to-day activity, and I created a mash-up of some existing forms that I called the Day Grid Balancer, which I then released with a Creative Commons license. You can read more here on the official Day Grid Balancer page about design rationale. If you’re using the DGB forms as-is, you can download the following PDFs. If you are interested in remixing these forms, you’ll need Adobe Illustrator CS4 to modify these fully-editable files.
Download 2010 Updates to Day Grid Balancer
- Download Day Grid Balancer Draft 1, which features the “balance grid”
- Download Day Grid Balancer Draft 2, which has a biorhythm-inspired grid
Enjoy!
I really like the DGB. Call me old-fashioned but the neat balance grid works better for me than the organic “grid”.
If I were to customise it for myself, I would change the following:
1. Remove Sat/Sun and extend the todo-list down. It’s not that I don’t do anything in the weekends, but I like to keep weekends separate.
2. Remove the week number and replace it with a date range. I don’t think in weeks.
3. Europeanise it. In other words, make an A4 version and replace “Month/Day” with “Day/Month”.
4. Make it just slightly smaller, with wider margins that I can trim. That way when I clip it into my A4 spiral notebook, it wouldn’t stick out.
I’m still undecided about the “Dammit”. On the one hand, it’s nice and punchy. On the other, it feels like the list is breathing down my neck.