Building Time: Creating Detailed Schedules in Google Sheets

1. Introduction to the Class: Planning any series of complicated activities is tough and that's why you need to learn how to make your own custom schedule to simplify your life and increase your productivity. Thankfully, it's not hard. This class teaches you how to build a schedule from scratch using Google Sheets. You can start with absolutely no experience as a beginner and end with a working knowledge of Google Sheets and scheduling, we'll build a Gantt chart style scheduled from start to finish. So you'll end the course with a schedule of your very own to track whatever your current project is. The online courses that I've found on scheduling are typically dry and slow and really not suited for beginners. And this course changes. I've been using this kind of schedule to track dozens of commercial construction projects over the last ten years of my career. This is honestly the class that I wish I had back in 2014 when I re-entered the construction field, I'll share with you the foundational elements of the tools and techniques that I've used to build an effective and clear schedule as quickly as possible. Having a detailed and clear schedule increases the speed of any project, whether or not you're doing commercial construction and it helps everyone involved to be more efficient and come away satisfied. In this class, I'll teach you how to get access to Google Sheets for free. How to set up and build a schedule of your own, how to actually plan activities in order and organize them correctly. Formatting techniques for getting plenty of info without adding visual clutter, how to edit and change your schedule when the ideal plans don't work out. And this always happens to me and how to customize the stylistic visuals to your liking. But where are we talking about schedules? Why are we making a schedule here? Well, scheduling keeps your project on track no matter what it is. If anything has more than ten steps in it, you can't do a list. You can't just have a to-do list of 45 things that need to happen in order and plan to stay organized and plan to be able to do all that in an efficient manner. It's just not going to work. What you need is a proper schedule to have high-quality and the fastest possible finishing date. Let's get started. 2. Your Class Project!: As part of taking this class, I encourage you to take on a class project of your own. And all that means is that you make your own version of a schedule. As we get into the class, I'll show you some examples of ones I've used. And don't worry, it does not need to be complicated. It can and should be simple for your first try pick literally any topic in your life that you can practice with. Cleaning your room, work plans for the week of vacation itinerary or that home project that you've been thinking about and haven't quite gotten around to starting, we'll break out all of those steps onto our schedule format so you can see it in one place and make the best possible plan. And like I said in the intro, Google Sheets is totally for free, so there's no extra commitment that you need to do to get on this train and get started scheduling yourself. So if you're interested in following along, get out a computer or a mobile device of your choosing and follow along and make your own schedule. Let's go. 3. Bonus 1: Before We Begin: Just before we get started here, the first four lessons in this course are really building a template from scratch so that you can have your own schedule. And I think for almost everyone those are worth watching. They help you to know how we set things up and why things are the way they are. But if one of the following three things applies to you, then I recommend skimming through them or playing them at a higher speed like 1.25 or 1.5 times speed, just because you may not need as much details other people. Number one, if you already know how to use Google Sheets really well, maybe you don't need as much of a detailed tour that I'm giving in these first four lessons. Number two, if you really want to jump to scheduling right away and you don't care to see how it was made. I understand. I want you still get value out of this course. So go ahead and use a template or number three, if you're only going to use this on mobile devices, if you're only using it on an iPad or on a cell phone than the way I set it up won't necessarily apply directly to a mobile device. Just so you know, if you do choose to open the pre-made template, you will not be able to edit anything right away. This is intentional because it's really the master copy. And so the way that you get a copy for yourself is by going to make a copy. So whenever you open mind, you'll be given an option to make a copy. Then whenever you do that, it will copy aversion over to your Google account where you can edit it. Do not request access to my original template because I won't give it to anyone. For those of you who are my mobile device users who won't be using this on a computer. Starting in lesson number five, I'll get into really how you're using the template and how you're putting a schedule together. So that'll be where you really want to dig in and pay attention. But at the end of all ten lessons, I'll have a bonus lesson where we take the principles of the first ten and we apply it specifically to a mobile device. I just wanted to give you a heads up about that now so that you see it coming and you know that I didn't forget you as you see the desktop version getting built, hopefully those recommendations make sense to you and you're able to get as much out of this class and learn as much as possible. Now let's get on to the first lesson. 4. Lesson 1: Getting a Google Account: To make a schedule, you'll need a free Google account. So in this lesson, we'll get you set up with one if you don't have one yet. If you already have an email that ends in at gmail.com, then you know, you already have a Google account and so you can totally skip this step for those of you that don't, let's get you set up now. So the first thing we'll do is we can just type into Google and a computer browser, something like Gmail. And then that'll come up and we'll click on the first option and will create an account. Gmail account is an email account, but it's also some other stuff from Google that's totally for free. One of those free programs is what we'll use to make a schedule. It is truly, totally free if you're unfamiliar with this, which is really great. So I'll put in my personal information and then for a username Brandon schedules. And once you have that filled out, then hit Next. Then of course we're going to have to hit. I agree. And next a few more times to finish setting up our account like with any online account. And now Google is working its magic. Hey, hey, look at this. So this is our new home screen for our email account that's associated with our Google account here. Now, you're under no obligation whatsoever to use this for email to correspond with anybody. But the fact is that now you have a Google account, which means you can use those other programs that I alluded to earlier. So to get to those, there's a myriad of different ways, but the easiest way I think, is to come up here to the top right corner where there's this little dot matrix. And whenever I roll my mouse over it, it says Google Apps. If I click on that, then I can go down to sheets. And sheets is what we'll use to make our schedule. Now if for whatever reason you don't have that option and you can't go to sheets, then you could also just go back up to your browser and just type in Google Sheets. Then you can click on something that says something like sign into Google Sheets or just the Google Sheets homepage, then it might prompt you to sign in with that information that we just set up right now. So make sure that you keep a record of that Gmail account that you just set up, whatever it is scheduled master at gmail.com. Keep a record of that and keep a record of your password. That's it. You're all set up with a Google account. In the next lesson, we'll actually set up our schedule and get the process started. 5. Lesson 2: Template Setup Part 1: Welcome back. In this lesson, we'll get our initial schedule set up in Google Sheets and get the basic structure built out. And so we're gonna start with a blank one. So now we have a blank spreadsheet, not super handy yet, but it will be very quickly. So the basic structure of all of our schedules will be that tasks are listed here vertically and the time for each task will be going horizontally. What we wanna do is make this something that gives us a lot of information, is very usable to see at a glance. And so the great thing about google Sheets is that we're going to do is set up a blank structure once. And then what I recommend us doing and I'll show you how to do this, is we'll go back and kind of go backwards one step and make a copy of this. So you can always have the first one is a blank template and then every time you are going to come back and make another schedule, you don't need to rebuild it from scratch. That's silly. Just make a copy of it duplicated instantly and save yourself a bunch of time. So let's get to work on our template now, the first thing that I like to do is widen out this first column, column number a, I widen it out. And so all I did was grab that margin there, see how it turns kind of darker blue. I grabbed that little margin window thing, click and hold and I can make it tiny or it can make it big. So I like to make that one bigger because we're going to have room to describe each task. And here, it can also be helpful if you want to to label this column. So I like to label it task, you can label it, fun thing or whatever your plan is, but I'll label it task because that's typically what mine are tasks. And then everything from there over to the right will be dates. And so what I like to do is actually have the month, the date, and the day of the project all represented up there at the top. And so what we're gonna do is reserve the top row for the month. We'll leave that alone for now. We'll go down to that second row and we'll end up making that the date. So the first activity of your event, whatever that is, the date of the month, put that there. So let's just pretend like today's the 14th. I'm going to start on the 14th. Let's say I'm going to start today and then 15th, 16th, and so on, all the way across going from left to right. Here's a shortcut for you if you're not familiar with spreadsheets or Google Sheets in general, because we've got this pattern going 14151617 or maybe for you it's 1234 because that's the month that you're in. You're going to start the first day of the month, whatever it is, as long as you have a consecutive pattern like that, the spreadsheet will pick up on that. If you click the first one, you hold down shift and you click the last one, then you will have highlighted all of those that you've typed into so far. And there's that tiny blue box on the bottom right-hand corner. If we click that and hold it and then drag over to the right, making sure that we stay in that same row. Watch what happens when you let go the mouse. It's continued that pattern on for us. So you don't necessarily need to come in here and say, hey, let's type in every single number. You can use that sort of pattern recognition that's built into the spreadsheet and just extend it out up there to the 27th. How many days are in May? 30 days has September, April, June, and November. So it's got 31. Here's a keyboard shortcut that you will use a thousand times today, Control Z, or if you're on a Mac Command Z, what that does is undo. So if I type a bad word in here and I don't want that to be in there anymore. Command Z, boom, just undoes the last thing. You can get to that too, by clicking on edit and doing undo. And it'll show you a little keyboard shortcut there. But I swear that is the most used command that I have. It's incredible. I love it. Okay, so now we can see that our format is a little bit more visible here. If we'd start putting tasks in here, task one, whoops, me to go down one more task, one task to that kind of thing you can kind of get the visual tasks will be a column on the far left and the date will be happening across the right, but this is still not very readable. I don't like this. So what we need to do is shrink down these columns where he put these numbers in so far so that they're just enough space to get the number in there, but we're not wasting all this real estate. So what you can do is click on the letter that's represented in that column. So for us it will be b. Click on b, and then scroll all the way over to the right. Let's go over to the end of the month. For me, that's s, We'll do our highlighting trick again, redo Shift, and then click on the S. And then what should have happened now, as you've highlighted all of those columns between B and S, all of those. And then what you can do is right-click on any of those letters up there that you've highlighted, right-click on it. And then what we're going to go down to is right here in the middle, resize columns B through S, So it's recognizing which ones you've highlighted. We're going to click on that. And then what it's saying is this is the width of each column. And if you want to, you can type in a specific number or you can just make it do it automatically fit to data, like typing a number because I'm weird and precise like that. Each column has extra fat. Let's shrink this down to say 25. Ooh, I like it so much tighter. Look how tight and nice that is. I love how compressed it is. Because look at what we've done. We've taken something that was taking up our whole entire screen to be able to see that number of days. And now we've shrunk it down to where it's like a third of our screen so we can see it really easily. This is also part of the formatting that will make this structure work on mobile. Because whenever you've got your mobile phone and you're scrolling, a phone screen is oriented up and down. And so that makes it more difficult to see more real estate unless you turn it sideways when you can, It's fine. But I like to compress it as much as I can while keeping it readable because it makes it that much easier to read either on a computer or on mobile. Now what we wanna do on this very top row above those numbers is make that into one singular cell so that it tells us what the month is. Very simple. We'll click on that first box above your first number. So for me it's a box B1 should be B1 for you to click on that hold down Shift and then click on S. And now what we're gonna do is this little shortcut here is called merge cells. So we're going to merge those click and it's turned all of those individual cells into one. Now we can click in there and right, May, the month of May, something else. That's a formatting thing that should be universal for everyone. This isn't so much a stylistic choice. This is a functional choice. If we highlight all those columns again the same way we did before. Click on b, hold Shift, click on S, then what I like to do that I think it helps a lot. This is up to you, but functionally, we want to center align our text. So it's this little emblem here that looks like everything has shifted to the left for now, which normally you do want that we want to take it from horizontal align, center align. And so now you can see that our numbers are in the middle and our month of May is in the middle. Now what I don't like to do is center align our tasks because I think it's a lot neater and easier to read if they're all aligned on the left. It kind of gives your eye a common starting point where Watch if I center align it, it starts to get weird if the task is longer, you can see that where your eye has to start to read each word is in a different place, not a big fan. Let's do control Z a bunch of times to get that back. There we go. If you want to, you can do this step, which I like to do, which is the number of days you've spent doing this project. This is, I would classify this as optional, but you can, if you want to, you can do kind of a 12345. Start getting those typed in. Do our same Highlight, click and drag a little box, continue on and you can see, hey, we've got 18 days in our little project here. Now for basic readability sake, let's do a touch more formatting before we go into the next lesson. And that will be just to add some dividing lines so that it's really clear what's happening here. Click on the a in the first column and then click on this little box here that represents borders and choose a right border. So what that did was draw a little vertical line in-between tasks and the schedule itself and the time associated with that task. Just what's really clear in our mind. The next thing I'd like to do is highlight the lowest set of numbers there. So for me it's the one through 18. Highlight those do a similar border but on the bottom of it. So pick the bottom border. And then now what we've done is we've divided our date section up there at the top from where we're actually gonna be building out the schedule. That's it for our very first lesson. Now we'll go onto more formatting and customization to build this out the way that you want to see it in the next lesson. 6. Lesson 3: Setup Part 2: Welcome back. In this section, we're going to stylize this and make it look the way you want. We'll clean up some stuff. We'll pick the colors you like, the font you like, and get everything tuned up to where you go. Oh, I like looking at this, that looks really nice. The first thing that I like to do personally is get rid of any excess columns that we're not using. So what I'll do is highlight for me T through Z, right-click on them. And then what you can do is delete them or you can hide them. It doesn't really matter. I'll go ahead and hide them and then I want just won't see him anymore. So now I've cleaned that up. I don't have any extra real estate trying to take my eye away. Next, what I like to do, I'd like to make the month color. And so what you can do is highlight that little cell that the MAY is in. Pick the little fill color bucket up here, and then you can dump a color in there. So for me, I'll choose a nice pale, dark blue. The goal is just to keep it readable. Next, I personally like a font that just looks a little more interesting to me. By default, they use Arial, which is fine. It's legible. But what I can do is this top left corner up above the numbers and next to all the letters, they're just little dead space. It looks like it doesn't do anything. Watch what happens whenever you click it. Boom, it selects our whole entire spreadsheet. If you want to do any formatting that's going to touch every single cell in your spreadsheet. This is the way to highlight them all super quickly. I'm going to pick that. I'm going to pick our little font here and pick Roboto. Roboto is just weird enough to where I like it and I think it's interesting, but it's still really legible. The other thing I wanna do is sort of de-emphasize the number of days in the project. I want the date to be more prominent for me than the number of days. So what I'm gonna do is highlight all of those and shrink them down to a size six so they're tiny. So now if we just kinda look back here, likewise, I'm gonna make me grow a little bit. Let's make May 14. Okay. So if I add a glance, just look at this. I'll go I know we're in May I know it's May 14th is day number one, and then that little tiny number under it, I have to work to see what it is. Okay. That's the first date of the project. Not as important to me is knowing which date I'm supposed to do which activity. And now that I'm looking at it, I think I'm gonna go ahead and extend our border line all the way across to be above our first task to, just to make it look a little bit nicer, more interesting. And so far I think that's looking pretty good. I'm happy with that. If you want to, you can do things like add a double border between your tasks and your actual dates. That looks pretty nice. You could also make a double border happen here on the bottom side. That's a little bit more of like a strong dividing line. That doesn't look bad. This is where we stylistically get to choose whatever we wanna do. There's some interesting stuff that you can do here to, that if you really want to get creative, you can, for instance, you can pick a cell and you can go up here to the top to insert, you can actually insert an image in the cell. So back in the day, I know people would put images over cells. But for me the image in cell was kind of a newer development. It's kind of an interesting thing. So if you wanted to have something in there that just reminds you of something, happy, hey, I'm gonna go to the beach for this vacation. I want a picture of the beach here in this cell to remind me that this is my vacation itinerary. Let's get a picture of the beach. That looks so nice. We'll save the image as beach. Then. What we can do is let's merge these two, these two cells merge these two shells by the seashore will go back to Insert Image, image in cell, and then we can go back and find that one that we just downloaded. It's going to actually upload it into our spreadsheet and stick it in there. Kind of a funny thing, but you can do stuff like that. Go ahead and pick the elements that you want to match your style and make this look the way that you like it. And we'll move on to the next lesson. 7. Lesson 4: Setup Part 3: Welcome back. This lesson is going to make sure that what the schedule is that you've built in a basic format works everywhere, works on your phone, works on your computer. And depending on how long it is, easy to read, two, we're still building our basic template here. So don't feel like you need to fill out a bunch of tasks yet that kind of map out what you're gonna do for now. Keep it pretty blank. I just have task 123 in here just to show you that that's where the tasks will go in the future. We're still formatting this and getting it setup will be done in just a couple of minutes and we'll get scheduling. The first thing that I've learned by trial and error is that this needs to be easily viewed. And a big part of that means that you always need to be able to see the stuff that you put there in the top three rows, the date information. And you always need to see your tasks. Because if you're building a small schedule like I have on the screen now, we're not gonna be scrolling up and down or back-and-forth so much that you'll lose that stuff. But whenever you make a bigger schedule with 5200 dates in it or with 50 or a 100 tasks in it. What's going to happen is, as you scroll down, we lose them. I don't know what date this is. I have B, C, D, and E on the column, but I don't know where we are. Are we in May, are we in June? It this year, is it next year? I'm lost. How do we fix this? There's a little tool that you can use called Freeze. And so what we'll do is we'll pick the row that we want everything above that to be frozen in. So what I want to do is maintain this view of May, the dates, and the number of days that doing this whole activity. So I'm going to pick the third row. If you're following along closely with me, you should pick the third row also. Then what we can do is go up to View in this menu and you pick freeze. Now, you can pick no rows, one row, two rows. It depends on if you've frozen something wrong in the past. You can do no roads to kind of undo it. But for us what we want to do is up to row three because it knows we picked row three. For instance, if you built out a bunch of stuff up here because you wanted to build in a picture and a title and all this stuff. And you've got like ten rows. You want to be able to see that all the time no matter what, no matter how much you scroll, if you picked row ten and you went to view freeze, it would go up to row ten, so it knows which one you picked for us. We're just going to row three right now. We'll do freeze up to row three and then you notice something happened there. A little subtle formatting change happened where this became a like a more solid gray bar. Now watch what happens whenever we scroll down. Whoa, whoa, the rest of the spreadsheet looks like it's sort of scrolling underneath ME and all those numbers. Because what it's done is it's saying we have frozen those top three rows. No matter how much you scroll to your heart's content, they will always be visible. This is what we want, but next, the same problem could happen left to right. We wanna do is a similar thing. I'm going to pick just call them a because all I have is a single row of tasks. You might have two or three columns over there depending on how you format it it but pick the columns that you want to freeze, that you want to have visible all the time, click and highlight those, go to freeze. So then I can pick one column or I can pick up to column a. It's the same result either way, I can pick one column and then that's similar. Thicker gray bar has appeared. Now if I had more columns over to the right, like if I was going from May into June to July, then I would have a problem. I'd be scrolling and I would lose my tasks. Here. I'll add some more columns back in, just in case you wanted to see that. And for you, if you wanted to do this, then all I did here was highlight those first sections of columns, right-clicked. And then they said, insert 18 columns, left or right wherever you want them. Boom. And that's probably the fastest way to duplicate things. If you needed to add more, highlight the ones you've got, and then hit Insert however many of them to the right. Okay, Now if I had not frozen this swatch, Let's unfreeze it. No columns are frozen. Now, Let's say I'm out here into May, I'm into June, I'm into July, and I've got dates just flying through the calendar out here and I want to double-check what's happening out there on that 43rd day of our activity here of our schedule. And I scroll over to the right, will have lost my tasks. I can't see what the task is. That's not good. I can't do I need to buy something? Do I need to show up somewhere? I have no idea what's happening. So the way we fix that is with that freeze that we just did, I'll go back, hit View freeze one column and now I can go over there to the 43rd day and I had no okay. It's that task right there. That's the way that we have to format this so that it stays maximum readability if that makes sense. And you know what? Let's go ahead and keep this in here just so that we've got that as an illustrative effect. Alright, now we have our basic template done established, built looking the way we want. Got the colors, got the interesting little divider lines. It's got the freezes in there. I've got a picture of the beach just because I love the beach. You don't have to have that in there if you don't want, I just hit delete and it's out of there. Whatever you wanna do, you've got it in there and we've got a basic structure. Now again, don't start scheduling yet because in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to make copies of this so that you have a template that you can follow anytime you want to make a schedule super quick to duplicate it and get rolling with the next project. Let's go. 8. Lesson 5: Setup Final!: Welcome back to the fourth and final setup video in this course. Now with our template established, what we're gonna do is back up a step and I'll show you how to make a copy of this so that you can use this in the future. So what we wanna do is go back to our Google Sheets homepage, if you will. And if you click on that little green icon, it'll do that. So we get back to our homepage here. And what we can see is that we've got our first schedule that we made, this most recent one. Now the trick is to not open this and start using it. Because what's going to happen is if we go in here and we fill this up with a whole bunch of tasks and a whole bunch of activities and we schedule all this out. Then when the time comes for you to use this again to make your next project happen, you're gonna have to go in and delete a bunch of stuff and it'll be a big pain. So it'll make a copy of this and enable you to use it in the future. All you have to do is hit File, make a copy. And what this is going to do is take everything that you've done so far, formatting all that stuff, included, bottle it up and make a copy of it and I'm happy to have it be called copy of whatever the title is. You can call it whatever else you want whenever it's asking you down here at the bottom to share it with the same people or copy comments or whatever, don't get thrown off by that. That's part of Google's sort of stick and part of their value add. If you are going to do this with a team, what this is asking you is to say, hey, the people that you've shared that with, do you want to share it with them again, like you're making a copy of this. Do they need the copy or just copy just for you know, that that's a feature that you could use if you wanted to. We're not really gonna get into that for this class because that's more of a function of Google and not so much a function of making a schedule to do your thing. But that's what that means. Now I'll hit make a copy and it immediately opens a new tab for us. And then now what we can see is the version of our copied schedule. So if we go back and forth between the original and the copy, they are the same. There's no difference whatsoever, which is good. That's what we want. If you want to hear, you can go back to your Google Sheets home screen if you will, by clicking this little green icon, Google Sheets home. And then we can go back and see all of our spreadsheets that we've got copy of schedule for Skillshare class and the original Skillshare class. And what I like to do is to pick one of these and make them my official template. So I will just pick one of them and I'll rename it by clicking the little three dots on the right and call it schedule template. And then I'll know whenever the time comes in the future. Let's say I'm gonna do my home remodel project that I've been putting off. We really want to make a pantry out of this side closet and be great. It has a lot of work. There's a lot of steps. If I need to actually make that remodel happen someday. Hopefully, then what I can do is click on the schedule template, do what we did before. File, make a copy, and then I can call it closet, pantry, remodel, schedule. Boom. I've got all that work that we just did to format everything and get setup done, inputted, ready to go. I love it, but for the sake of me and you, I'll go into my copy and we'll actually get started scheduling. Oh, one more thing that I want to point out is don't feel obligated to make yours look exactly like mine because maybe yours isn't time-bound by dates. Like I'm used to building things this way because that's kinda how I think that's how this construction works. I need to plan people out by calendar day, but maybe for you, your schedule is more of a sequential event kind of thing happening. Maybe it's not so much bound by days, but by your own personal progress. If that's the case, you can take out the month, you can take out the date. You could potentially only have this third row of numbers, 1234567, because for you, you're not time-bound in that way, your activity bound. So however, you need to structure that in the top. Feel free. I don't want this to add some undue pressure for you. Now. It can't be an accountability tool and a good pressure, but make sure that this is built the way that you want it with the data that you want to see. Alright, next lesson, Let's get started. 9. Lesson 6: Scheduling Part 1: List All Activities: Welcome back. This is lesson six, and I'm gonna give you a little hint here. This is my favorite lesson. This is my favorite part of all. The formatting is kind of a grind to get it all set up, to get it started. You've got all the tools you need to get started in this beginning part is my favorite. So hang onto your boots. Instead of saying, hang on to your schedule in this section, I'm going to give you tips on how to get started the best way, how to fix mistakes that you've made, and how to reorder things when you realize that you're thinking was wrong. I love this. First of all, I've made dozens of schedules and these are high-profile scheduled. We've got multimillion dollar construction projects that are dependent on a good schedule and how to toot my own horn too much. But I've been told that I was a really good scheduler and that I scheduled better than most other people in our company, potentially anybody else in our company. I take a lot of pride in sharing this with you and giving you these tools. Because I know that they're good and I know that they work and that it's something worth doing. So here's what my first tip, which has helped me a lot and that's just brain vomit onto the page. I know that sounds crazy. What I mean by that is, whenever we're going to do this activity, whatever this whole project is for you, a remodel, a vacation, whatever the thing is, I want you to start by just listing out everything, anything and everything you can think of. Do your best guess to get it in sequential order because you don't want to get things to out of order because it just makes more work for you. But if you can just throw everything onto the page and don't worry about it being too perfect yet. Don't worry about anything over in the bulk of the spreadsheet yet, just make a big vertical list. So for me, I don't want to throw you off with any specific activities like demo the walls, get shelves taken down, put in new flooring or electrical or whatever, because I want you to be focused on your tasks and your activities. But what this looks like is just getting a bunch of these tasks written down your events, written down your milestones, wherever you want it to be, and get them all down onto your spreadsheet and out of your head. Because this is something that works universally in life. And that's get the ball rolling, get those creative juices in juicy mode. So now what we've got is a basic list of things that we're gonna do at some point somehow. But we don't need to perfectly scheduled them out yet because now we can critically assess them and go. Does that really make sense as the first task? Is that truly the first thing? Oh, no, that's not the first thing. It turns out there's actually two things before that. The real first things I have to call that person or by the plane tickets or whatever it is. Because the goal here is to create a lot of detail to put down steps that even seems so easy that maybe it's not worth keeping track of them. Because the point of this is that it's a catch-all. It's like a big brain net for you so that you know, you won't miss anything. In the construction industry where I work. A lot of guys typically it's men in the field. They don't like scheduling because I think it's a little bit of like a blow to their ego. What do you mean? I need to write all this down. Of course, I know that needs to happen. And the problem with that kind of thinking is that our ego gets in the way of our productivity. The goal here is to get everything down the page, even stupid little minor, silly things that seem so obvious because this is going to make sure that you don't miss anything. It's better to put on too much and then decide later that you don't really need that and to take it off, that did not put on enough. I'll even write questions for myself in here as a task, do I need to call them a head, whatever the thing is, and I'll put it in here. And then as I'm looking at the schedule layer, I'll go oh, I I do need to answer that question. I do need to know if I need to call them ahead. Just something as silly as that. It's like, I want this to be fool-proof. I'm the fool. So let's continue with that first example. Let's say you realize that your task one really isn't a task one, it's like a task three. So how do we get a row up there and get it in sequential order? Because we will want this is to be in order from top to bottom. First things on the top, last things on the bottom. Well, what you can do is pick that row that is near where we need to input a new row. So for me to be row number four, pick that number four with your mouse click and then right-click on it and do Insert row above. This will be your new best friend. Because if you're like me, you mess up and you forget stuff. If you want to, you can even click on one of the rows, go down three or four or five, hold Shift, click on that row, that's three or four or five down. So now you've got four rows highlighted, right-click on those, insert four rows above. So whenever you're right-clicking on the whole row, it gives you that number that you have highlighted as an option to insert, like if you knew, oh man, I really messed up. I need to put ten in here. Let's highlight ten and go click Insert ten or 11. So for us, if we need to put in a couple of more, we can do that. Insert two more rows above a new real task number one, actual task number two, actual task three. And then this look through it again. We're going to look through it and go, Does this make sense? Are all those things really an order? Oh, maybe you find out they're not actually an order. So what you don't want to do is come back through here and go delete, delete, and then rewrite them in here, go down, Rewrite some more stuff in here. Retyping, retyping. No, no, no, we're not doing that. We're saving time. I'm telling you this is the way to save time. What you do is I can do a lot of control Zs here to undo all the things I just did. Let's say that you realize and looking at this that you need to move up some of your tasks. Like for me, test seven needs to go up one spot, click on that row that it's in. For me, That's row number 13 and highlight it and then look at that little gloved hand that appears like it's just ready to grab something. It's a little hand. If you highlight that over, the number represents what row that is, left-click it and hold it. Look at how those fingers move. They went from open to closed, open to close. When they're closed, you've got that mouse held down, you can drag it to a new spot. And wherever that dark gray line is, is where that new spot is gonna go. Bam, hello. This is one of the things that Excel as far as I've seen and as far as I've ever used Excel can't do this. A lot of the people in my company and elsewhere still use Excel to make schedules. This reason alone right here is reason enough not to use it. Eventually you might realize that a bunch of stuff is out of place and that you need to move it around. So this allows you to move rose around so quickly and so easily. And I love it. I love this feature so much. It's especially important, Let's say as you're midway through a project, as you're tracking it and as you're doing stuff, you'll go, Oh, well, this thing didn't happen on time. So maybe that means that the thing that's supposed to happen right after it has to be moved down into the future. Well, you can do is click and drag events anytime and move them so it's adjusted correctly and we'll get into the Time sections here in a future lesson. But I just want you to know that that click and drag of the row feature is there. It's super fast. Oh my gosh, I love it so much like we did at the beginning, where you can click on a row, right-click on it, and then you can insert a row above or below it. You can also use that same feature to delete a row. So if you decide, you know what, I really don't need that row at all, that task is like a moot point. Just forget about it. You can delete the whole row if you want. So don't overlook those tools. The right-clicking on a row really opens up a lot of powerful tools here. Oh man, this is so exciting. Okay, let's keep going onto the next lesson. 10. Lesson 7: Planning Dates For Activities: Welcome back. Now let's get into the detail of using our schedule. We've got our format setup, we've got our tasks planned out, we've got our best guess as far as the order of them going chronologically from top to bottom. Now we're going to start assigning dates. Now for this, I like to zoom in my view even more so I'm gonna go to 125, go even up to a 150 per cent view. So I can really see up close. This is another opportunity for you to customize, because in my company what we typically do is we'll do a capital X for our initial projection of when that task is going to happen. Let's say real task number one for me is happening on May 14th, the first day of the project. So I'll put an x there. Now if you wanted to, you could do whatever you want it in here to make it fun and reflect what you like. Like maybe you really love cats, especially angry cats, cats a little too angry. How about a cute cat face? And maybe you want to be really nerdy. And instead of putting an X there, you want to insert an image into the cell. And frankly, you want it to be a cat face, boom, cafes, maybe cat face to you is the goal. Cat faces the baseline, whatever you like. However you like to represent your projection of when that activity is going to happen, you'll put something in that box that represents that task and however long you think it'll take, you can do successive dates along next to it. So what I mean by that is let's say real test number one for me is just one day. I'm gonna do it today, then I'm gonna be done. But then actual task number two is going to happen today, tomorrow and the next day. And so the way that you represent that in this type of schedule is you have three dates side-by-side there. So you're saying this task is happening on these days. And then your goal is to orient this in such a way that it sort of cascading down from left to right. This is another double-check that what you've done is in chronological order because as you check things out here and you go, I think that's going to happen on, let's say the 16th. Task number two is going to happen on the 17th. Task number three is going to happen on the 17th, 18th, and you start to fill this out, you'll want it to be a nice cascading shape like this. Because what that's showing you is that once the previous things are done, you can move on to the next ones. Like what, what this is representing in a graphical format is, I can't really do task number ten until these things above it are also done. I need to do those first. That's the whole point of putting it in this order. You want it to be sort of sideways like this, going down from top-left corner to bottom right corner. Just because it's more readable. Because for instance, if you didn't have it like that, you had things all scattered everywhere. All crazy town. That's difficult to read because you're going Okay. I get it. On the 14th, 15th, 16th, that kinda get what's going on. And then you start to search after that for What's the actual activity that's happening on like the 1800's, what am I supposed to be doing? Because it's really not clear. I'm having a difficult time pinpointing what I'm gonna be doing on those days, where if you keep it all aligned in that sort of cascading waterfall, then it's easy to see and that's easy enough to change with that row shifting future I showed you before, let's say for me task number six that I've found out was really not in the right spot, so I'll move it down here. Oh gosh, that needs to happen down here on May 18th. It has to for whatever reason in my pretend schedule world. Well, now if I've got these other ones that are going down here, well, that's the odd duck. What's it doing up there? The way that you get that back into line and put it back with its brethren happening on May 18th, is we're going to click that row, drag the number back up to where we want it, and let go. Boom, now it's in line. So just at a glance, if you need to ask me, Hey, what are we doing on that remodel project and your kitchen on May 18th, angle right here and go oh, May 18th, let me tell you a task three, task seven, and task six. I'll happening that day, whatever that might be, go to Home Depot, come back, realize you forgot something. Go to Home Depot again. That's what those tests would mean for me. Oh, and by the way, if you're gonna do an image like IM, or even if you're not going to do an image, if you're gonna, it's gonna represent it in a simple letter. What I've been doing here is a Control C and Control V to copy and paste these images as I go down. That's how it can be so fast. You don't have to keep doing insert image, that kind of thing over and over and over. You can just pick the one that you did, the initial time control, C, control V, that kinda thing. The goal is that whenever you've got something that's largely filled out, it looks something like this. I'll zoom out a little bit more so you can actually see the whole thing in one view, but you can see that general pattern is happening from top-left to bottom-right. This could potentially feel like a lot to wrap your head around if you're new to this and you go, Man, that really seems difficult to me to understand, like how to read this or it seems a little bit clunky at first, like it's difficult to read, to know what's going on. I understand I'm with you because for me, the learning curve on this did take a little while. And so now that I've used it a lot, I can just glance at this and tell you a whole bunch of stories of what's happening. I can see the things that are going on, but I can understand if you're a little bit skeptical at this point to go, brendan, this doesn't seem as useful as I thought it would be. Hold your horses because we're not done yet. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to actually track your progress with this, and that's where the magic happens. This is our initial setup. We've kinda got the plane fueled up, it's on the runway. We're ready to take off, but we're not flying yet. So the next lesson we'll show you how to functionally use this to track your progress and to know if you're ahead of schedule or behind schedule or right on track. 11. Lesson 8: Tracking Your Progress: Welcome back. Now, let's put our schedule to use and actually track our activities and know what our schedule is doing for us. Are we ahead of schedule? Are we behind schedule? Are we right on track? Have we gone overboard and we need to recoup what's happening here. Let's get into how we do that. And the way that I've done this professionally in practice is by highlighting a cell in a certain color if we're on schedule or behind schedule. So let's zoom in and take a look at that now. So let's say my real task number one was supposed to happen today, May 14th. I had a plan. I fail to plan. Oh, no, I didn't do it. So the way that I would represent that is I would highlight that cell. I just want to click on it and then I'll go up here to the fill color. And for me, red means stop. Red means progress didn't happen. Somehow the wheels didn't turn. I didn't do the thing I needed to do. Red means no. Now, if I had done it, Let's say that I did accomplish real task number one today, instead of red, I personally would make it green. And I don't like, this is just me. I don't like the super bright, saturated, crazy colors because that's like a little bit of an affront to my eyes. I pick one of these more like commuted middle colors because I like those more. And so then what you can do is as your project is happening, as you're checking things off the list. Hey, actual task number two. Yes, did it today. Then you can highlight that in green and then let's say tomorrow. Oh, no, I didn't do the things that I was gonna do read the next day, I completely forgot about this whole project. Read didn't happen. Now at a glance, what we can start to see is this pattern of green means I did it. Red means I didn't, or green means the thing that I had planned happened. And red means it didn't for you with your project. That could mean different things. If it's your vacation itinerary, maybe you guys decided you didn't want to play bingo on the cruise ship because it looked lame and you did something else. So maybe you had three days of Bingo planned. You asked the last two days because it wasn't actually as fun as you thought it would be. That's fine. It may not affect anything else in your schedule. This may just be like a really awesome task list for you That's not so much connected for me in construction and doing a remodel project here at my house. And some of these other projects that I've got going That's pretty critical because those things need to happen at some point. I can't just not do them like bingo, I have to do them. And so what this is going to mean for me is I've got two more days of actual task number two that need to happen here. And so the way that I've represented that professionally in my life in the past is I'll use an R to reschedule that event at a later date. So let's say I didn't do this one on the 15th, 16th, which means I probably have two days worth of work here that needs to be our rescheduled for those next two available days as closely as possible. I've gotta do it. Now let's say I totally forgot this activity too, because I forgot about this project altogether. I was supposed to be doing it totally forgot about it, slipped my mind and I'll put an R next to that one too. So now what I'm seeing is the first day I really went after it, way to go, the next two days totally fell on my face. Now what's happening is those dates are shifting further and further to the right, and now more stuff is accumulating in the next day because it's got to happen right now. You probably get the pattern here that I can put things into green or put things into red if they did or didn't happen. And then I can read. I did the things that I didn't do the things in. So let's go ahead and say optimistically that I did all those things I was supposed to do here. So those are green and we salvage the rest of these days to their green. Now, even this in and of itself tells us a story of progress. This tells us that I ran into a speed bump there on the 15th and 16th, and somehow I recovered like the 17th and 18th, there must have been really killer days because man, I cranked out a lot of stuff visually. Another tip and using this as the more vertical your schedule is like in this section for me here on the 17th and 18th, The more things are stacked up on top of each other. The busier, that time slot is, the busier that day is. So that's saying, Wow, you've got a lot of expectations for that day too. If down here on my schedule further down, Let's say I had something like this planned Oh, my goodness, May 24th. I have got a ton of expectations for that day. Now it's interesting because you can almost predict the ebb and flow of a project just by the shape of it. If I see this, I'm gonna go, you know what, those couple of days leading up to that, I had better setup this day really well to make all that happen. That's a big ask. Or likewise, if it's the opposite of that and I've got scheduling out here that looks like this. See how flat this is. It's really not like vertical at all. Then I'm gonna go, wow, the beginning of June is gonna be like pretty boring. It's very flat. It's going across from left to right, which means that tasks have time to themselves. There's not a lot of overlap. There's not a lot happening consecutively in one day. Does that make sense? The shape of the schedule itself can betray your intentions and your optimism level. Now let's go back up to the top here where we've had some progress and we've read some stuff in. We've got some green and red going on. If you want to, you can use different colors maybe for you. Blue means go, blue means I did it and yellow means I didn't, or however you want to represent that. You could also pick different letters. You could pick an image to put in there. Like you could download a picture of a big red X on line and say x means now or you put it in an image of a stop sign, whatever makes sense to you, as far as a way to track your progress and indicate to yourself as a representation of this was my plan. It did or didn't happen. And then if you need to reschedule stuff, you can pick your own version of that too. I like that are just gets really simple. R means reschedule. But now let's get into what it means to know if you're ahead or behind schedule. Now, what typically would happen with me is all of these tasks needs to happen. I can't skip them. That's why I put them all in. They need to happen. Now if I start to have another slip up here, let's say May 19th, my plan falls on its face. Things are just not happening. Man, I wish they would. I'm working on it, but I can honestly say that that task was done. It's not happening. I just have a terrible three days here, 19th, 20th, and 21st. Oh, here's another good tip. Don't forget to scroll up and get the activity that you're looking at really tucked up there tight to the date so you can see what's happening these days really stink things aren't happening. So now what I need to do is reschedule them. That was one days Arthur activity. So I'll put one r That was two days worth of activity. I'll put two R's, those down there. Man, things are not happening. Now what's going to start happening here is if you keep having these failures and you keep having these days or things aren't happening the way you want them to happen, then you'll start to see that your original timeline is to the left of what's becoming your actual timeline. So this is something that a lot of scheduling software fails to do well. One of the reasons why I choose to use Google Sheets over and over is the scheduled versus actual difference is rarely represented. A lot of these schedules catered towards, let's say like a software design team. We've got this project. You want to put this thing together because you've got to develop a new app or a software product or something, all they give you is one line of scheduling. And so for us, it's interesting and it's useful to know at what point are we going wrong, at what point are we going right? And so for us in this format, we can represent both of those timelines. The x's for me represent the original timeline. This was what my plan was. Now you can see by me leaving the x's, they're coloring them. Read, you'll go, Hey man, your plan went pretty awry. That we give the 19th, 20th, 21st, like something bad happened or you planned poorly somehow your project when sideways and things did not happen the way that they needed to happen. So even if I'm getting back on track here, I can use to just do a control C and control V. What you'll start to see is I've got a separation here That's going further and further to the right. And even if I do my best and I reschedule something, maybe it still doesn't happen until out here. Oh, man. Now I'm getting way further out to the right. I rescheduled it. I knew what needed to happen. It couldn't even happen tight to that initial scheduling date. It's happening way out there more and more to the right. So if you see something like this happening in your schedule, again, the shape is an indicator. You can go, alright Brandon, let's pretend like we're gonna be eating. Alright, Brandon, starting on May 19th, things went sideways and then they continued to go sideways because look at the number of days you have separated between your planned date for an activity and the actual date that you thought was going to happen. Now, even if you did eventually get the thing done. So what this is saying is, Look, we've we've planned to date, we've missed it. We've planned a rescheduled date, and we miss that two. Now, all we've got is this final date where we actually did the thing and you can see how many days we've lost. So let's say, let's look at this as an example here. This is Task 14. I'll scroll over there so we get it tight up there in the top-left corners we can see the task clearly. We can see the date clearly. Task number 14 was supposed to happen on May 26th. Didn't happen, the next day didn't happen. And I've got four days in here where some nothing related to that happened. I planned on it happening again on June first, second. That didn't happen. Now I've got it happening finally, June 3rd and 4th. So I've lost 1234567 days. I've lost a full week off of my intended schedule. If your project is like mine, the implication here then is that ripple effect will continue all the way through the schedule. And so we might need to go ahead and plan on these other ours happening down here similarly. Oh man. Well, if that other stuff was delayed, that means all of this will be delayed, which means that I can't plan on getting done on time. And so this is how in construction you can actually predict a finishing date or in your project, you'll be able to tell somebody, Hey, I'm actually predicting my finishing date to be out here now before maybe you thought you'd be done on June 12th. That was the original plan. As you follow this along, unless you can miraculously make-up time and still end up with the same finishing line. You're not going to finish until June 21st. And so this is part of the power of the schedule. You can actually see into the future. You can become a fortune teller and you can look ahead into the future and forecasts when you're realistically going to finish this thing. Now, if you're just doing this as a fun exercise or you're planning a vacation itinerary, you're not going to have to play on these kinds of delays and reschedules because maybe you have a fixed amount of time. I've got two weeks to do whatever I can do on his vacation and then I'm gonna go home. But if you've got a project where you have sequential events like this are things that need to get done. This is the way that we show that the best, I mean, this is really the best representation of that because it's giving us this really clear picture of why we went wrong here. We couldn't quite reel it in. Now are finishing date is delayed by this much. Now. Likewise, the opposite can be true. We don't need to be total negative Nancy's here and just plan on things like not working well because you could actually be ahead of schedule. And so a similar thing could happen here where, let's say instead of going awry up there, you didn't hit this date up at the top because you actually went ahead of schedule. Look at you. I mean, you are just a master of the universe here because you're actually getting things done earlier than you planned. Now the difference, again is a visual one because what you can see is before when we were off schedule, our actual kind of scheduling line was going further and further to the right. You're using up more columns. They are across the top, which means more time is being spent. If we're instead on the left side of our intended path of our intended activities. What we're saying is, while you're actually getting done early. And so just at a glance, That's one of the powers of this, especially if you're working in a team or there's other people involved and they know how to read these right at a glance, you go, oh my goodness, look at this. This schedule is a thing of beauty because my gosh, how could you possibly pick up this much time and be actually early? And if you continue that projection all the way down, maybe you'd finished the whole project early. And yada, yada, yada, you get down here, oh my goodness. We're going to finish a week early. How awesome would that be? So that's the other visual shaping that you can interpret from this is at a glance, know, are we ahead? Are we behind? How much red is there? You know, if you're right on schedule and you're just hitting everything right on the head. It's just a little trickle of green way to go. You're on schedule. Perfect. Everything's happening. If you're ahead of schedule is to the left. If you're behind schedule, it's to the right. Okay. Let's get this cleaned up and we'll continue on with our next lesson. 12. Lesson 9: Examples of My Professional Schedules : Welcome back to the ninth lesson in the class. There's just one more after this. And in this lesson I wanted to show you examples of completed schedules. So this is something that's like, Hey, if you've got really crazy, this is what it could look like if you wait a little bit overboard here. This schedule that I'm showing you first is an example of a car wash that I built. And so if I zoom out a little bit, a little bit more, you can actually see, wow, I've got multiple storylines happening here. And here's a little test for you. How much red is there versus how much green is there? Things went awry pretty fast on this project. Now I clearly didn't keep updating it because they don't have much green here past a certain date. But what happened at the beginning set everything off to an immediate sort of three-week delay. So what we've got here at the start is I planned for things to happen in June. They didn't even happen until July. So I've got like a 1234 week delay right at the beginning. That's showing me the difference between my planned versus actual. And then you can see that that gap is maintained basically throughout the whole rest of the project. Then I've got a secondary storyline happening down here, because whenever you're building something, the building itself takes a lot of time and energy and focus and then the site work around it is almost like its own other projects. So like the parking lot and utilities and things like that. That's too much construction knowledge for us to talk about in this scheduling class. But what it looks like is I've got the same time window happening. I've got the same month of June, July, August, September. But what I have is two separate storylines, two separate projects happening simultaneously. And so I layered them on top of each other here, just because that style seemed to work for me at that time because I wanted to know if I'm working on this part of the building, what am I doing on the site at the same time, I wanted to in the same window, in the same view. Now, alternatively, if you wanted to get really crazy, you can take advantage of tabs down here. So I started to break these out into phases. The first phase is a much more detailed broken down version of this overall schedule, just into the timeline of like two months so that I wouldn't have to be necessarily overwhelmed with this master view. I went into a more granular view then and can plan things out even in more detail as far as formatting goes, I went even more overboard than what we set up. I've got the title of the project, the address, the month, the week of the project, the number of days that we're currently in here. I'll zoom in a little bit more so you can see the number of days in the project. Oh, no, I'm sorry. That's not the number of days. That's the date. Then at the bottom, I have the number of days in the project. So that's a good formatting option for you if you didn't like me stacking those two on top of each other, the date of the month, and then the number of days in the project overall. Because it's like number on top of number, don't like it. It's confusing. You guys dropped those numbers down here at the bottom. Project day number one, project day number two, that kind of thing. And then I also have another ONE here, which is the phase of construction. So the phase one is going to happen there, phase two, phase three. And you can see that if you build this, it'll make sense to you. You can probably explain it to somebody else. And although it is overwhelming, what it's giving you is a ton of information at a glance. What am I going to finish? Phase one? Bam, I know that. When am I going to start at phase two or phase three? Bam, I know it. What date is that activity going to happen where we pour the tunnel, bam, it's going to happen right there. Like it's just a way to condense a lot of information and a lot of thinking into this perfectly trackable format that is so satisfying to lean on. Let's do another example. Here's a project I'm actually working on right now, and I've designed this one a little bit differently. Let's see if I can zoom out enough that you can see the whole thing. Now as you can see overall, the shape of this tells us a story. It tells us that in the middle, things get really flat. Look how flat that is in the beginning. It's kind of cascading slowly but surely. And then right here in the middle, it's like dead flat. What's going on there? What's happening is there's a delay in the middle of the project. And so that means that no activities can keep happening. And once you check off an activity, you get to go down. Your goal in this is to be able to go down and get to the next activity, check it off your list and go down to the next one. Because I have this delay in here of three or four weeks where nothing can really happen. It's extremely flat, which means progress has stopped even here at the end this section in the last few weeks, It's pretty darn flat, which means not a lot of activities can be happening simultaneously. I'm dependent on two or three things happening at once. That's it. And as you can see, there's a lot of red on here too. So we're not terribly far off schedule yet. If we zoom in a little bit, we can just look at this gap between our line of x's here and our line of ours there, or a week or two behind schedule, probably still fairly terrible, but not not horrendously terrible yet. Like it will be once we get down here. And I'm not showing you this in an attempt to overwhelm because this is something that I'm using for myself within a corporate context. This is not a casual thing, and it's also the 20th or 30th or 40th schedule I've done like this. And so this is to cast a little bit of a vision for you of if you spend a little bit more time formatting, and if you want to get in this level of detail, you can really convey a lot of information if you want to. If you don't, you stick to our basic format. You get what you need in there, and then you adjust as you go along. That is nerdy stuff right there. But I love it. I am, I'm such a fan of this. I love doing this. Okay, let's go into the next section and create a schedule with me in real time about that home project that I've been wanting to do. Oh my goodness. We're gonna put it on paper. Let's do it. 13. Lesson 10: Build a New Schedule With Me: Alright, let's do this thing. I have not planned this out in advance for the record, I don't have like a list over here to the side. I'm going to actually build this with you here live over the next five minutes or so. So let's go back to our Google Sheets home screen. We've got our scheduled template. We're going to click into there. I'm going to File, make a copy. We're going to call it home pantry remodel, example 2022. Boom, it's opening up a new one. So I am going to just get rid of these columns. I'm going to highlight them, delete them. I'm going to reformat this to be June. You always got to start with formatting, man, formatting is the key. Okay, let's extend this out. I mean, I would love if this didn't take that long, but realistically, I think this is probably I mean, it shouldn't take that long. Okay. Sorry, I'm thinking out loud here. It really shouldn't span into the next month, but it could there's a chance. I don't really even need to know the number of days in the projects. I'm just going to delete it. We're not gonna do it. Alright, the first thing I need to do for this is finished cleaning out that closet. We have a closet that like connects to the garage. Gotta finish cleaning that puppy out before I can turn it into a pantry, then I need to demo the shelves. What I don't want to do is cut a hole from our garage into our kitchen essentially, and just leave it open for a long time and make a bunch of dust nasty. Don't wanna do that. Tuition installs light fixture, realizing that's out-of-order because I need to call an electrician first, find somebody, schedule them, do the whole deal. I mean, the communication aspect is huge for this, I should talk to all the people first, I should not just start working. We're gonna do highlight the row, insert one row below, call tile guy, whatever other just general things like cut hole in the wall again, I'm just trying to word vomit all this down, get it in there, reinforce the opening above the door. Probably need to do that. We'll need to trim out around the new opening for water heater. I don't think we'll need a light above the water heater though. What else is part of this install new door? I would love a door guy to do that, not me because it needs to work. I'm not that handy. That's it. Right. I think that's everything. Okay. Realistically, hopefully I can be finalizing the design even before here, but let's give me three days to finalize the design. And then I can call all these guys, gosh, like the same day. I mean, why not set everything up, call them all. I'm getting vertical here. So I have a lot of expectations built into one day, but should be able to do it. Then let's start working on finding in buying the light and finding and buying materials. Maybe not super in advance of talking to people, but I'll start looking the day before and then I'll have something to be informed and actually talk to guys about. Then if they changed my mind at all, then I'll have a day afterwards to buy more of the things. Realistically, I'd like to clean out the closet earlier, but I'll give myself a dedicated day to do that and demo the shelves. And then after that, as long as people are available, we could do the electrical rough and right away, I would be shocked if that was more than one day for one light. It's gotta be one day than I could also be opening the wall while he's doing that, maybe he's open the wall a little bit for something else. I should have the wall size for going from door to kitchen, but realistically, I work pretty slow. Let's say it's going to happen the next day. And I can reinforce that area above the door also the next day, assuming that's all the damage we need to do, we can get up to reparations with drywall repair. Now let's say he needs to patch one day. I'll probably have a couple of days to coat texture. That's worst-case scenario. Let's plan for worst-case scenario. And then one of these days we'll be painting. Sometimes I'll build an extra day just because I'm not sure which one it will be. I'll put it in a buffer day here of unknowns before the electrician can come back just in case someone's delayed between drywall and paint then and I'll take him one day, max. I could probably install the light fixture, but the flooring, I think would take two days because typically they need to lay it, wait a day, come back and grout it, then. Well, we need to install a new door before we trim around it. Silly. Oh, wait, that's a different trim. Okay. So we're gonna do this here. It's all new doors. One day that same guy could probably the trim. All the trim. But we'll give him two days if I'm doing cabinets and shelving and counter tops and all that stuff is going to take me a week. Well, it won't take me a week consecutively. It'll take me two days of trying, then I'll come back in another week just knowing myself. I'll finish it. And then I'll do all the small wears a little bit after that because a lot of that work could really happen on weekends. If you wanted to, you could designate which of your dates are weekend dates. And then you'll be able to more specifically plan things out and go, Hey, unlike a Monday, I could call that guy on a Tuesday, could call that guy for the sake of this, I'll keep it fairly vague. Okay. So this is the other regulatory part of making a schedule is I couldn't have told you right off the bat how long that can take in commercial construction, that should be like a week. That should be the most basic thing. But that's also meaning that you have a lot of information because someone has designed it for you. I'm the designer, I'm the source or of all material. I'm the coordinator. There'll be a lot slower though for us. Let's say I'm actually done on this date. So that's June 6th. Oh, no, it's July 6th. Wow. From June 6th of July 6th. Let's take an a full four weeks to actually do the project. It's probably realistic. Home projects always take two to three times longer than you think, right? So if it was commercial construction and perfect world, one-week, normal world, two weeks. But none of No, double your expectation for a home remodel project. Four weeks total. That's realistic. And I've got a very optimistic start here, look how vertical it is and then it levels out. And then for me, the finishing touches are pretty flat at the bottom, which means slow progress. I think that makes sense. Cool. What do you think? 14. Bonus 2 Mobile Scheduling: Creating a schedule from scratch on a mobile device is kind of a pain. So remember to make yourself a copy of the blank template that I linked in the class description. When you do that and you open it, it's going to look something like this. Let's zoom into it so you can really see it well. So when you first open it, it looks really similar to the one that I made on desktop. It's a little bit zoomed in. So if we zoom out, you can understand the scale of the thing that you're going to have a lot of time kind of pre-made in there for you, and a lot of space down the side here for you to input your own tasks. I thought I'd do a quick tour just to show you some of the other options as far as the difference in navigating on a mobile device versus a desktop device. Now to start with, you're going to navigate this largely the same way you would on any mobile device. So it's not that different to use Google Sheets. But at the bottom and the top, you notice that there's certain kinds of tools and Toolbars. So let's go over those now. First on the bottom side, these are like common formatting things. You can bold your text. You can pick a text color. You can change your alignment from left center. You can do a fill color, and then you can add a row or a column. Pretty basic stuff. And in case you do want to move a row around here in the mobile version, all you have to do is select a row and then touch and hold it and you see on the screen goes white and then we've got that gray line that's moving around and it's showing us where this is going to end up. So just remember that touch and hold to drag stuff around. One of my favorite features in Google Sheets, something you use all the time if you're scheduling in Google Sheets. Along the top, we've got some of my favorites, undo and redo. Oh my gosh, I use them all the time. I love them so much. Then that underlined and bolded a button that's up there at the top is really important. It's a ton of formatting options that are all kind of hidden away. If we touch it, we can go in here and see that we have two categories. One is text and one is cell. The text is pretty normal self-explanatory stuff like bold underlying text alignment side to side as well as up and down, the size of that text, the color of it, the font, and it's rotation, the cell formatting tab. When I use more often because that lets you do things like Wrap Text, merged cells when you have more than one selected and change other formatting elements. By far, the most used part of this for me is borders. You can add or remove borders around the cell or cells that you have chosen, which is really handy if you want to modify the look of your schedule. And I'll just touch on the screen to kinda get out of this, get back to normal here. The plus sign up here in the top-right corner allows you to add a comment, a chart and image, all that kinda stuff, which we sometimes use when we're scheduling, but not all the time. And then the three dots on the very top right corner let you toggle light and dark theme, which of course I like dark theme. I think it looks a lot better and it's easier to read in that section. It also gives you a few more useful options. The most used one for me is share and export. And what that does is it allows you to send a copy of your schedule to someone or to even share your online copy if you want someone else to be able to see it or edit it with you. Pretty cool. I also have mine checked to available offline just in case I need to see it whenever I'm not connected to the internet from him, kinda spotty signal area. I still want to be able to do things. There are some other options that sometimes people don't realize when you're doing stuff on mobile, which is if you touch on a cell that you want to do stuff in and then you touch it again. Then it gives you more options. Copy, comment, clear note things. So that's kind of like your right-click. If you click on one and then you click it again, see how that's like a right-click gives you those extra hidden options. So make sure that you know about that as far as using this version on your phone whenever you're actually trying to schedule something and you're doing stuff on your phone functionally, it's the same as desktop because what you're doing in the same way is writing down your tasks along the far left side. And then in the middle over here on the right side, you're typing in your expected durations. So you might say something like, Hey, task number one is going to take one day. Task number two is going to take me two days test number three, which is a little further down the list now, I'm going to take me two days. And then you can fill some stuff in here. Test test number two. Maybe that takes you a day. Test number two takes you a couple of days because we froze this. It means that sometimes you can scroll over here and lose your text because you're operating within a frozen area and then a non frozen area. So if you're losing it, just remember to scroll back over there, touch where those tasks are and slide it back over so you can see it. And then zooming and scrolling is very similar to anything else on your phones where you can just slide over and back and get what you want to see their Zoom In and Out, see the overall deal, zoom back in, find your text. I think you can see here that a bigger screen is probably a little easier to use in this case, but it does work on your phone, especially if you have something that you built before with a bigger screen like an iPad, or maybe you built it on desktop, then you can access it and make some fairly basic edits on your phone. That's what I typically do. I build the big major one, onetime using a real computer and then I do the rest of everything on my phone. That's it for this section. I hope that was helpful and that you are comfortable using your mobile device for scheduling now. 15. You've Done It! (Conclusion): You've made it through this incredible class that's been so fun to make. I'm so happy that you've been here and now you know how to schedule. You learned how to set up a Google account so that you could start this whole process and use their free software. You learned how to navigate through Google Sheets in a basic sense and to build your own template so that you can come back and duplicate that whenever you have a project and customize it however you want. Put in the cat face, put in a picture of a beach, make all the colors the way you want. Make it so it's readable on mobile. All that stuff is. So in your grasp now because you've seen this and even if it was a little bit shaky there in the middle where I got kind of in-depth and nerdy rewind, go back to those other lessons and watch them through one more time. Don't forget that if I'm talking too slowly for you also, you can adjust the speed so you can go like 1.5 times speed the second time around. So it's not so boring. I got you. You also learned how to generally plan out everything. So first we vomited everything out on the list so that you had an idea of these are all the things that are involved. Then you learned how to reorient all the rows so that they're in the right place. And to actually plan out that schedule and the timeline itself, using the cat faces, using the x is whatever you wanna do that fits your style. And then you are able to see how just visually we can interpret a schedule. We can know for me if everything is in a green box. Hey, we're right on schedule. If there's a red and it's shifting out further and further to the right. We know we're behind schedule. All that stuff has now become so apparent to you. Two are at a glance. You can see what's going on with your project. You can know immediately if you're on track, where you went off track and how hard it could be to get back on schedule. And you also got to see some really crazy big nerdy examples of what this can look like if you apply it to something like a multi-million dollar commercial construction project, you can see how much detail and the level of information that you can cram into one spreadsheet and how you can use tabs to dive in even deeper into certain phases of it if you want to highlight areas. Finally, you got to see me live in a cringy sort of way, make an attempted schedule for a remodel that I really do want to do in my house right now without any preparation, without having ever done that before, you get to see me do it and see my thought process. And maybe you sat through that, maybe not. I don't take any offense if you skip through that one because that was a little bit painful. My goal for you with this as a general takeaway is that you can leave this and go, I've got a template, I've got the know-how to fill it out and now I'm empowered to be organized and I can plan out all these tasks and know exactly what's happening. I won't forget a single thing and I'll make sure that things are happening the way that I want them to happen. This is something that initially might feel a little bit scary, but becomes so simple for you that it's like a form of thinking. It's so exciting for me to know that you've made it this far and you have this skill now so that you can plan things out really well. There's very few people that know how to do this. If you're in a project management role, you know how to do this, but nobody else really does because there's no one that teaches you. This was the class that if I could have had at the beginning of my career, I would have taken in a heartbeat. And so I'm so glad that you can have them all in one place. Thank you so much for being here and watching this class and learning with me and keep an eye out for more classes coming soon that I'll be making and putting on this platform for you.