Matrix Planning: Revolutionize Assisted Living Investing with Bullet Journals
Jan 06, 2025
Feeling overwhelmed by endless tasks and chaotic schedules? If you’re looking for a better way to plan your days, Matrix Planning might be the answer. This simple, visual method organizes your time into a grid, helping you prioritize tasks and stay focused. Whether you’re running an assisted living facility, managing a side hustle, or balancing family life, this system can help you streamline your day and get things done.
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What Is Matrix Planning?
Matrix Planning is a system that combines structure and flexibility. It uses a grid to divide your day into manageable blocks:
- Rows represent times of the day, like Morning, Afternoon, and Evening.
- Columns focus on key areas of your life, such as Work, Family, and Side Hustle.
By filling each cell with tasks and events, you get a clear snapshot of your priorities and schedule for the day.
Why Matrix Planning Works for Assisted Living Entrepreneurs
If you’re managing an assisted living business, you know how hectic your days can get. Between staff meetings, resident care, and managing finances, staying organized is a challenge. Matrix Planning helps by:
-
Prioritizing What Matters
You can assign urgent tasks to specific time blocks, ensuring nothing important gets overlooked. -
Balancing Multiple Roles
Running a business while keeping up with family and personal goals? The grid helps you see how you’re dividing your time and energy. -
Reducing Overwhelm
The visual layout makes your day feel less chaotic. Seeing tasks in neat sections is much less stressful than a long, cluttered list. -
Flexibility
Matrix Planning adapts to your needs. Use it for a single day, a week, or even a long-term project.
How to Start Matrix Planning
Follow these steps to set up your first matrix:
1. Draw Your Matrix
Grab a notebook or sticky note and draw a grid. A 3x3 grid works great for beginners.
2. Label the Rows (Time of Day)
Divide your day into Morning, Afternoon, and Evening.
3. Label the Columns (Life Areas)
Choose the areas you want to focus on, like:
- Work: Tasks for your assisted living business.
- Family: Personal time with loved ones.
- Side Hustle: Growing that second stream of income.
4. Fill in the Boxes
Add tasks and events for each time and category. For example:
- Morning Work: Review staff schedules.
- Afternoon Family: Lunch with your kids.
- Evening Side Hustle: Research property for a new facility.
5. Use Symbols
Borrow symbols from bullet journaling to keep it clear:
- • for tasks.
- â—‹ for events.
- → for tasks moved to another day.
Tips for Matrix Planning Success
- Start Simple: Stick to a 3x3 grid to avoid overwhelm.
- Be Consistent: Refresh your matrix daily to stay on track.
- Adjust as Needed: Try different layouts or add a column for “Self-Care.”
- Pair with Digital Tools: Combine Matrix Planning with apps like Notion for long-term projects.
A Real Game-Changer
Matrix Planning isn’t just about getting organized—it’s about taking control of your time and energy. Whether you’re juggling a growing assisted living business or balancing work with family, this method gives you clarity and focus.
Try Matrix Planning today and watch how it transforms your productivity. With just a notebook and a few minutes of setup, you’ll feel more in control and ready to tackle whatever comes your way.
If you found this information helpful and need help getting organized to create a solid business plan, make sure you download our Business Plan Checklist.
Need help figuring out where to start? Join the next Roadmap Challenge and build your launch plan with me.
Show full transcript 👇
Transcript
00:00:01
does bullet journaling ever feel overwhelming to you are you struggling um with trying to find a planning method to help you organize your time and get everything done have you ever tried time blocking but haven't been able to figure out how to make it work for you are you just pulling your hair out screaming because you can't get anything done i've got the solution for you hi everybody i'm brandon gustafson i own and operate two assisted living facilities and i created this channel to
00:00:28
help people just like you learn the ins and outs of investing in assisted living welcome to assisted living investing [Music] in our last video we talked about bullet journaling for the small business owner and how you can 10x your potential as a business owner and productivity how you can do that make sure you go and watch that video and learn the secrets of how you can be a more productive business owner in this video i'm going to talk about a new bullet journaling method that i have created
00:01:08
that i just absolutely love i'm super excited to share it with you i call it matrix planning so i understand bullet journaling can seem complex i've tried to give you an overview of of what it is and how it works and i'll link that up here above so you can go and watch that video about how bullet journaling works and how you can do it and i've got to preface all of this by saying i absolutely love bullet journaling it has completely changed the way that i plan my day and how i get things
00:01:36
done it has been just an incredible system that has been very simple for me and easy for me to implement but as i've gone through this now for the past five or six years what i found is the method that that writer carol talks about in the bullet journal journaling method um it it worked for me but it wasn't i just couldn't get into exactly how he does it and that's fine um that's the great thing about bullet journaling you can do it the way that you uh that you want to do it i'll link that that
00:02:05
book down in the the description below so you can go and get a copy yourself um but you know just make sure that you have a good understanding of what that looks like um but you know with all that said i i love bullet journaling but i get it it can feel overwhelming at times especially if you spend any time on the internet looking at different bullet journals you'll see all kinds of intricate art and colors and calligraphy and different types of pens and things that you can buy for and it's just you can look at it
00:02:36
and be like oh my gosh this is overwhelming i'm never going to make something that looks as beautiful as that you don't have to it's totally fine but i get how you feel when you're looking at it and you're just like i can't do this especially as a guy who is not artistic um i can look at those things and be like oh man i would love to spend time doing that but i don't have the extra three hours in my day to make this beautiful bullet journal i and honestly nobody's
00:03:02
gonna look at it and nobody cares what it looks like and i don't need to do those things and i learned a lot of this i'm actually going to link his channel up above here his name is matt ragland i watched a lot of his videos he helped me out a lot in learning about bullet journaling and how to to do things um for for me that helped me um learn how to be more productive with my bullet journaling and use i used his system he used a 10 block system that i really enjoyed learning and i implemented it for a
00:03:32
little bit and then i found a different ways to do it and have kind of through time got to the point where i've created a system that that works for me i'm going to share that with you here in this video now as i mentioned i've been doing this for five or six years and i kind of stumbled probably about a year ago on a method that really works for me that just to me just speaks to me and i'm like oh this is exactly the way that my brain works this is how i want to do it i've shared it with several people
00:03:56
before and they also love it and so i want to share it with you so you can learn this new method and i call it matrix planning so in matrix planning i actually use a lot of the same symbols that you use in bullet journaling i use the dots i use the migration symbol the event symbol and uh the i'll use like the cross through and a lot of those things i don't really i don't necessarily have a future log for this um because i use notion for that and eventually i'll have a video up here
00:04:25
that talks about notion and how i kind of use notion as my future log and how i make that work for me but matrix planning is again extremely flexible just like bullet journaling it can be adjusted to meet your specific needs and there is no right or wrong way to do matrix planning i'm not going to be sitting there watching over your shoulder making sure that you're creating everything exactly the right way do it for yourself do it the way that works for you do it in a notebook do it on a on a flash card do
00:04:52
it in a on a sticky note do whatever works for you to make it work um specifically for you basically all you need is a piece of paper your notebook a note card and i'll i'll put links down in the description for things you can purchase on on amazon that will help you do those things specifically a good notebook or a note card on on things that you can do i found that like flashcards work really well for this um it's how i actually started my method out was was using flashcards until i
00:05:24
implemented a system in a notebook that works for me but a matrix i'll give you a little bit of an overview of what it is if you remember back to your days in math class when you're in junior high and you're learning about all these different things and matrix matrices um came up um that's kind of what it is um we're not talking about the movie the matrix uh no keanu reeves here or anything like that um but uh yeah the type of matrix is just recall back to your days in junior
00:05:55
high math learning about matrices and how they work and how they look a little bit because that's how this works you basically have rows and you have columns with each cell in the matrix being its own entity is what i would call it on the x-axis you're going to have rows and on the y-axis you have your columns and i've taken this concept and and kind of just simplified it and applied it to daily planning is is all i've done now as you're working through your matrix you can create as many rows or as many
00:06:29
columns as you need i found that a three by three or a three by four matrix generally works best for me so how it works is i like to start my matrix matrix off with the x axis so with those rows and i like my rows to represent the time of day so first is the first row was am so in the morning the second row is p.m in the afternoon and the third row is in the evening um the things that i want to get there and then after i make those rows i put in my yx access or my columns so in this example let's say i've got
00:07:04
three different areas for those and let's call the first column is family the second one is my job and the third one is my side hustle for me i would have you know like my full-time job be won i'd have my assisted living facilities be uh one of those columns and then like my youtube channel and my other ventures that i'm working on in the fourth column but for the example up here we're gonna do family job side hustle so you can kind of get a feel for exactly exactly how that works
00:07:34
now once i've created that matrix all i need to do is look at my to-do list that future log that we've talked about in previous videos and determine where i'm going to work on a task um is this something that is family related is it something that's related to my job or is it something that's in my side hustle um and then what time of day am i gonna work on it in the morning the afternoon or the evening and then i would put that task or that event using the bullet journal symbols into
00:08:02
the corresponding cell in my matrix so let's say i've got a meeting with my facility administrator in the afternoon so that would be in my side hustle um in my side hustle column and it's in the afternoon so in that cell i'm going to put in there a circle to signify a meeting and then put in a meeting with administrator and i like to use shorthand so meeting i'll do like mtg um with with a spl with a slash and then administrator would be admin um and it just like helps me keep things a little
00:08:37
shorter doesn't take a lot of time to to write things in there today for my full-time job i've got in the morning i need to work on a project and so i would go into that that cell you know the am the am row and then my job column and i would put a dot because this is a project i'm going to work on a task that i'm going to work on and i would put in something like data analysis because that's what i do for my full-time job i'm a data analyst and then let's say in the evening i have
00:09:09
a date planned with my wife um in the evening so i would put in that evening row on the family column i would put in there um a a circle because this is an event and i put date with a wife in there date w slash wife or however you want to put it in there and now it's in there and now when i look at my i take this out and i look at it i can see oh cool this is what i have going in the morning i've got to work on this task this is what i have in the afternoon i've got a meeting with my
00:09:38
administrator and in the evening i've got a date with my wife i can see it's right there in my matrix lets me see exactly what i've got to do if it's an event if it's a task what i've got to work on and and how i'm going to plan those things out and this has helped me out just incredibly as i do my time blocking and my matrix planning and and all those things it just kind of helps pull everything together for me and keep things organized and lets me see at a quick glance these are the things that i need
00:10:07
to work on it helps me stay on task and helps me be productive with my time you know in outlining my work this way i can easily see what my day looks like at a glance what tasks and what meetings i need to get done in which area of my life i'll be working and what time i'm going to be doing it at and i just love the way of planning and this way of planning and organizing my work it's just been game changing for me i've been doing it now for about a year and i just i absolutely love it i'm so excited to share with you
00:10:33
if you have found if you think that matrix planning is going to be the the way that you can uh you know improve your your way of looking at things and just smash that like button and let me know in my next video i'm actually going to do a plan with me bullet journaling style with matrix planning i'm going to show you how i do it how i go through the day i'm going to use a note card i think for how i do it to show you then i'll probably give you a quick glance at what my notebook looks like as well as i
00:10:58
go through that and again i'll reference down below in the description some of those resources where you can go and buy some of these things for yourself as well and in closing to learn more about investing in assisted living make sure you visit me on assistedlivinginvesting.net i've got blog content free resources out there you can set up a consulting call with me we can talk about assisted living we can talk about matrix planning bullet journaling how you can structure your your life to be more
00:11:24
productive and help you move along down the path to help you be successful in your business and just remember it doesn't take a lot just a little bit just keep going making progress step by step by step every single day just do a little bit and you will be successful i promise thanks for watching and have a great day [Music]
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