How to Use the Pursuing Excellence Planner: A Complete First-Week Guide

The most common reason people abandon a new planner is not lack of motivation. It is not even lack of time. It is uncertainty — they open it, feel unsure where to start, set it aside, and never come back.

This guide eliminates that uncertainty entirely. What follows is a complete walkthrough of the Pursuing Excellence Planner system — from the foundation you build before you open the first daily page, to the morning ritual that sharpens your focus, to the evening reflection that closes the loop and builds accountability over 90 days.

By the end of week one, the system is no longer something you are learning. It is something you are doing.

Before You Open the Daily Pages — Complete the Workbook First

If you have the Pursuing Excellence Workbook, this is where the system begins, not with the planner.

The workbook walks you through three sequential phases that form the foundation everything else is built on.

Attitude — examining how you think, building a gratitude practice, and writing your personal commercial, the present-tense self-affirmation Sidney has used since age 23 to begin each day with confidence.

Preparation — completing a time audit to understand where your hours currently go, then setting goals across six life buckets: Family, Fitness, Finances, Friends, Fun, and Career.

Execution — understanding the five daily actions that the planner's evening reflection holds you accountable to every night.

Spend a focused afternoon or weekend morning on the workbook before your first daily page. Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer's research on implementation intentions — the act of writing not just what you want to achieve but when, where, and how you will pursue it — consistently shows this single step more than doubles follow-through rates. The workbook is your implementation intention session. Do not skip it.

Once your goals are set and your time audit is complete, carry your top targets for the next 90 days forward into the goal-setting section at the front of your planner. Now the daily system has something concrete to execute against.

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Understanding the Daily Structure

The Pursuing Excellence Daily Planner is built around four distinct sections that appear on every daily page:

Daily Affirmations — the morning preparation section. Four prompts: three things you are grateful for, three goals for today, what you choose to focus on, and why you are pursuing excellence today. This is Sidney's "sharpening the axe" ritual — borrowing Abraham Lincoln's principle that quality of preparation determines efficiency of execution. In his high school powerlifting years, Sidney spent hours visualising lifts before competitions, creating the mental clarity that translated into three state championships. The affirmation section is the same discipline applied to daily life.

Today's Schedule — hourly time blocks running from 5 AM to 7 PM. This is where intention becomes structure. Fill it with meetings, protected work blocks, exercise, and the most important tasks of the day. Sidney's rule, drawn from Stephen Covey's principle of starting with the "big rocks": schedule your highest-priority work first, then fill the remaining blocks. The schedule also tracks hours of sleep from the previous night — a deliberate signal that recovery and performance are part of the same system.

Daily Reflections — the evening accountability section. Three prompts on what made the day successful, three evening gratitudes, and the five yes/no accountability questions Grant Cardone's insight inspired Sidney to crystallise: Did I learn something today? Did I exercise? Did I produce? Did I communicate? Did I influence? These five questions, answered honestly every evening, are what Karl Pearson meant when he wrote that which is measured and reported improves exponentially. The reporting is the point.

Notes and Ideas — a dot-grid space for brainstorming, additional task lists, and working through ideas that emerge during the day. Use it freely. It is the planner's unstructured breathing room.

The Morning Ritual: Step by Step

The morning section takes 5–10 minutes when done with genuine attention. Here is how to work through it:

Gratitude first

Write three specific things you are genuinely thankful for this morning. Sidney's instruction from the workbook applies here: the more vulnerable and honest you allow yourself to be, the more effective the exercise becomes. "I'm grateful for my health" is a placeholder. "I'm grateful my daughter slept through the night, and I woke up rested" is real. The research on gratitude practice — including Robert Emmons' longitudinal studies at UC Davis — consistently shows that specific, emotionally engaged gratitude activates measurably different neurological responses than generic statements.

Set three daily goals

These are not your long-term goals. They are the three most important things you need to accomplish today to move your 90-day targets forward. If you completed the workbook's goal deconstruction exercise, you already know what daily behaviors map to your quarterly goals. Choose from those.

Write your focus

What do you choose to concentrate on today? Sidney's examples from the workbook: "Today I choose to focus on pursuing excellence." "Today I choose to focus on eliminating distractions." "Today I choose to focus on leading through words and actions." Keep it to one clear intention — not a list.

Write your purpose

Why are you doing this today? This prompt goes deeper than goals. It connects daily effort to the longer reason behind it — family, legacy, financial freedom, professional impact. The greater your sense of purpose, Sidney writes, the bigger the challenges you will face without walking away.

The Daily Schedule: Time-Blocking Your Day

Once the affirmations are complete, open the schedule column. Time-blocking — the practice of assigning specific tasks to specific time slots rather than working from a general to-do list — is one of the most consistently supported productivity interventions in applied psychology research, including Cal Newport's work on deep work and sustained focused effort.

The Pursuing Excellence Planner's schedule runs from 5 AM to 7 PM in hourly increments. Fill it like this: place your highest-priority task in your peak-energy window first (for most people, this is morning). Block time for exercise, meals, and family commitments as non-negotiable fixed points. Fill the remaining slots with secondary tasks. Leave buffer — a schedule with no slack breaks the moment anything runs long.

The schedule is also the place to protect your deep work time. A blocked 9–11 AM on the page makes it real. An intention to "work on the project this morning" competes with everything else that arrives before lunch.

The Evening Ritual: Step by Step

The evening section is the most underestimated part of the system and, according to Sidney, the hardest to stay consistent with — and the most worth it.

Reflect on what made the day successful

Even difficult days have wins. Finding three specific successes — however small — trains what psychologist Albert Bandura called self-efficacy: the belief, built through evidence, that you are capable of producing results. Self-efficacy is not confidence in the abstract. It is confidence built from documented proof that you showed up and did the work. The Daily Reflections section is where that proof accumulates, evening by evening, across 90 days.

Evening gratitude

Three things you are grateful for tonight — separate from your morning gratitude. The bookending of the day with gratitude practice is a deliberate structural choice. It creates a psychological container around the day, beginning and ending in a positive, intentional mental state.

The five accountability questions

Answer each one honestly. Yes or no. Did I learn something today? Did I exercise? Did I produce? Did I communicate? Did I influence? A string of honest "no" answers is not a failure — it is data. It tells you where the system needs adjustment before it tells you anything about your character.

The Monthly Layer: Calendar and Habit Tracker

Beyond the daily pages, the Pursuing Excellence Planner opens each month with two additional tools.

The monthly calendar gives you a full-month view — a space to map deadlines, appointments, and milestone dates. Use it to see the month in structure before you plan the individual days within it. At the right edge of the calendar is a monthly to-do column for larger recurring tasks and commitments.

The habit tracker runs numbered columns from 1 to 31, with space for up to six habits tracked daily. This is where James Clear's concept of habit stacking — attaching a new behavior to an existing one — becomes visible. Choose three to five habits at the start of each 90-day cycle that directly support your quarterly goals. Mark them daily. The visual streak that builds across the tracker is one of the most powerful accountability mechanisms in any paper planning system. Research by Phillippa Lally at University College London found that habit formation takes an average of 66 days — not the oft-cited 21 — which is why the Pursuing Excellence Planner's 90-day horizon is precisely calibrated to carry you through the full formation window.

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Week One - What to Focus On

The goal of week one is not to use the planner perfectly. It is to use it consistently. These are different targets, and confusing them is what causes most first-week abandonment.

Days 1–2:

Complete or review the workbook. Set your habits in the tracker. Fill in today's date on the first daily page and work through the full morning section — even if it takes 20 minutes the first time. It will take 7 minutes by the end of the week.

Days 3–5:

Morning and evening rituals only. Do not worry yet about optimising your schedule layout or perfecting your goal entries. Just show up to both rituals every day. Consistency before optimisation.

Days 6–7:

Add the schedule time-blocking. Now that the affirmation and reflection habits are forming, layer in the daily schedule. Review your habit tracker at the end of the week. Adjust any habits that felt unachievable — self-efficacy builds from completing what you set, not from aspirational tracking.

By day seven, the planner is no longer a new object you are figuring out. It is a daily practice with a week of evidence behind it.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How long does the Pursuing Excellence Planner's daily routine take?

Morning affirmations and schedule planning take 7–10 minutes once the habit is established. Evening reflections take 5 minutes. The full daily ritual is 12–15 minutes — less time than most people spend scrolling before bed.

Do I need the workbook to use the daily planner?

No — the daily planner works as a standalone system. But the workbook provides the strategic foundation — goal-setting, time audit, personal commercial — that makes the daily planner significantly more purposeful. If you have both, complete the workbook first.

What if I miss a day?

Pick up the next blank page and continue. The Pursuing Excellence Planner is undated specifically so that a missed day, week, or month never invalidates your progress. Your journey continues from wherever you left off.

How do I choose which habits to track?

Choose habits that directly support your 90-day goals — behaviors whose consistent execution will produce the result you are pursuing. Start with three rather than six. Five habits you track reliably are more valuable than ten you abandon after two weeks.

Ready to Begin?

The Pursuing Excellence Planner is designed to be picked up today — any day of the year, any point in the month.

Shop the Pursuing Excellence Daily Planner →

Start with the 6-Month Planning Kit →

Related reading:

• The complete guide to choosing and using a goal-setting planner

• How to pair a goal-setting workbook with a daily planner — and why you need both