Creating your Perfect Day Itinerary (PDI) may be one of the most powerful exercises you ever do for yourself, so make it count. I've coached many wandering entrepreneurs through this exercise, and most of them have told me it changed their lives. I wasn't surprised—when I did it for the first time years ago, it literally set me up for creating the life I always envisioned and living it every day. 

In this exercise, your job is to map out what your perfect day looks like along the path to achieving your vision. There are two parts to this exercise: the macro and the micro.

Part 1: The Macro Part
In this first part, you'll figure out what your perfect day would look like at a general level. Not every day is going to be exactly the same.

Each day will look a little different depending on what happened the day before. It should look a little different; otherwise, life would get boring and monotonous. Still, you want to have a broad sense of what each perfect day feels like. This starts with a series of questions:

  • How do I want every day to look?
  • How do I want to feel every single day?
  • What am I creating daily?
  • Whom am I spending my time with?
  • What places am I exposing myself to?
  • What passions am I fulfilling?

Take out a blank piece of paper or open a new document on your computer and fill the first half of the page with the answers, in broad terms, to these questions. Here's mine from my first time completing the exercise:

Part 1: My Perfect Day
In my perfect day, I wake up next to the woman of my dreams and she's crying tears of joy because she's so excited about the life we have together. I'm preparing to compete in the 2016 Olympics with USA Team Handball, so I head to an intense training session with my coach to increase my physical strength and athleticism. Then I'm working on my TV show that's on a major network and supporting my company team with all of my projects that inspire entrepreneurs to follow their own passions and make a living around what they love.

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Media Platforms Design Team

Part 2: The Micro Part
Now, in part 2, write out a detailed itinerary for the next perfect day on the bottom half of the page. This should include everything you want to do and have to do and exactly how and when you want to do it. Every successful sports season I had included detailed daily itineraries. We received one in the morning and one before practice, and they set us up to win. There was no more wondering what to do, when to do it, or how much time to spend on it. It was all right there, plain as day, laid out in the steps necessary to reach our end goal. This is true for every professional sports team as well. The successful ones have a daily plan designed to lead them to achieve their vision. Theirs are similar, if not in many ways identical, to what I’m asking you to create.

Here is a version of my daily itinerary while I was writing this book:

Part 2: Tomorrow's Perfect Day

  • 7:30 a.m. Wake up, meditate, and enjoy the views from my balcony.
  • 8 a.m. Healthy breakfast with green juice or a smoothie.
  • 9 a.m. CrossFit/kickboxing or private skills training session.
  • 10:45 a.m. Check in with my team about projects of the day.
  • 11 a.m. Complete the top three tasks that were on my list before bed.
  • 12 p.m. Healthy lunch at home or lunch meeting with someone who inspires me.
  • 1:30 p.m. Back to the top three on my to-do list, recording interviews, doing videos, or working with the team.
  • 3 p.m. Physical therapy to increase flexibility (2 days a week).
  • 5 p.m. Pickup basketball, hiking with friends, swim in ocean.
  • 7:30 p.m. Healthy dinner at home or out with friends.
  • 9 p.m. Read, movie, events with influencers on the town.
  • 11 p.m. Make a list of what I’m most grateful for today, create a "completed list" of what I did today. Write the top three list of what I want to create tomorrow.
  • 11:30 p.m. Meditate, sleep, dream, recover body.

If you let it, the PDI can be a powerful exercise that will set up your year (and many years to come) to contain the best days of your business and life. It also helps validate your vision and vice versa. If your vision doesn't fit in with your perfect day at either the macro or micro level, you need to either change your vision or be more open, honest, and creative about what it will take at a daily level to reach your vision.

The article "The Most Powerful Exercise You'll Ever Do for Yourself" originally ran on RodaleWellness.com.