Welcome to Part 2 of the six part series on “How to Manage your Time, Instead of Time Managing Us “.
In Part 1, we explored how “Staying Healthy” helps us in Managing our Time. In Part-2 , we will dig deep into “ Planning the Day”
2. Planning the Day
This is the most critical step to achieve your day’s goal. Planning has to be good to make sure we are satisfied with our accomplishments at the end of the day.
When to start?
Start the day early, when you can spare time for yourself, when the daily hustle bustle of the life is yet to start for many.
This gives you ample time to think, plan and execute the day, the way you want to, rather than you getting pulled into things randomly and on the fly.
When to plan?
Start of the day, End of the day and every couple of hours.
Start of the day – Plan for the entire day in front of you. List down every small and big task that needs to be done and is required to be closed today.
After every task completion – Review/replan based on what got added/deleted for the day or due to the delay/before time delivery. End of the day review should also include sending any kind of reminders for any upcoming dependent tasks.
End of the day – Review the entire day’s activities and list down the pending tasks and plan the next day.
This helps in preparing for the next day, mentally and logistically both.
How to prioritize?
Any task that needs any kind of preparation by some other members – notify them first thing in the morning or previous evening
Prioritize activities based on deadlines
Give high priority to time critical dependent tasks.
Sort out small ticket items quickly. It helps reduce the list and thus giving a psychological motivational boost
- How to manage the prioritized tasks?
The first thing to be done is, to have a deadline for all the tasks.
Make the time to do things. Nothing is going to happen automatically. Take control and go for it.
Commit yourself to the plan. Come what may, our focus should be to close the task at hand in the given timeline.
Plan and set aside time to handle all distractions like messages, emails, phone calls, family members & household chores.
Avoid procrastination. The more we delay things, the more we prolong the identification of the problems and the less time we will have to tackle them.
To Summarize: “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!” ― Benjamin Franklin.
This brings us to the end of Part-2: Planning the Day
In Part 3, we will explore how to manage time by “Managing the Daily Tasks”. Incase, you have not read the Part 1 : Staying Healthy of this series, click here. Till then Stay Tuned and start planning your day so that you can manage your time better.