The state of chronic lack of time gives rise to feelings of guilt and inferiority in a person, and also contributes to the development of psychological complexes. People who do not cope well with the distribution of their powers and capabilities, who take on too much or avoid any planning, as a rule, fail in all endeavors. It is difficult for them to set priorities, and as a result, the solution to each task is given to them with great difficulty and does not bring internal satisfaction.
How to plan the day to keep up with everything? How to make time pressure cease to be the norm of life, giving way to concentration and joy from each successive overcoming?
7 reasons to make a to-do list
Failure to think through their actions a few steps forward and draw up an appropriate algorithm leads to the fact that a person loses the idea of ​​the time frame. Insignificant or meaningless activities can take him away all day, but really priority tasks will be relegated to the background and lose their relevance.
The ability to enclose each successive micro-target in a strict “temporary capsule” and assign it the right place on the priority scale is the main idea of ​​such a direction as time management. And before you understand how to plan your day in order to keep up with everything, you need to determine for yourself 7 advantages of this practice:
- Developing good habits and abandoning old ones. The most reliable option to introduce some useful component into your life and abandon what prevents you from doing this is to start filling out your “success calendar”, marking every stage of victory over yourself in the daily list. For example: "7th day on a healthy diet" or "3rd day without fatty foods."
- Reasonable distribution of forces. Many tasks take a huge amount of energy from a person, so planning will help to divide energy-consuming processes into periods, alternating with less complex issues.
- Improving your own efficiency. Through a clear indication of the goal, the person comes to understand the need to obtain a result, and it is easier for him to concentrate on achievements.
- Increased stress tolerance. When an individual clearly understands what he wants to achieve, he ceases to be tormented by insecurity and doubts, which are the main source of domestic stress.
- The development of punctuality and constructiveness. A person practicing time management is able to soberly assess his abilities and understand how long this or that task will take. This frees him from unnecessary fuss and allows you to feel like a master of the situation in any situation.
- Relieving stress from the brain. The lack of plans on paper forces a person to keep all current tasks and prospects in mind, therefore, achieving full concentration at work will not work - the brain will constantly send alarming signals about the need to do many things.
- Disclosure of creativity. When a person does not need to rush about in search of another goal, a lot of creative energy is released from him. As a result, even routine tasks are perceived by the individual with interest. Such people are said to be "gushing with ideas."
In other words, they plan the regime of the day with the goal of putting things in order in all their affairs and becoming the real owner of their time, and not their blind consumer.
When is the best time to plan?
How to learn to plan your day? According to the results of scientific research, it was proved that it is best for a person to absorb motivating information if he thinks it over and puts it on paper before going to bed. By morning, the brain manages to fully grasp the list of scheduled tasks and take them for granted.
Having woken up, a person no longer asks whether or not he needs to fulfill the items of the compiled list, and thus, from the first minutes after waking up, he is ready to start its implementation.
To-do list method
For beginners, planning for the day is best done on paper, in a classic way. So he manages not only to indicate all the necessary goals, but also to think about their necessity. Perhaps the task indicated on paper will not be as important as the others, as it seemed at first. In addition, the notebook is more convenient to carry around constantly and often re-read. It does not depend on the battery power of the phone or other electronic media.
Experienced planners will suit any convenient gadget. There, it will be easier to adjust the to-do list taking into account force majeure circumstances, and they do not need to look at the compiled program for the day as often as beginners.
How to plan your day to keep up with everything?
There are a few rules that can help an inexperienced time management follower avoid mistakes when creating a daily plan and following it:
- you need to choose the storage medium (notebook or gadget) that will be convenient to hold in your hand, which is nice to look at;
- you should always have a to-do list with you;
- each executed list item must be deleted immediately upon its execution;
- opposite each item, you need to put down the time for which it must be completed (in the first month of practice, the time is indicated "with a margin");
- you can’t specify more tasks in the list than a person usually does, but you must definitely enter 2-3 tasks that must be solved without fail, no matter what;
- it is necessary to compile a list in such a way that complex cases alternate with simpler ones and time is allocated for rest.
The main rule of this analytical direction: the list should be opened with the most important task for the day and gradually descend to unimportant goals. If you do the opposite, a person all day will be afraid to wait for the moment when it will be necessary to tackle a difficult business, and his productivity will decline in all respects.
Defining Your Goals
Before compiling the first to-do list, a person must analyze his life as a meaningful movement to some significant event. This may be a prospect for a year or two in advance (a trip to an expensive resort, a wedding or buying a car) or a long-term project (to become a famous writer, to get a leading position in production).
In any case, each day spent should advance a person in the indicated direction, which means that items in the list of tasks are necessary that contribute to this advancement. “Microstep tactics” helps best in achieving a major goal, the essence of which is the formation of many consecutive algorithms that steadily brings an individual closer to his idea. How to plan your day using this practice?
Microstep Tactics
How this one of the main strategies of time management works can be analyzed using the example of an individual’s intention to open a sewing workshop. What will he need for this?
- Draw up a business plan.
- To get investments, take out a loan or accumulate the necessary amount.
- Register with tax authorities, etc.
Each of the items itself contains many different manipulations, which means that it cannot be part of the daily plan, but will be the final moment of a certain period - 1-2 weeks, month, year. Therefore, having compiled a list of major tasks, a person should return to the first point and break it down into several parts. So, the section on the preparation of a business plan will take a more specific form with an easily implemented procedure:
- Find several companies involved in accounting services on the Internet.
- Examine reviews and choose an organization that is trusted by businessmen.
- Make an appointment with a specialist, etc.
Now a person clearly understands what he needs to do, and can gradually include the necessary items in his daily list, but be sure to take into account his abilities to fulfill his plan. The goal, which yesterday seemed an unattainable dream, will be available, and the desired will be realized much faster than if the future entrepreneur approached the business without a clear idea of ​​his actions.
Organization of the day: nuances
How to plan your day to keep up with everything? It is necessary to immediately abandon the habit of "falling asleep" after a hard week, because a long sleep, like its absence, entails disorientation in time - it is much more difficult for an object to "get into a rut" and fulfill its plan.
According to psychologists, the 8-hour period from 22:00 to 6:00 in the morning is the most productive time for rest, after which a person feels ready for achievements and energetically updated.
How to plan a working day? In the service schedule mode, tasks arise that require a momentary solution - for example, a business call or an urgent meeting. If unexpected circumstances do not interfere with the implementation of the plan, then they can not be fixed in any way, but if force majeure requires a serious approach, then less important things should be replaced by the time spent on it. At the same time, unrealized goals are transferred to another day or are decided at leisure.
The proper organization of the day also includes the introduction of a strict limit on the use of social networks, e-mail and other distracting applications (if this is not part of the work process). It should be allocated for online communication or viewing news from the mail no more than 30 minutes a day, breaking this time into 2-3 approaches.
Ability to refuse and delegation
Not sure how to plan your day? Remember one more rule: it is very important to exclude interfering factors that arise daily and manifest themselves in the pressure of society on feelings of duty, guilt or responsibility of an individual. As a rule, most of these points are not based on the real need to seek help from a person and is only the desire of someone to relieve themselves of the burden of unnecessary things or to make life easier at the expense of a friend. If an individual practicing time management realizes the opponent’s attempt to take advantage of his reliability, he needs to learn how to refuse immediately, without explaining the reasons or promises to return to this issue “another time”. Just a few unsuccessful attempts and the failures received - and the manipulator itself will leave you alone and turn your attention to someone else.
But there are situations when assistance is really necessary. Then the object must find the best way out and decide whether it is possible to provide assistance through delegation (shifting responsibility for the execution of the case to another person), or is it better to do everything yourself. The responses of experienced followers of the described direction confirm that after a thorough analysis of the situation, hardly 10% of the emerging force majeure of this type really deserve personal attention and can be completely solved in other ways.
We plan the day of the child
A child of pre-adolescence is not able to competently operate with the concepts of time and energy balance, so it must be constantly directed in the right direction, not forgetting that older children need stimulation. The student must have an hour or two a day for what he is interested in at the moment. It is in his free time that his creative potential awakens and personal (and not imposed by his parents) goals arise.
It is necessary to draw up a schedule for the day of the child with his participation, and although each item on the list requires discussion and acceptance by both participants in the process, we must not forget that the opinion of the student should be prevailing. The parent only needs to adjust the time frame for each lesson, based on the real capabilities of the child.
It is unobtrusive to ensure that the student tries not to evade the created algorithm. It's okay if some work is done in a hurry or remains unfulfilled - it is more important that the child learns to draw conclusions by analyzing the past day and correctly evaluating his actions. To do this, every evening before compiling a task list the next day, you need to discuss with the young planner all the problems that he encountered on the way to following the algorithm, and then jointly decide how to prevent the re-occurrence of obstacles.
Error analysis and correct conclusions
How to plan your day to keep up with everything? The first steps in the organization of self-discipline are inevitably accompanied by mistakes and mistakes that come from a person’s ignorance of his own abilities and the inability to effectively manage the allocated time limit. Usually, in order to eliminate the main causes of periodically occurring “failures”, it is enough to analyze every day lived for 1-3 months and, making the next list, take into account the conclusions made.
But it happens that 3 months, and even six months of regular planning, do not bear fruit. By the middle of the day, the schedule ceases to be relevant, and the implementation of the projects indicated in it is pushed forward. In this case, the method requires adjustment. The planner will have to temporarily abandon the compilation of the daily schedule and keep a “diary of his affairs” throughout the week, recording in it all the actions performed and noting the time of the beginning and completion of the manipulations.
After the necessary time, the data of the compiled timing is compared with the records of the old lists. Most likely, the actual numbers of minutes and hours spent on some manipulations will be very different from those that the person planned to spend initially. The next schedule should be formed based on their actual capabilities. After a few weeks, the time allotted for less important matters can begin to be reduced - first by a few minutes, and then to the minimum necessary time.
Followers of time management in their reviews say that anyone who is configured to adjust their lives so as never to face the time pressure load can achieve visible results in 5-7 months. To do this, it is not at all necessary to study all the nuances of the analytical direction - it is enough to adhere to the general principles of the method and apply the basic techniques of organizing your time.