Is it hard for you to manage your time effectively? Do you feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish everything you need to?
Learning how to plan your time can be a game-changer for your productivity and overall success. We’ll walk you through the importance of planning and provide practical strategies for organizing your day, week, or even month around your true priorities.
Keep reading to discover expert tips on creating a time management plan that works for you and helps you achieve your goals.
Planning Your Time
Once you’ve identified your priorities, you can plan out your day, your week, or even your month. A time-management plan isn’t just a to-do list—you need to schedule time to focus on what’s important and organize your time around your true priorities. First, we’ll explain why planning is important, and then we’ll go into detail about how to plan your time by blocking off your day and your week—with tips on how to remain flexible enough to adjust your schedule when the unexpected happens.
Brian Tracy says that taking 10 minutes to plan your day can save as much as two hours in wasted time and effort. Although planning has been shown to increase productivity and efficiency, surprisingly few people do it. Even if it sounds difficult, Tracy insists it’s really simple: First, write down everything you have to do. When something comes up, add it to the list. When you work from a list, you can increase your productivity by 25%, so each night you should start your list for the next day, including unfinished tasks from the day before and new tasks to start on tomorrow. A benefit of making a list the night before is that your subconscious mulls it over while you sleep, so you wake up with ideas that give you a head start.
Gary Keller puts a spin on the traditional to-do list by saying you need a “success” list instead. Simple to-do lists are long, disorganized, and can pull you in many directions, whereas a success list is short, prioritized, and aims you in a specific direction. For instance, a typical to-do list includes both work and personal tasks, such as meeting with your boss and picking up your laundry, arranged in no particular order. A “success” list only includes those tasks that support your overall objectives, ranked in order of importance. Keller says goals and priorities must come first—without prioritization and direction, to-do lists are merely “survival” lists that show your best intentions, rather than being a path to your goals.
Protect Your Plan
In addition to making planning a priority, you have to build the habit of protecting the time you’ve scheduled for what matters. In Make Time, Jake Knapp and John Zeratzky write that you should block off time on your calendar for your #1 priority, especially if your calendar can be viewed by others at your workplace. You have to be firm with the time you set aside for your priorities, but make sure that you use that time constructively. The hardest part may be saying no to other people’s requests for your time, but you have to be willing to reschedule or even cancel other activities. You should always be honest when you tell people no. If you find saying no very hard, you could consider writing and rehearsing a script.
Choosing a longer time frame for your plans can help protect your priorities while making room for other tasks. Stephen Covey suggests planning within the framework of a week to balance your big-picture perspective with day-to-day actionables. Covey says to start with the most significant tasks, not the most urgent ones—as long as you stay focused on your most important items, you can make time for merely urgent matters around them. If you schedule time for urgent tasks first, you’re likely to run out of room for your main priorities.
Make sure not to schedule every minute of each day so you can maintain flexibility for unexpected problems and opportunities that arise. Covey warns that you’ll inevitably face challenges in your schedule and will need to make decisions in the moment about how to proceed. Like Tracy, Covey says to start each morning by reviewing what’s on your schedule and prioritizing your tasks. Look for time-sensitive commitments and watch out for pressing but not significant activities that might have crept into your schedule. Those and tasks that aren’t time-sensitive can be pushed aside if unexpected emergencies come up.
