Structure Your Day For Success
I nearly always start my days by taking the time to write out a plan for the things I want to get done that day. And although the process can take me anything from 15 – 30 minutes, I find it’s time well spent to keep me organised and on track.
This is in stunning contrast to the days when I just used to arrive at my desk and deal with the things that “seemed” the most important, were the quickest or the easiest tasks.
These days my list is carefully thought out and planned and covers all aspects of my life to attempt to not only keep some semblance of being organised, but also allows me to move forward on things that are important but not necessarily urgent.
In this post, I’ve asked and answered a series of questions which may help you decide whether having a more structed approach to your day would be beneficial to you too.
How Does Having A Structure Help?
My daily plan is the cornerstone to my day. Like everyone else, I get interrupted multiple times during the day and knowing I have my day planned out helps me get back to where I intended to be quickly and easily.
Isn’t A To-Do List Enough?
At its most basic level, having any sort of to-do list is better than nothing and will at least give you a focal point of tasks and activities that you want or need to get done during the day.
But the trouble with a basic, unscrutinised list is that it can have you going off on tangents or always dealing other people’s demands.
It may also lead you down the road of doing too many of the “easy” tasks at the expense of tasks that could make a profound difference to your life in the future.
So, whilst a to do list is better than nothing, it should be a starting point to the structuring your day which you then build upon.
What Did I Achieve Today?
If you’ve ever reached the end of your day and wondered what you actually achieved, then having a plan will help you.
We’re all busy, often trying to combine jobs, with caring responsibilities, maintaining important relationships, running a home, keeping the finances and admin in check and somehow trying to have an enjoyable social life too.
But all these commitments come with their own demands and usually those demands are loud and unrelenting. From the moment you wake until you fall exhausted into bed at the end of the day, someone or something has wanted a slice of you!
Setting down your plans for the day into an organised structure will allow you to quickly see whether you’ve made progress, or, if you haven’t, the reasons why that is, ie, the interruptions that came your way.
Did You Progress Your Goals or Personal Interests Today?
Before you eat the elephant, make sure you know what parts you want to eat.
– Todd Stocker
If you’re not making progress on your goals or personal interests, then having a daily plan will help you.
In amongst everything else you must do, maybe you also want to learn a new language or play the piano, or maybe your interest lies in pursuing a PHD or glass painting.
We all have goals or special interests. These are sometimes called hobbies, but that seems like such a dismissive word for something that is important to you.
The problem with your goals or special interests is that no one else around you is interested in them and so, with the daily demands of life, you continually push your interests aside to accommodate the demands of others.
This leaves you feeling empty and perhaps even resentful too.
By having a plan and a structure for your day, you can ensure that your personal needs and wants have a time slot so that they’re not ignored at the expense of other demands.
Have You Over-Committed Yourself?
Sometimes our stop-doing list needs to be bigger than our to-do list.
― Patti Digh
You will also find that having a plan will help you consider how many commitments you currently have and whether taking on something else is viable.
A lot of people, me included, have an attraction for the next “shiny object”! That of course means, that it’s very easy to take on too much, fall behind and feel overwhelmed.
Having a structured day can help you deal with this tendency, because it’ll become obvious very quickly that you just can’t schedule any more stuff into your day without compromising existing projects and commitments.
Another benefit of having a schedule is that it allows you to see whether the commitments you’ve already made are actually relevant and important compared to other new commitments and opportunities that might be coming your way.
If you have a tendency to say “yes” to everything, having a structured schedule will help you sift through your commitments and objectively decide what you should and shouldn’t be doing at this time.
There’s no harm in saying “no” to a request, but you might find it easier to say “not now” instead, which feels much softer and also gives you the opportunity to schedule the task ahead to a more appropriate time for you.
What Tools Can You Use To Create The Best Structure?
From notebooks, diaries, organisers, planners, scraps of paper to the myriad of digital tools – the list of available tools to organise your day, week or month is endless.
But the important thing for me, and for anyone wanting to become more structured in their approach to their day is to have a tool that works for you.
It’s taken me a lot of time to find the tools that I’m consistent in using, but it’s basically boiled down to an online calendar to capture meetings and events, a paper page-per-day diary to write out my to dos and a small notebook that I use to timebox the tasks into my day.
Don’t be put off if you find yourself trying different tools and discarding them soon after. As I said above, I’ve tried lots of different tools over the years. There’s no one-size fits all and it might take some trial and error to find your best fit.
A Downside of Having a Plan/Structure – Losing Flexibility
There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
— Henry Kissinger
Having a planned structure to your day can be addictive. As you see your list of check marks stacking up against the tasks you’ve already progressed or completed, there can be a tendency to become too rigid and lose flexibility.
You will want to keep to your planned structure because you can see it working, however, if other more important tasks land in your in-tray, you will need to maintain a sense of perspective and re-allocate your already allocated work slots to the new (more important) tasks that have arrived.
This can lead to feelings of resentment and sometimes overwhelm.
If that’s the case, just remember that had you not applied this structure in the first place, you wouldn’t be as far ahead as you already are. So just make the necessary adjustment to your plan for the day and then set to work again.
Tomorrow you will get to reassess your workload and plan your day afresh.
What to do next…
> Read another post – 7 Reasons You Should Do The Hard Stuff First
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