Have you ever reached the end of the day and realized you haven’t really accomplished as much as you intended to accomplish? Many people find it painful to discover how much time they’ve put to waste at the end of the day. After all, you only have so many hours in a day, and once they are gone, you can’t get them back.
Over time, wasting these valuable hours also means missing out on your goals. It results in late nights and stressful deadlines and compromises the time you might have intended to spend with friends and family.
By optimizing how you use the time in your schedule, you ensure that you make continuous progress towards your goals.
Protecting Your Time
When implementing any new scheduling tool, it’s important to understand the purpose behind it. Time is the only resource you cannot get back. It’s the only resource you cannot increase. This scarcity makes time the most valuable resource you have, and your schedule is the tool by which you determine how you will use it.
For this reason, you should always prioritize time in a way that ensures you get the highest return possible on your investment. To ensure a high return on your investment of time, you should begin by establishing a daily plan and schedule. It has been shown that when you spend merely 10-12 minutes a day scheduling and planning, you can save up to two hours of your time that you would have otherwise wasted on other activities.
As you set aside time for scheduling, remember to schedule your most difficult/undesirable task first. Often called, “eating the frog first,” this practice helps many people jump-start their day and avoid procrastination. If you complete the most undesirable things in your daily schedule first, the rest of the day will seem much easier.
At the end of the week, you’ll want to feel like you’ve been as productive as possible, not just busy. By taking active steps to protect your time, you can end the week knowing that you spent it as effectively as possible.
- Execution
While most people have no difficulty making schedules, many people struggle to stick to their time commitments. Unless something more urgent comes along, a thoroughly written schedule should be the law to which you hold yourself.
To begin honoring the law of your schedule, you must devise a strategy to hold yourself accountable to it. In the moment, people will always choose immediate pleasure over delayed gratification, so commit to your own schedule as if someone else made it for you and expects you to follow it to a T.
As you begin following your schedule, it’s also important to establish a routine for yourself. If you always know what to expect in your day, your subconscious will have an easier time following the pattern over time.
- Review
As you learn to optimize the time in your daily schedule, you should make it a practice to review your schedule at the end of the day to analyze your progress toward effectively using your time.
You can only begin to make progress on creating an effective schedule when you review previous schedules retroactively. By reviewing previous schedules, you can learn what worked and what didn’t, and accurately understand how long different tasks take.
This is not an excuse to beat yourself up if you didn’t get around to every priority. Instead, ask yourself why you had difficulty accomplishing a priority. Did you have too many distractions? Did a task on your schedule take longer than it should have? Was there something fundamental missing from the process of completion?
Remember that creating a perfectly optimized daily schedule is a moving target. Keep trying new things to understand how you best operate on a daily basis. Don’t throw in the towel early on improving your scheduling process.
- Revise
Based on the data that you analyzed from the previous day’s schedule, you can revise the next daily schedule.
If you didn’t get to a scheduled activity, don’t simply ignore it. If a task in your schedule is still important to you, you should work on your missed priorities during the next day or week.
One common pitfall people encounter when they begin to practice better scheduling is that they assign themselves too many tasks at once. There can be a lot of excitement around a schedule filled with productive activities, but a small delay or unforeseen obstacle can quickly derail an entire day. For this reason, use your revision time to understand how long tasks actually take. Give yourself more time than you believe you will need, so that you don’t get off track and become discouraged.
Lastly, schedule a block of time at the end of the day for miscellaneous tasks. This block of time can be a good opportunity to get caught up before the end of the day if you find yourself falling behind.
Accountability in Scheduling
Without a doubt, holding yourself accountable to your schedule is the hardest part of improving your time management. Here are some tips to help you increase your accountability:
- Connect with your mission: This helps you stay motivated as you work towards accomplishing what you’re trying to accomplish.
- Write it down: Write your schedule down (or in something like Google Calendar) where you can see it often.
- Use rewards: Reward yourself for sticking to your schedule, even if the reward is something small, such as taking a walk outside.
- Put consequences in place: Subsequently, give yourself consequences for when you fail to stick to your schedule.
- Ask a coach: A coach can help you improve self-accountability when it comes to your schedule. Coaching could save you a lot of time and energy!
The Bottom Line
By optimizing how you use the time in your schedule, you ensure that you make continuous progress towards your goals.
You owe it to yourself to dedicate the time you need into making your mission and goals a reality. Many people don’t bother learning proper time management at all, so you’re already well ahead of the curve. Even implementing one piece of this process in your life can make a huge difference over time.
Speaking of making a difference, be sure you’ve downloaded your copy of The 10 Step Arootah Success Formula, here. It teaches you everything you need to achieve big goals.
Does your daily schedule need some work? How are you looking to improve your scheduling process? Let us know in the comments!
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