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A Productivity Expert's Tips For How to Properly Plan Out Your Week
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Become more organized
In order to be successful and reach your goals, you need to be organized.
One first step in this direction refers to starting your day planning: choosing the agenda that works best for your can be a game changer.
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Practice a lot
Acquiring organizational skills, as in getting better at planning, can take a while. While finding the appropriate agenda is essential, making a habit out of using it is just as important.
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Plan important moments monthly
When preparing your schedule on a monthly basis, make sure to add not only the daily tasks and objectives, but also the big moments.
For instance, integrating your friends' birthdays can prove both useful and time saving for the future.
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Establish a day for planning your schedule
Establishing a certain day, when you can sit and plan your next week can prove extremely useful.
For instance, choosing Friday to be that day, seems pretty clever, as this day marks both the end of a working week and, why not, the beginning of another one.
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Manage priorities first
In order to have successful days at work and not only, make sure you keep track of your tasks. Furthermore, taking care first of the priorities should be on everybody's calendar.
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Necessities are the real thing
Whenever you plan your schedule, write down whatever you need to do, but not everything you need to do.
There are tasks that do not required being noted down, as they have become part of a daily ritual and can not be forgotten.
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Use colors to plan your agenda...or not
You choose how you want your planning to look like, therefore avoid trusting too much others' opinions, but rather choose to prioritize your own.
For instance, using color appeals to many individuals, but not to everybody. Just choose your own style and get started.
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10
Key Ideas
Make planning a habit
Some mornings we feel motivated to create a to-do list, but that is often the exception. We need to get things done, even when we feel disengaged.
Start by setting ...
Align your to-do list with goals
- Break down your big goals into daily tasks. You can't add "Get in shape" to your daily to-do list, but you can add "spend 30 minutes on my bike."
- Consider your week as a whole. You likely have multiple goals. Some goals benefit from daily activity, while working towards others a few times a week can create momentum.
- Add your have-to-do tasks last. We often fill our to-do lists with have-to-do tasks that crowd the whole day. Adding it last forces you to fit your have-to-do tasks around your goal tasks.
Have one daily priority
Many of us start our mornings with dozens of things we need to get done, but later realize that we haven't crossed any of them off our lists. We did get stuff done, but none of the things we planned.
A balm against hectic days that pass without progress is to choose a single activity to prioritize and protect in your calendar. If you struggle to select your top priority, ask yourself, when you look back on your day, what do you want the highlight to be? That's your priority.
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Take Stock and Track Your Time
You can’t really clean up your schedule if you don’t know what’s in it—and that includes all the things on your literal and official calendar and all the things that aren’t.
Purge Recurring Meetings and Tasks
Once you know what’s on your calendar, ask yourself: “What is the purpose of each thing on here? Are we accomplishing that or does something need to change?”
Question each task. Start with recurring meetings, which can very easily build up and take over your calendar.
Sort Things By Importance and Urgency
... and put them in one of four quadrants:
- Quadrant I: Important, Urgent (crises, last-minute meetings for important deadlines)
- Quadrant II: Important, Not Urgent (strategic planning, long-term goal setting)
- Quadrant III: Not Important, Urgent (certain emails, phone calls, meetings, and events)
- Quadrant IV: Not Important, Not Urgent (scrolling mindlessly through social media, binge-watching TV you don’t really care about).
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The junk drawer
The "junk drawer" has become a universally acknowledged space where you store all the things that doesn't seem to have a place. It is not always a drawer - it could be a room,...
Discard before organizing
Don't think how you will organise items if you're still considering what to keep. You can only assess available storage space when you're done decluttering.
Sort and throw away first before you put back the stuff you've been collecting in your junk drawer.
Tidy by category, not location
Gather all the items of one category in one spot. You can only decide what to keep and what to discard if you know what you have and how much you have.
Categorization is important in the process of decluttering. The five main categories are clothes, books, paper, miscellaneous, mementos. Gather and assess all like items at the same time. If you have two junk drawers, tackle the objects in both spaces at the same time.