Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time.

<a href="https://www.canva.com/planners/">Creating and sticking to a schedule</a>—both in your personal and professional life—is the best way to manage your time and ensure you fit everything you need (and want!) to do into your daily life. But schedules can be challenging, especially if time management isn’t one of your strong suits.And to add to the confusion, what is an effective schedule anyway?

How to create an effective schedule

Your daily schedule is like your blueprint for the day. It keeps you on track and helps you make the most out of your time.Not only that, but schedules allow you to identify where the “time sucks” are. Think of these as areas that are draining your time, and you need to get rid of (we’re looking at you, mindless social media scrolling).If you want to be efficient on anything?Managing your time is the key to finishing everything and hitting the target 100%.Manage your Schedule, or your Unorganized Self will Manage you!

The Importance of a Daily Schedule

1. Perform a Time InventoryYou can use Digital Planners available in the Market to Track Down what are you doing every day, block a specific amount of time on these activities. If you are not a techie, you can use the good old-fashioned Planners.2. List your daily/weekly/monthly prioritiesThis is going on the Macro Level of Things, instead of counting minutes and hours, you must look at your schedule from a birds-eye view too.3. Invest in a Daily Planner If Planners are too expensive for you, you can create your own using <a href="https://www.canva.com/planners/">templates from Canva.</a>

How to make an effective daily schedule

Planners help hold you accountable; if you have written reminders of where you’re supposed to be and what you’re supposed to be doing, it’s more challenging to ignore.Planners are also helpful because they help keep you organized. Instead of having your schedule spread out over multiple devices, calendars, and post-it notes spread across your office, a planner organizes all your daily to-do’s in one, easy-to-manage place.

Why invest in a Planner?

Clearly, if you want to build an effective daily schedule, you need a planner. But what, exactly, do you need to include in that planner?Here’s an outline of the five must-have’s to include on each task in your daily planner schedule:<ul><li>Time</li><li>Commitment</li><li>Other people involved</li><li>Contact information</li><li>Notes/Any other relevant details for the commitment</li></ul>

Planner Outline to keep you Organized

Is there a way to keep on top of your to-do list? Color coding can be used to distinguish between distinct commitments. Work commitments, for example, could be highlighted in pink, family commitments in yellow, and personal commitments in blue. That way, you'll be able to see right away what kinds of things are on your to-do list for the day—and plan accordingly.Folding over each page when you're done with it is another technique to keep your planner orderly.

How do you keep your planner organized?

<ul><li>If sticking to a schedule on your own is difficult, ask the support of a friend, coworker, or family member to hold you accountable. </li><li>Pull out your planner at the end of each day and take a brief check of your schedule to see how well you stayed to it. If you struggle, think about how you can improve the next day.</li><li>Add your daily schedule to your phone and set alarms to remind you where you need to be and whenIf you have difficulties remembering to check your planner, add it to your phone and set alarms to remind you where you need to be and when.</li></ul>

How to stay in line with your Planner?

We look at how making a schedule could help us stay productive and efficient every day. Hint: It's easier than you think. 

Not all meetings are a waste of time, but meetings tend to take a lot of time, so it’s crucial to ensure that the meetings you call are worth everyone’s time. You can do this by setting a clear goal or agenda. Without a guiding agenda, a meeting is just people talking—and it’s possible you’ve sat through many such meetings yourself.

Meetings with no agenda

If you have far more important things to do but are laboring away at administrative tasks that could be delegated elsewhere, you might have fallen victim to a time waster. You may feel like you’re really working—but if there’s a better way to spend your time and another employee who can easily take over this work, this work qualifies as a time-waster.

Administrative work that could be delegated elsewhere

Poor communication can negatively impact a business, but even on top of these numbers, any failure in communication is also a waste of time. You not only have to account for the time lost based on poorly communicated plans, but you also have to communicate again to correct these errors.

Poor communication

Most of the time, planning is a great way to avoid wasting time. But there comes a point when it’s possible to overdo the planning process. Because it is possible to overengineer a system or a strategy to do more than you set out to do, increasing the complexity of the plan but not contributing significantly to the overall goal. Knowing when to stop planning and start doing ensures that you don’t allow your planning to morph into a dreaded time waster.

Forever planning

Possible scenario: you go to a coffee shop to work but end up not doing any work at all. Or perhaps you decide to rent a spot at a coworking space and end up researching nearby co-working spaces for hours.These distractions from work, no matter how seemingly trivial or distantly relevant, are time wasters. And they can negatively impact your focus, productivity, and your career.

Distractions

By definition, procrastinating means that you’re avoiding a difficult task—likely in favor of an activity that provides more instant gratification. But it’s not just the fact that you’re not working that makes procrastination a waste of time. It’s also the fact that often, procrastination is linked to a sense of guilt and poor emotional regulation.

Procrastination

Push notifications are interruptions, and interruptions are time wasters. It takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the original task after an interruption.What’s worse is that push notifications are not just any interruptions; they’re appealing interruptions, and it’s not difficult to imagine why. Research shows that humans are “hard-wired to follow the path of least resistance.”

Constant notifications

Busywork is work that seems productive but only serves to keep you busy. For example, you’re trying to show that you’re a hard worker and end up doing something that is of little value to the company but keeps you occupied. Busywork has many causes, but the result is that time passes and you have not done anything of real value. This is arguably the definition of wasted time.

Busywork

Nobody can truly do two things simultaneously and well. It makes us slower and less efficient. This is because what we think of as multitasking is often just really fast toggling between one task and another. And ultimately, all we end up doing is wasting time.

Multitasking

The worst kind of time waster is the kind that comes disguised as work. This is a guide to some of the most common time wasters and can help you spot and avoid them.

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How to create an effective schedule

Top 9 Time Wasters and How To Avoid Them

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#timewasters

IDEAS ABOUT #timewasters

How to create an effective schedule

Top 9 Time Wasters and How To Avoid Them

It's time to

READ

LIKE

A PRO!

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career