A Simple Guide to Planning Your Day

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It’s no secret that planning your day is crucial if you hope to be productive and successful. Therefore, planning your day and week is worth taking some time over. To give yourself the best chance of achieving what you want, you must give the planning process due care and attention.

In the rest of this post, we’ll discuss when you should plan your day, share some tips and how to go about doing so, and talk about what you can do to build a fantastic morning routine to start your day off right.

First, let’s discover why planning your day is important.

Why Is Planning Your Day Important?

You may wonder why it is so vital to organise and plan your day if you aim to be productive.

Here are just some of the reasons.

• Planning can reduce stress and give you peace of mind because you know you have a viable plan of action detailing how you will go about achieving your goals.
• By planning, you are more prepared to tackle and overcome obstacles and you’ll have a backup plan in place if things go slightly awry.
• If you have a plan, it will be easier to evaluate your progress and make sure that you stay on schedule.

When Should You Plan your Day?

There are two options for you to consider if you want to pinpoint the best time at which to plan your day.

Plan in the morning

To get yourself on the road to a productive day, you can make writing out your daily plan part of your morning routine. Taking a few minutes to plan your day will help you stay focused.

Identify the priorities for the day so you can face them head-on when you begin work. You will spend less time procrastinating if you work out which of your tasks is the most crucial and will be less likely to be distracted by trivial things. Detecting your three main priorities is a good place to start.

To make a habit, write your plan out each day. You need to have a clear plan of what you want to accomplish on any given day if you wish to be productive.

By dedicating the same part of the day to planning, you will increase your capacity to focus over time. Check out our post on the best productive morning routine for tips on how to get your day off to a running start.

The night before

The other option is to plan for the following day the evening before. Mapping out your day the night before makes it more likely that you will achieve what you want to on a given day.

How you use this planning time doesn’t matter. If you vibe more with calendars use them to plan, or if you like using to-do lists, try out the Ivy Lee method to see if it works for you.

At the end of the day, make a note of the five or six most important things you want to do the next day. If you use calendars, you can schedule each of those tasks, to ensure you complete them before the close of the following day.

Planning the night before means you know where you will expend most of your willpower and won’t waste any of your limited energy deciding what to work on in the morning. You will be engaged in meaningful work all the sooner and will find it easier to enter a state of flow.

You will be able to pack your days with work that adds value to your life and affords a sense of satisfaction. The best thing is, the framework you create for your days is not rigid. Not every day need be the same, you can adjust it to suit you and the various tasks you must undertake. In this way, you can account for changes in your schedule, or unforeseen changes to your day.

The first hour of the day is critical, if you spend it getting distracted by notifications and pings, it will set the pattern for the rest of the day. By that same token, if you spend the first hour concentrating on working towards your goals, the rest of your day is likely to prove productive.

Now we’ll share some tips on how to go about planning your day.

Tips for Planning Your Day

What is the best way to plan your day? Here are some helpful tips and stages to planning for the day and week ahead.

• You must clearly define your goals. Putting them down in writing will help you plan for success.
• Create a mind map and come up with ideas about what sort of tasks would need to be completed to realise them and finish your project. Putting all those goals in a logical order and assigning an approximate time estimate to each will be helpful when you come to add them to your schedule.
•  Ask yourself what role you will take in reaching your goals and determine what role others will have in helping you do so. Assigning tasks will help build team cohesion and will boost team productivity as you work towards a shared goal.
• Next comes scheduling. It is wise to devise a weekly schedule alongside a daily one. Weekly planning is essential for eventual success, but it is your daily schedule that you will use to track your progress and figure out any necessary adjustments you need to make. Use significant project milestones to work out your weekly schedule. Then, break down each milestone into more manageable tasks and make completing those tasks part of your daily schedule. Strive to make your goals manageable and achievable so that you will be able to stay motivated.
• When you’ve finished scheduling, evaluate your work at regular intervals to see if you’re on track. When you finish a project, go over the planning process and ask yourself how successful it was. This will allow you to work out if there are any refinements you might make to improve it, or if you have managed to optimise your planning process.

How Do I Plan a Morning Routine?

There is much advice out there pertaining to morning routines. Below are some of our best tips.

Wake up an hour early

Waking up just an hour earlier than usual can reduce the chances of suffering from depression by as much as 23%. This means that it doesn’t matter whether you are a morning person or a night owl, starting your day an hour earlier than is your want can set you up for greater productivity.

Not sure what time of the day is your most productive? Take this quick quiz to find out your chronotype.

Plan the evening before to deal with decision fatigue

Using the evening before to plan frees up time in the morning so you can jump into important work without delay and without having to make any decisions.

Making too many decisions in the morning slows us down and drains our energy which will affect how we perform for the rest of the day. Make decisions in the evening to devote more energy to difficult tasks the following day and increase the chances that you’ll be productive.

Create time for exercise

If you get moving it will get the blood flowing, boost your energy, and get you off to a jump start. Doing as little as 10 minutes of exercise when you wake can set you up for a more productive day.

Do the most important task first

If you focus on the most important task first and concentrate on it until it’s complete. This will give you a sense of accomplishment and the momentum will carry you through the remainder of the day. It will also reduce the likelihood that procrastination will disturb your routine.

Wrapping Up

We hope that you now have a better idea of how planning your day can boost productivity, improve motivation, and help you accomplish all you set out to. Don’t be afraid to try out different things until you find the right planning process and routine for you.

Already have your planning process down to a fine art? Let us know about it in the comments.