7-Day Productivity Plan - 4

7-Day Productivity Plan: Day Four

Estimated reading time: 4 mins, 57 secs

QUICK-WIN: Spend 10 minutes at the end of each day planning what you're going to work on tomorrow. Use this time to review your task list and schedule time for the things you want to get done. Be realistic with how much you plan on doing. Similar to before, focus on high-quality work across fewer tasks wherever possible.

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us” – Gandalf, Lord of the Rings


 

Hi [urlparam param=”FirstName” default=”friend”/]!

Good job! You're now over half way through the 7-Day Productivity Plan. Are you enjoying it so far? (leave me a comment and let me know how you're getting on)

Yesterday you dissected your goal into the smaller tasks you need to complete and you organised all of this in your task list. Today you're going to plan out when you're actually going to do all of this work using your calendar.

The importance of scheduling

Your to-do list is the place where you define and organize what you’re going to do. Your calendar is used to identify when you’re going to do those things and how much time is needed to complete them.

When you schedule appointments in your calendar, you’re saying to yourself: “I’m going to do A, B and C by X date and it’s going to take Y hours”. Once you make this promise, it becomes harder to procrastinate. You'll find you become less impulsive as your time is planned out and as a consequence, you get more done.

The other great thing about scheduling your time in advance is that you’re literally making time for the work you want to get done.

So if you have five things you want to achieve today, and you budget 60 minutes for each item, it’s fairly easy to add these appointments to your calendar. Then you can literally see how long each task is going to take and how they fit into your day.

Scheduling your time

Use the following steps to schedule your time:

1) Choose your calendar app

Your first job is to choose which calendar app or tool you're going to use to schedule and manage your time. Now you don't have to use a digital calendar, a diary is fine, however, I highly recommend you give a digital calendar a go as they're far more capable and will save you time later on.

Apps like Google Calendar and Apple Calendar are great options and are the default choices for Android and iOS users. I actually use both – Apple Calendar for my personal appointments and the Google Calendar is where my work-related appointments live.

Of course, it's a real pain to switch between multiple calendars during the day, which is why I sync the Google Calendar appointments to the Apple Calendar.

2) Link your task management app (optional)

A lot of task management services come with the ability to sync your tasks to your calendar. For example, if you manage your tasks in ToDoist, Asana or Trello (among others) you can sync these tasks so they appear on top of your calendar.

Displaying your tasks on top of your calendar appointments is one of the most useful things you can do when planning your time.

Having all of your appointments and tasks in one place like this is incredibly useful. It reduces the number of apps you need to switch between. Instead, you can keep your calendar open during the day and refer to it to see what's coming up next.

3) Create your calendar categories (a.k.a. “calendars”)

Now you can create the “calendars” which you can use to categorise your appointments. The terminology can be confusing (how can you have multiple “calendars” in your calendar?). Just think of them as categories for the events you're going to plan. Appointments (or “events”) are usually shown as different colours on your calendar depending on which calendar they're in.

Set up some basic categories like home, work, social, random and any others depending on how you want to group your appointments. Just don't go overboard with the number of calendars you set up as it can make it harder deciding where an appointment should go if there are too many.

This step is going to save you a tonne of time every week and is one of the major benefits of using a digital calendar. You might want to set up recurring events for things like:

  • Your day job. Block out 8 hours (or so) for this time.
  • Taking breaks or going for a daily walk.
  • Going to the gym and working out (this will help you stay more accountable as well).
  • Weekly meetings.
  • Planning your time. Block out 15 minutes at the end of each day to review tomorrow's tasks.
  • Planning your week. Block out 30 to 60 minutes on a Sundar for conducting a “weekly review” (more on this tomorrow).

5) Plan when you're going to work on your tasks

Now that your calendar is ready to go, refer back to your task list and start blocking out time to show when you're going to work on specific tasks. You can simply name the appointment as the task name.

For example, if you have a task like: “Write blog post” which is due on Friday and you estimate it to take about 4 hours to complete. You may decide schedule 2 hours to work on this on Wednesday, an hour on Thursday and another hour on Friday.

The advantage of going through this process is that it forces you to think about how long tasks will take to complete and then allocate the time you need to do the work. This way you don't over plan or try to do too much each week as you've already allocated all your time. Whereas if you just have a list of 10 things to do, it's easy to over-commit as you haven't thought about the time you actually need to complete the work or planned when you're actually going to do it.

Mistakes to avoid

  1. Be realistic with how much you plan to do on a given day and don't squeeze too much in. One of the benefits of using your calendar like this is that it forces you to allocate an amount of time to a task and you can clearly see how much you can fit into your day.
  2. Don't neglect your calendar. Make sure you keep your calendar open during the day and reorder tasks and appointments as you need to. You'll inevitably have to adjust your plan. Make sure you update your calendar as you go to ensure you're making enough time for other work.
  3. Be realistic with how much time you allocate to a task. Too often people (myself included) think something is going to take 30 minutes when, in fact, it's more likely to take 45 or 60 minutes. If you can get it right first time, it's going to reduce how much you need to adjust appointments throughout the week.

Action step: Set up and share your calendar

Go through the steps above to set up your calendar and schedule time to work on your tasks. Tomorrow we're going to look at one of the most important times of the week for maintaining this system, the “weekly review”.

Take it easy,
Paul

 


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