There’s a simple trick that highly productive people know and use to get the absolute most out of every single minute of every single day.
It doesn’t take any special skill, knowledge, or talent, and can be done in as little as 10 minutes a day.
This simple trick is planning, and it can literally transform your day into a task accomplishing, work crushing, results producing success.
If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. -Benjamin Franklin
Planning can make all the difference between a winning day and a losing day, and if everyday is an efficient winning day, then you’re well on your way to having one of your best years ever.
Life Changing Productivity
I can clearly remember only a few years ago feeling overwhelmed, overworked, and like there simply wasn’t enough time in the day to get everything I needed to do finished.
It didn’t matter if I worked 8 hours a day, 10 hours a day, 12 hours a day, or even the odd 16 or 18 hour day, there was always more to do. It was at this point that I decided to finally take the advice I’d heard and read about for so many years and started to completely plan out my day.
I started with a spreadsheet day planner, but now use and recommend the Action Day Planner, and wrote out my entire day from 5am until 5pm (as I was planning on stopping work each day at 5pm to spend more time with my family)
The results were profound.
By planning my day in advance I found I was able to accomplish far more, in far less time. I also had an exact plan for what needed to be done and when I was going to do it.
Basically, stuff got done!
Parkinson’s Law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. By not having a plan I allowed tasks to creep on and on and take up days, even weeks of time, where if I had simply planned them out and allocated a block of 4 or 5 hours to them, I could have wrapped them up far faster and moved on to bigger and better things.
The other benefit of planning is that it enables you to focus on one task at a time. Constantly switching from project to project, or allowing yourself to become distracted by phone calls, emails, social media, or coworkers can cause a loss in productivity by 40%.
A 40% loss in productivity works out to losing about 3.2 hours each day.
Multi-tasking does not work, and neither does project switching. By planning our day in advance we can take advantage of “Batch Processing” and get more done in less time.
What You Need To Succeed
The beauty of planning is in it’s simplicity.
All you need to do is layout (either on paper or electronically) the tasks you want to accomplish that day and the time you’re going to work on each of them. I like to do this each morning immediately as I step into my office, but it can be done just as easily the night before.
The point is to set aside 10 or 15 minutes to go through your “to-do” list and prioritize your MIT’s (most important tasks). From there, decide how long you’re going to work on each one and at what time you’re going to work on it. I’ve also found it’s best to work on the most difficult task first to get it out of the way.
- If you’re looking for more help on stopping procrastination and getting the important things done first I advise checking out Brian Tracy’s book Eat That Frog!
If you’ve never planned out your day before the simple act of writing down the 3, 4, or 5 most important things you need to accomplish today and the time you’re going to set aside to work on them can have truly amazing effects.
Planning = Success
When the important things get done the results start to stack up quickly.
The opposite is also true, when the unimportant things get done, there are rarely any results.
Sadly, without a plan it’s far too easy to allow the unimportant tasks to use up your valuable time. We’ve all experienced looking back at the end of a day and wondering where the time went, and asking ourselves if we even got anything accomplished?
This is why planning is so important to success.
Time is our most valuable resource for it’s the only thing we can’t get more of, and planning your day in advance allows you to get the maximum return on your investment.
