15 Minutes Of Daily Planning Can Make Significant Productivity Gains.

Start Planning Your Day

Virtually everyone knows the importance of eating a healthy breakfast, setting the tone of the day. However, many people are not aware that planning the day properly can lead to huge rewards long term. Getting into the day planning habit will make you effective, punctual and therefore more employable! This is just as important as eating a decent breakfast.

Spend a few minutes to plan your day to give yourself set daily targets. It motivates you to accomplish what you have set out in the morning and consequently increases your productivity.

Guard against hectic and unproductive days, by making planning your early morning priority. When you get into the swing of it, you are automatically moving closer to your goals, both short and long term goals. The great thing is, it doesn’t take a significant chunk of your time and eventually becomes a habit. About 10 – 15 minutes of planning is what you need to set the day up and running.

Daily Planning Tips

Here are some helpful tips when planning your daily activities:

Avoid distractions

You don’t want to plan your day in a noisy environment or in a place where there are a lot of people about. This will disrupt your thought process needed. Also, you don’t want calls from people to distract your attention, keep your phone on silent or on flight mode when you plan for the day. This way, you will mostly remember everything you need to put on your To-do list for the day.

Strategic Scheduling of Tasks

Another crucial thing to pay attention to is the proper scheduling of tasks for the day. You should ensure the most difficult tasks for the day are allotted to when you’re most active and vice-versa. This strategy will optimize your productivity for the day as you focus on tackling the more complex tasks when you’re most mentally agile. People are generally more active in the morning, therefore planning for the challenging tasks in the morning could improve general productivity.

Batch up tasks 

You should also consider bringing together similar tasks for the day and handle them all together. For instance, if you’ve got some emails to reply to and some updates to send out to prospects or existing clients – do these within the same task – maybe as “Email Tasks”.

Plan buffer times

When you plan tasks together in sequence, there may be some unexpected events risking lateness. So it’s preferable to add buffer times to your daily plan because sometimes tasks take a bit longer to complete for whatever reason. If you end up planning too much buffer time – fill that time with activities you enjoy doing or need catching up on – even a short nap can work wonders!.

Recap: Spending around 15 minutes to plan your day effectively is one of the surefire ways of increasing your productivity and helps you get more done, feel accomplished and ultimately gives you more free time to do things you really want to do. Ensure you avoid distractions during the planning and make sure you’re strategic in arranging the daily tasks and tackle difficult tasks at the times you feel more alert.