19 Apr A quick guide to more efficient days!
Do you ever wonder where the time went — and what you accomplished during the day?
Do you wish to experience calmer and more productive days that brings you closer to your goals?
Starting the day with a clear plan
Even though most of us understand the value of planning we often struggle where it matters most — our daily lives. 🤯
A daily planing ritual is a good way to remedy that feeling of aimless busy work.
Make it a habit – the ritual
Do not wait for motivation or inspiration to strike you — set a schedule for your habits.
Habits are your best friend when it comes to achieving goals!
You will not feel motivated every day, but good habits will continue to work in your advantage when you are feeling tired and disengaged.
Make it short and sweet – your morning planning ritual should take no more than 10 – 15 minutes.
A great way of making your planning session enjoyable is to plan your day whilst drinking your morning coffee.
Use mindburp to remind you to plan your day, or any other method that works for you!
One great way of making sure your habit sticks is to keep planning on the week-ends — add relaxation, a movie, errands, or a home made dinner!
Build lists with your goals in mind
Once you the daily planning habit is in place — ensure that your plan is actually aligned with your bigger goals.
1. Divide and conquer
Add a manageable amount of goals in one day — divide and conquer!
A good rule of thumb is to have no more than 5 big goals at once — add a mix of short-term and long-term goals to your list.
Break down your long-term goals into daily tasks.
For example:
Improve my health –> 1️⃣ Work out in the morning, 2️⃣ take an evening walk, 3️⃣ decide what foods to eat (this will help you avoid certain foods).
2. The bigger picture
It’s easy to get tunnel vision when planning, therefore — start your daily planing by considering your week as a whole.
You likely have several goals, and many tasks to accomplish them — and only so many hours in the day.
That’s okay. 😇
Some goals benefit from daily action while others only needs attention a few times a week (I.e. gym exercise on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays).
Some days, it can be effective to only focus on actions related to one specific goal — you might for example tend to your personal goal tasks on the weekend.
To prepare for the next week – zoom out and lightly sketch your week on Sunday evening so you know which goals to focus on and on which days, but
save the details for your daily planning.
3. Focus on what’s important
In a perfect world, we would only perform tasks that help us achieve our long-term goals.
But we all have commitments and obligations that we have to fulfil that are not aligned with our long-term goals.
Make sure the commitments you cannot avoid aren’t taking over too much of your time and energy — get comfortable with saying “no”.
Most people begin by adding their mandatory meetings, deadlines, etc. and then try to fit goal-oriented tasks around them.
Consider planning your day the other way around.
Begin with what’s most important to you — you will be forced to fit your have-to-do tasks around your goal tasks.
Begin each day by thinking about what you hope will be the bright spot. If, at the end of the day, someone asks you, ‘What was the highlight of your day?’ what do you want your answer to be? When you look back on your day, what activity or accomplishment or moment do you want to savor? That’s your Highlight.
Use mindburp to mark the Highlight for your day with three stars for a great overview.
More reading
There are many ways to get more productive — we have collected some of the most popular techiques below: