5 Keys to Planning and Prioritizing Well.
Planning and prioritizing are essential to effective time management, and in theory, they are relatively simple. However, we all have a little trouble with execution, which is why we rely on tools like a daily planner. How do you improve your planning and prioritization? Try these 5 tips.
- Plan Beforehand
Don’t plan in the car on the way to work. Don’t sit down and plan your day once your get to the office. Plan the day before or even a few days before. You want to go into every day knowing you game plan. This will help you sleep at night and you’ll be ready to dive in as soon as you arrive.
- What’s Urgent?
Urgent simply means that the task absolutely must get done today. The task might not be incredibly difficult and/or important though. For example, paying a bill might only take a few clicks, but if it’s due today then it’s urgent.
- What’s Important?
Important tasks aren’t necessarily urgent and when they are urgent, it’s probably a crisis. An important task might be starting doing a project outline or doing the styling on a website you are building. This type of task is probably more daunting and time consuming.
- Check Marks: Quality Over Quantity
Now a different between important and urgent tasks is established, it’s easy to see how 10 checkmarks out of 12 might not be indicative of progress. If the last two tasks are easily more time consuming and important to finish, you didn’t earn that 30-minute break or sweet snack.
- Just Do It
At some point, you’ll be in that stage when you’re dreading starting a task. The only solution is to just dive into your task and start getting it done. When you check that box in your daily planner, it’ll all be worth it.
Time management can be tough, but with the right daily planner and prioritization system, you’ll get your daily schedule and productivity back on track.
