Planning your day is something that most of us don’t give much thought to. Yes, we have a rough idea about what we want to do during the day, but most of us don’t have anything properly planned on paper, or in an app.
This is a huge weakness on our part because planning your day, ahead of time, is one of the most important things that you should do every day.
When the question is “How to plan your day?”, you really can’t rely on just a single strategy to magically plan every aspect of your time, you need to have multiple strategies.
In this article, we are going to talk about the various strategies that have been tried and tested by various sources from all over the organizational paradigm, and they have benefited from them.
Let’s discuss 6 of them in detail.
5 Useful Tips to Plan Your Day
Here’s the list of tips that we are going to talk about in this article.
- Write down your plan daily
- Keep one specific time to plan your day
- Have one daily priority
- Brainstorm different ideas and make a to-do list
- Divide the tasks that you brainstorm between life and work
1. Write Down Your Plan Daily
Planning your day is not an activity that can be completely figured out in a single day. It needs time and many different iterations before you get it just right.
This is why to keep a record of your thoughts; you need to make a write-up of all of the ideas and make sure that you do this every day.
Writing out your day plans is also an important strategy to improve your time management. How? Well, when you jot down all of your ideas every day, it will free up your mind to think about other important things about your life, and not waste time thinking about these ideas over and over again.
The best way to do this thought storage process is to use a note-taking app or use a planning tool that can help you plan out your thoughts into an actual plan to spend your day.
Here’s a list of different note-taking and planning apps to help you in this process.
- nTask
- Evernote
- Apple Notes
- Notion
- Milanote
- Standard Notes
- Microsoft OneNote
- Google Keep
- Boostnote
- Simplenote
2. Keep one specific time to plan your day
When you do anything at a specific time throughout the week, month, or even a year, you create a habit. When these habits are put to good use, you can create a sort of route for yourself which helps you keep on track whenever you are falling off the rails.
That’s why you need to make this planning process a habit. When you make this a habit, you can plan more efficiently and seamlessly no matter how distracted or tired you are on any specific day.
A good example of a planning habit is to make sure that you plan your next day at night. Why? Because at night you are going to have complete information about all of the possible distractions that can potentially derail you from your course the next day, and you can plan around them.
It’s just an example, not a law to do that at night because not everyone has the same routine. You just need to find the specific time duration in which you are free every day and mark that time down to plan your day.
To make sure that you maintain this process and follow up on your habit every day, you can use different habit tracking apps to keep you on track.
3. Have One Daily Priority
To make your day a little exciting, you always need to have one priority activity that you have to perform before anything else. You need to train your mind in such a way that it will get excited whenever you will think about doing that activity.
According to New York Times-bestselling authors Knapp and Zeratsky,
“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’s going to be your answer to that question? When you look back at your day, what activity, or accomplishment, do you want to savor the most? That’s your Highlight.”
As you can see, this priority task is very important for your whole day’s morale, and it’s up to you if you want to perform this activity at the start of the day to make yourself feel refreshed when you start your work, or you push that activity to the end so that the last activity that you perform that day is going to be the best one.
4. Brainstorm Different Ideas and Make a To-do List
Brainstorming is an amazing strategy for a lot of different things, but when you brainstorm ideas to plan your day, it takes the whole day-planning process to a whole different level.
Just writing down the ideas that are closely related to your overall day is not enough, you also need to think outside the box.
To do that, you need to make a to-do list of all of the random ideas that pop up in your mind regarding your day. When all of the ideas are on paper, you can spend time to shape all of those ideas in a form in which they can be beneficial for you.
Your brainstorming list may include:
- The deadlines that you have to meet regarding your work or personal errands
- The different people that you need to contact via call or email
- All of the errands that you need to run on that particular day
- Different activities that were left incomplete from the previous day
Don’t worry, you are just going to brainstorm every type of idea and write it on your list, but not every entry is going to make it into your plan of the day.
5. Divide the Tasks that You Brainstorm between Life and Work
The next step after brainstorming all of the different ideas is to divide them into your work life and personal life. Not everything has to be about work, you also need to make sure that your personal life is looked after as well.
Summing It Up:
At the end of the day, there’s a lot that goes into planning. Sometimes, there are setbacks and unexpected things that disrupt plans. It’s not easy; we understand that. However, learn to improvise and you will find the aforementioned activities rather rewarding.
Good luck, and don’t forget to get back to us with your thoughts at fwilson@ntaskmanager.com
