Plan Your Day (For A Happier Life).
What do you get out of it?
How you prioritize and sort your activities
How you plan your day
How you achieve long term success
It is great to look back at your day and see all the accomplishments. Our Self Coaching Tool No 4. will show you how a little coordination and organisation will boost your effectiveness in your daily life, eventually leading to more purpose and a happier life.
Have a look at our other Self Coaching Tools:
How does it work?
1. Divide the important from the urgent
Not everything that looks urgent is important and not everything that’s important is urgent.
Urgent = Activities that demand your immediate attention.
Important = Activities that help you achieve your goals.
The key to happiness for you is to find ways to eliminate or at least minimize your urgent activities and focus on your important activities.
We will explain the tool in a daily view, but we highly recommend you do a weekly, monthly, yearly version too, to increase your happiness on a larger scale.
Take a sheet of paper, take it in landscape, fold it in half and draw a large circle on the left side. Write important into the middle and urgent outside of the circle.
Now use the right side of the paper first and write a list of all activities that should be done tomorrow. Don't worry about the order right now, this will come later just write down all of the activities that come to your mind.
Questions that might help you with your list:
What do I need to get done tomorrow?
What are the things I should have done today, yesterday, last week but didn’t?
What is the reason I didn’t do them today, yesterday, last week?
What do I need, to get them done?
What do others expect from me tomorrow?
What would I like to do tomorrow?
Now take each activity from the right side of the list and write it on the left side. Activities that are important and help you achieve your goals into the circle. Activities that are urgent and require your immediate attention outside the circle.
2. Delegate and Eliminate
There is no better way of increasing efficiency than not doing any activity at all. Or at least not doing it yourself. That is why this section is about delegating and eliminating the tasks as much as you can.
Take the paper and a colored pen. Have a critical look at all the tasks. Mark the ones you believe you can delegate to someone else with the colored pen and strike through the tasks you can eliminate completely.
Ask this questions to yourself while looking at the activities:
Whom do I need to support me on this activity?
Who could do that activity way better or faster than me?
If I don’t do this activity at all what would happen?
Who would care if I don’t do the activity at all?
Is there a way that I can limit the damage if I don’t do the activity?
What would it take to delegate this activity to xyz?
Take a separate paper and write down all activities that can be delegated and plan their delegation.
When will you delegate which activity to whom?
Get the delegation done as soon as possible. Maybe even right now before you go ahead, because when the activity is delegated you don’t need to worry about it yourself anymore.
It might need some adjustments on the way and it will not be perfect without you doing anything from day one, but it will get better. You will learn how to delegate more effectively and therefore you will have less to do yourself.
3. Sort the Clutter
Now that you have eliminated some activities and delegated the others we get back to your paper.
The 80/20 principle is a famous way to create the greatest impact with the least possible effort. That is why we use it to dive deeper and select the 20% of the activities that create the biggest impact to boost your effectiveness.
Turn your paper around, draw again a circle on the left side and draw a line on the upper quarter throughout the left side of the page. Write 20% on the upper part ant 80% on the lower part
Write the important activities that might create the biggest impact with just 20% of your effort into the upper part of the circle and the important activities that create less impact into the 80% part of the circle. Do the same with the urgent activities but write them outside the circle.
Questions you can ask yourself while doing that.
How much effort (time, money etc.) do I have, to get this activity done?
How much impact will this activity create?
What will be obsolete if I finish this activity first?
Who might be able to create impact after I finished this activity?
Is there any activity that I can delegate or eliminate?
4. Plan Your Day
Take the right side of your paper and build a schedule of your day. It is easier to select time frames like 6-8, 8-10 etc., then specific timing.
If you haven’t delegated the activities, this is the time you should either do it directly or write them into the first time slot available.
Put the urgent 20% activities into the next free time of your day. These are planned as soon as possible into your day to create the impact straight away and free up your mind for the important activities.
Now take all the important 20% activities and plan them into the free time slots.
Finishing the 20% urgent and important activities first in the day will boost your effectiveness and the outcome of your day dramatically. Some people are even eliminating all 80% activities and are fine to spend some free time rather than chasing other activities to get done during their day. But this is up to you and how comfortable you are with delegation and elimination of activities.
Next you take the important 80% and plan them following the important 20% in your day and the same with the urgent 80%
This way of planning will help you to always have a good mix of urgent and important on a daily basis, you will achieve your goals with the least effort plus creates a boost of purpose, happiness and accomplishment.
Why do we recommend it?
Planning your day ahead will make you more effective and efficient. It will help you to sort out what really needs to be done by yourself and what you might be able to delegate to others.
Leaders are people who engage with other people all day long, being effective in what they do and efficient in what they delegate is important. People who get led by effective leaders will get effective and efficient on their own due to the good example they experience.
Any thoughts or experiences on your side? Let us know in the comments at the end of the page.
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