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Daily Planning - Before the end of the workday – or at least before you go to bed in the evening – you should spend 15 minutes planning the next day. Ask yourself what you need to achieve during the next day, block of set times to look at email and deal with phone calls, get an overview of what meetings or other scheduled activities are already planned to try and imagine the flow of the day in advance. If there is available time on your schedule then set this time aside to work on your most important tasks. By doing all of these things it’s likely to mean that you will get a better night’s sleep and feel more rested and ready to take on the world. This is because uncertainty (which comes from a lack of planning) is one of the primary causes for bad sleep. Before we fall asleep, we’re lying awake and worrying about all of the things we haven’t gotten done yet and all of the new challenges the next day will bring – and our worries increase if we cannot see how we are going to get everything done. Then when we fall asleep, this uncertainty means that we’re unlikely to reach a stage of deep sleep and we are likely to be haunted by the outstanding and coming tasks, either directly or indirectly, in our dreams. By the time we then wake up, we’re completely drained and then the day becomes one long game of “survival” rather than one where we can spend our time effectively reaching our goals and being productive.
Weekly Planning - We all know the feeling… It was a great weekend with friends or family and it’s all winding down. All you feel like on Sunday night is a good meal and a movie (or a good book), but your already dreading going to work on Monday morning because of all of the issues you know the week will bring (and particularly the multitude of ones you don’t even know about yet!) So what can be done about this? Yet another thing to schedule for. Put aside 45 – 60 minutes on Sunday to plan your week ahead. Use the same techniques as above and look at what you can start scheduling for every single day. Use your time to also talk with your partner and children to align schedules (you really don’t want to miss little Timmy’s school play on Wednesday afternoon) and find out if there are other demands on your time you hadn’t thought about yet. A little planning can go a long way to alleviating that stress of the dreaded and forgotten deal (“so you’re picking up the kids from school today…”). I don’t think you even need to have kids to understand the nuclear bomb this can cause in an argument because the party who had agreed to pick up the little ones is also the one who has scheduled a work meeting/drinks with a mate/a gym session at the same time as well. All of this happens because of bad planning (or because we only plan one side of our lives), but it all comes down to one simple thing. It is unhealthy! It has a detrimental effect on our physical and emotional well-being – and it can lob a hand grenade into a relationship with your partner and/or kids.
Monthly Planning - This is for some of the bigger stuff. Big projects at work, holidays or other big and time consuming aspects of what’s happening at home. And, as always, planning is key. Before the start of each month, I recommend that you set aside two to three hours (maybe even across a couple of sessions) to plan for the month ahead. At work you might want to ensure that you start blocking off the time you need to finish that big project looming ahead. At home it might be a question of how to deal with the kids being off school and any outstanding planning that needs to be done. This would also be the time when you start planning for a new project (whether it’s learning Spanish or getting fit). As I wrote in my article about the Elephant Technique, it’s all about taking small bites. This means that you could book in that free introductory training session at the gym and tentatively book in visits on the following Mondays and Thursdays.
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