Effective scheduling is one of the key differences between living an effective, productive life and living a stress filled life where you struggle to cope with the demands placed upon you. There is a lot of noise in modern life and many things scream for your attention. If you want to excel, you need to consistently focus on what is most important and get that done. Importance must always be the focus but when you are faced with pressure, it is easy to get caught up in the trap of trying to get more done. To do this requires organisation and preparation. Effective scheduling is just one part of this but if applied, it can make a massive difference to your results and quality of life.
8 Tips for effective scheduling
The following eight tips will help you to make effective scheduling a key part of your life. By taking a few minutes out of each day to implement these tips, you will recover even more time.
1. Plan the night before
Rather than waking up in the morning totally unprepared, you can guarantee effective scheduling and a strong start to the day by making your plans the night before. When you make your plan the night before, you suffer less worry and anxiety and you get a better night’s sleep. Your subconscious mind can work on the plan while you sleep. You then wake up the next morning, with greater energy and ready to take on the challenges of the day.
2. Select 1 key task
Effective scheduling is not about getting a large quantity of work completed. You can get a lot of work done and still have an ineffective day; if that work is not important to your objectives. Effective scheduling is about making sure that you identify your most important task for each day and that you get that task completed.
You should also identify the next couple of tasks in order of importance. Once you have completed the most important task, try to get these tasks done.
3. Key task first
There is an old school of thinking that you should start the day with an easy task and ease yourself into the day. I do not agree with this approach. The start of the day is usually when you have the greatest energy, this energy needs to be focused on your most important task, not some unimportant task which fails to make a significant impact on achieving your objectives.
Life is unpredictable and you can easily get thrown off course. Therefore, it is best to get the most important task done first. That way, even if some emergency arises to throw your day into disarray, you will still have had an effective day by completing your most important task.
4. Context based lists
If you have less than 20 tasks on your list, effective scheduling can work off of just one list. However, if you have a greater number of tasks, you need to consider context based lists. A context based list, divides the tasks under headings based on the situation you find yourself in, or the resources (and people are also resources) available to you at the time. It means that no matter what situation you find yourself in, you can ask yourself ‘What is the most important task I can get done with the time and resources available?’ This allows you to keep moving rapidly through your list while focusing on importance. As an example, the following are some of the lists that I have:
- @desk – I have to be at my desk for these tasks
- @phone – I only need access to my phone for these tasks
- @Jamie – all of the tasks/issues/ideas I need to raise when I am talking to my friend Jamie
- @town – the tasks I need to complete when I am in town
These are just a few of the lists that I maintain. Hopefully, you can see how this is a more effective approach e.g. when I am in town, I can complete every task that I need to get done in town, saving me numerous repeat visits, or if I am away from my office with only access to my phone, I can make 5 phone calls in a short space of time.
5. No agenda, no meeting
Effective meetings are one of the greatest tools available to any business but ineffective meetings are one of biggest time wasters . Effective scheduling requires that you treat your time as a precious resource. As a minimum, refuse to go to meetings which do not have a clear agenda. A clear agenda should outline the topics to be discussed with time limits for each item. This guarantees that people come prepared and ready to get some important work done.
Meetings without a clear agenda are just talking shops. Avoid them like the plague. Make some excuse and ask for a copy of the minutes to be sent your way.
6. Establish rituals
Routines allow you to get important, repeated tasks completed with maximum efficiency and minimum thought. They make effective scheduling easier as you can block that time out on your calendar and there is little or no planning involved. Examples of routines include:
- Going to the gym at specific times on specific days
- Taking your wife/partner on a date on specific nights
- Meditating at a specific time each day
Remember that rituals must be important to you, so there should not be too many of them. You do not want to fill your schedule with nonsense.
7. Only time specific tasks go in your calendar
You should only put time specific tasks in your calendar i.e. a task which has to be done at a specific time e.g. a 3pm meeting. As I repeatedly emphasise, effective scheduling is about getting your most important tasks completed. To do this, you need flexibility in your schedule to allow for the fact that the priority of tasks consistently changes. You might have a clear priority list at 8am but by midday you could have a number of new tasks which changes that priority list. If your calendar is stuffed full of unimportant tasks, it becomes a nightmare to adapt to your new circumstances.
8. Projects vs. tasks
You may know from reading the blog that I am a big David Allen fan. One of the most important ideas that I have taken from David’s work is to distinguish between projects and tasks. Using David’s teaching:
- A task is something which needs to get done but has not been done yet.
- A project is something which needs to be done, but has not been done yet and will take more one task to get done.
This may seem trivial but using this thinking, you will realise that you have many more projects than you had thought. There is real benefit in thinking this way and breaking each project down into tasks. I will demonstrate using the example of writing a blog post. That may sound like one task and for a long time I viewed it that way but the following list highlights the number of tasks that I now break it down into:
- Choosing a topic
- Listing the key points that I will address
- Writing a draft in Microsoft Word
- Copying that draft into my website as a draft
- Finding a suitable picture
- Inserting that picture in the post
- Adding relevant links
- Optimising for SEO
- Proofreading (I do try)
- Publishing the post
- Sharing to social media
There are many benefits to this approach including that I feel less resistance towards one of these small tasks than I would feel towards the whole project; I can divide the entire project over a number of days rather than trying to get it all done in one go.
For more great productivity strategies, check out The Organised Mind.
Effective scheduling is something which requires a small amount of time and effort on a daily basis but reaps large rewards. Effective scheduling allows you to adapt to the ever changing demands of life. You start the day with a plan in mind and in many cases you will be able to see that plan through. However, because your schedule is designed to be dynamic, it takes minimal effort to adapt to any unexpected events. In a fast paced life, you need to be able to adapt quickly and repeatedly while maintaining your focus on importance. Effective scheduling enables you to do so.
Image credit: Geoffrey Whiteway