A daily schedule is an easy and effective way to manage your time. It can give you a sense of structure, improves focus, and increase your productivity. You can make a simple schedule on paper but it’s always better to have a mobile app or any other software tool. That way you’ll have an option to frequently make changes, track your progress, and collaborate with others. Also, it’s easier to visualize, share and plan your tasks this way.
Having an endless list of many tasks can be overwhelming, especially if you don’t know where to begin or are prone to procrastination. Use the tips below to help you improve your time management skills, increase productivity and protect you from burnout.
Make a to-do list
Have a list of what you want to achieve as a goal, so you’ll know what should be included in your schedule. Learning to make a daily schedule for yourself to achieve your goals can be challenging. Before organizing your list, you should make a checklist of the items needed for the week. It’s ok if you don’t remember everything the week ahead. You can always add more to-do items to your list as you go. Decide for yourself how specific to get with your task list.
Prioritize all tasks
Feeling overwhelmed after creating your whole to-do list is expected. Your list will feel more organized once you prioritize and sort it. When you prioritize tasks, you get a clearer overview of what you should do next and when. That way you can focus on the ones that are the highest priority and the ones that will do the most impact. To prioritize your tasks, begin by marking each task as critical, high, medium, or low priority. Here are some questions you can ask yourself that will help you decide which of your tasks to include:
Set approximate deadlines
Similarly to priority, deadlines can show clearly which tasks are the most important and what is the capacity of the work. Without a clear deadline even if not accurate, you might find it difficult to finish tasks on time.
It’s better to select a random deadline for now and come back to it later. Go through your to-do list and make sure everything has a deadline. By creating these deadlines, you can ensure that you’ll be more organized and have a better sense of what you should be doing every day.
Set recurring reminders
Once you’ve set the deadlines on your to-do list, schedule any tasks that happen repeatedly in your daily life. Tracking your time every day allows you accurately block hours and finish tasks on time.
We can easily forget about our tasks and responsibilities, especially if we are feeling overwhelmed. We could all use a little help managing time. Creating reminders ensures you remember all your appointments, deadlines, and duties. By setting up reminders you also build long lasting habits that will make your next task easier to deal with mentally.
Sort items by dates, priorities, or statuses
Take the items from your to-do list and sort them by day. You can also order your items by priority or status. Your high-priority tasks should occur first, while low-priority can be last. You can switch your to-do list to a calendar view to see how full your calendar is. If your schedule seems too full, you can postpone some of the tasks so you’ll have an achievable day.
Make course changes frequently
Now that you have a clear vision of what your schedule looks like, you can get to work. It’s vastly important to stay flexible throughout the day because the schedule you start with likely won’t be the exact schedule you end up with. Deadlines are not constant, and sometimes your weekly appointment or a meeting may change to a different day. Remove any tasks that don’t feel necessary so you have space for any task that might be longer than expected. These changes will be less stressful when you use an app. That way you can adjust your schedule with the click of a button.
Here are some bonus tips to help you stay on track:
