Life can get overwhelming sometimes, and it’s easy to feel you’ve lost control of your time. When you have a lot to do, you can get overwhelmed by the abundance of choices, leaving you frozen and unproductive.
Working with a schedule is a good and consistent way to regain control. However, it isn’t so simple, and there are some facts you need to consider to make the most out of a schedule. Some of these facts will be addressed in the coming sections.
Working With Time
Whether you’re a professional who takes a lot of meetings or a hobbyist trying to make time for the things you love, it can be challenging to get organized. Many people struggle with time management and often look for tools that can help, like this meeting scheduler app.
If you’re trying to regain control of your day, some tips could help you plan more effectively. Keep the points below at the back of your mind when planning.
Work With a Functional List
Visualization is a key aspect of organizing. What you need to do and when it needs to be done will make much more sense when you can see it. For this reason, it helps to list your tasks for a given period. Giving your responsibilities a physical form makes them much more challenging to ignore.
If you’re just trying to plan out your day, then you can go ahead and make this list in the mornings. If you want something that spans a longer duration, create time to go over what needs to be done and organize it to make sense.
Consider How Often It Should Be Done
Some events in your life are one-off or once in a while. They don’t happen very often and can just be accounted for once. Others fall into a daily routine and are repeated almost every day. You need to keep track of these differences when planning. When working with a list, you can add the task frequency beside it to easily fit it into a planner or calendar. It also doesn’t need to happen seven days a week to be accounted for. Just ensure that the number of days is well documented.
Assign Priority to Tasks and Events
No two responsibilities are made equal. However, having a list of tasks alone doesn’t fully communicate how dire some of your coming tasks and events truly are. As such, it’s important to assign priority wherever you can.
You can come up with keywords that communicate when something needs to get done. Something as simple as “urgent” tacked onto a task will help you understand that it should be prioritized. You could also show this with colors if you plan to transfer your list into a planner.
On a planner, you can use the colors green, yellow, and red to communicate urgency effectively. Just be sure to include a key that translates the colors to words for a complete understanding.
Consider Charting Your Schedule
Simply listing the tasks that need to be done might not be the most effective way to get organized. If you want to get technical, it helps to distribute these tasks over the several hours we have in a day. This is where a chart, planner, or timetable comes into play. After listing what needs to get done, you can also take a moment to consider when it needs to get done during your day, week, or month, estimate how long it will take, and factor in the urgency.
Group Similar and Related Tasks
Your responsibilities aren’t always as simple as getting one thing done. Sometimes, tasks come together to form what must be done. In such a case, it helps to group related tasks together and properly outline which feeds into the next.
Modify and Adapt as Needed
You’ll almost never get your schedule perfect on the first try. However, once you’ve experienced it for a while, you should be able to identify what needs to be changed. When tasks are completed, you should be able to easily replace them with what needs to be done next.
Conclusion
Time management can’t be mastered overnight. However, with intentionality and consistency, it shouldn’t be too much of a task to get your schedule under control. Keep at it, and you’ll be amazed by the changes and orderliness in your life.
