How Well Do You Plan Your Day?
Posted On: 2015-12-10
Right now I would give just about anything to be anywhere but where I am right now. It's not that I don't want to be here in the office. I do want to be here and I do have the day mapped out because I want to get a lot of work done.
Unfortunately, downstairs there are some workmen who are applying some form of chemical treatment to the floor. They were supposed to have sealed off the area that they are working on but that seems to have been all too hard for them and now the fumes are everywhere.
I already have a headache and I'm feeling nauseous and it's only 9.30am. Fortunately everyone else in this office is working from other places today but some of the things I need to do can only be done here and someone needs to man the office ... oh well.
Speaking of planning your day, how well do you plan your days? Do you jot down a list of things you want to do before you start work each day or do you have so much to do you just pick something out of the backlog and make a start on that?
Back when the only thing I was doing was selling porn I thought that all of my time every day was taken up with building and submitting. It seemed like a never ending cycle that took up every waking hour of the day and left me with little time to do anything else.
Is that how your days seem to be? Is all your time taken up with building and submitting and you have no time left for any personal development work, family time, or time away from your computer?
That was how it seemed to be for me until I decided that it was time to really look at how I spent my time. Over the course of a couple of days I kept a record of everything I did and how long it took me to do each of those things and I discovered that I had far more spare time than I thought I had.
When I added up the time I spent on all the things that I did through the day I found that I spent at least 20 minutes of every hour doing almost nothing. Instead of working steadily at a task I would take a few moments to hit the message boards, I would spend a few moments reading interesting stuff and chatting with people on ICQ. I would even spend time just looking out the window.
Now I am not suggesting that you should be working every minute of every hour. We all need to get up and walk around to keep our bodies moving and we need to get away from the screen to give our eyes a rest.
Experts suggest that taking a 10 minute break every hour will actually increase our productivity but I wasn't taking 20 minutes breaks. I was still there at my computer and hardly moved from it; I just wasn't doing anything productive or anything that would increase my productivity.
So when you look at the numbers, if I worked for 10 hours and basically did nothing useful for 20 minutes of every one of those hours I was wasting over three hours every day. That is a lot of wasted time every day.
How much time are you wasting every day?
Even if you're not wasting your time, are you using your time wisely? Do you have a plan that you work to or are you more haphazard?
Last week we had to deal with a very difficult client. This person knew that they needed to start getting their message out on social media but they didn't know how to do it and they didn't want to do much for themselves. They had come from a background of telling people what to do rather than having to do anything for themselves.
In an effort to help them make the best use of their time and avoid reinventing the wheel we went looking for a simple social media plan that they could use. We found one and if you do a search for 'daily 18-minute social media plan for small businesses' you should find it too.
I think that executing this plan in just 18 minutes is probably a little optimistic but it's a great plan for anyone who wants to take their business to social media. Even if you don't want to do that it's still useful because it will give you ideas on how to structure all the things that you need to do each day.
If you're not doing social media, you can still think of it as a blueprint that will help you make better use of your time each day and that's something we all need to do.