If you’re like most busy professionals, you often get to the end of the day with more left undone than done on your to do list. Who’s fault is that? Are there really just not enough hours in the day? Did you put too many things on your list? It may be that you did create too long a list, especially if you’re often finding yourself at the end of the day with most of your list undone. But how do you know what to leave off, and what do you do about all the things that don’t get done each day, yet really need to be done?
What follows are simple yet profoundly powerful suggestions for taking control of all there is to do, in a way that allows you to feel productive and satisfied, and creates space for relaxation, knowing that everything that truly needs to be done is done, or will be done.
Clarify Your Top Three Priorities
Your conscious mind can handle only 2 to 5 things at a time. If you try to juggle more than about 3 priorities, you’ll find you’re always dropping something. This feeling of juggling too many things causes stress, and decreases satisfaction. Better to stage your priorities – pick three to focus on now, and have the next ones waiting in the wings for their turn to be the center of attention when these are complete, or require less of your attention.
Create Clear Short Term Goals
Once you’ve got your top priorities identified, write one or two clear, specific and measurable short term goals for each of them. It’s helpful to work with a time horizon of a month to begin with. Where do you want to be in your progress on each priority in a month? Make it quantifiable, something that can be verified by an outside party. This will help your conscious mind focus and plan action steps, and will also help focus your subconscious mind – your intuitive self – to bring forth inspired ideas and fortuitious circumstances to bring about the fulfillment of your goals.
Put Your Plan Into a Calendar
Use a calendar to empower you to maintain your focus. Most busy professionals use a calendar to track appointments made with other people. I recommend you also track appointments with your priorities, and with yourself (for self-care, like eating, exercising and sleeping) and with your family and relationships (for quality time). Estimate the time required for achieving your goals, and add additional time as a buffer. Once everything is in the calendar, you can make clear and conscious choices about the impact of adding something more in, or moving something around, and how that impacts everything else, and especially your ability to fulfill your goals.
Plan Each Day in Advance
Planning your day in advance allows your subconscious to begin to work on the coming day while you sleep. You may find that you wake up in the morning with new insights into how to manage your day, or an idea about how to resolve something you need to do, or a new way of looking at something. Your subconscious is amazingly powerful, and very active while you sleep. When you plan your day the night before, you can tap into that power. In addition, by planning in advance you allow yourself to start the day knowing what you need to do and where to begin, rather than planning the day at some point in the morning, and running the risk of finding yourself already behind when you start.
Eat the Frog First
If you tackle the gnarliest, most unpleasant or foreboding task first, everything after it will be easy by comparison. When you avoid or postpone doing something, it can actually use up even more of your energy in the form of the concern, or dread, than it will take to do it. Or, it may siply be your habit to tackle small, easy tasks first, so as to have more to check off on your list. But in doing this, you may be pushing the tasks that require the most time and energy into the place in your day when you don’t have the time and energy to do them, or to do them well. Put these tasks – the important ones, the bigger ones, the ones that take something more to start into – at the beginning of your day.
Each of these five keys represents a new success habit which, once integrated, will provide a powerful building block for increasing your sense of satisfaction and productivity, and reducing your stress and overwhelm. Practice with these over time – that’s what it takes to integrate a new habit. Once you’ve made these habits your own, you’ll find you have a much greater sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, an understanding of your power to create the results you want, even in the limited time available in each day.
