Plan Routines First to Optimize Time | Best Scheduling Rules Ever

Scheduling your time is important to ensure you achieve your goals and staying productive. Most of us aren’t scheduling the right way. We look at schedules to plan events, but we really need to plan routines first to optimize our time. These are the best scheduling rules ever!

There are some pitfalls that we all tend to fall into when using a schedule:

Let others dictate our schedule,
Rarely plan for contingencies,
Over-commit ourselves leaving very little time to take care of ourselves.

Don’t worry I’m guilty of doing this too, so you aren’t alone.

It isn’t too late to break these bad habits and get the most out of your week. I was tired of looking at the long list of tasks that I didn’t accomplish at the end of the week. Why do I over-commit myself?

In reality, I didn’t over-commit myself. What I didn’t do was schedule my time effectively. I didn’t map out a routine that works for my most productive periods of time.

Why Routines are Important

Routines provide a sense of stability and give the brain a sense of peace knowing that it has a start and finish time. When there isn’t routine, chaos is allowed to come in and mess with stress levels, and productivity drops.

Understanding that routine is important is step one in being effective in scheduling. The best scheduling rules ever include:

Define your work hour day – know when you are most productive in the day
Planning the workday – schedule your routines in blocks of time
Don’t forget the Weekly Power Hour

Change the way you look at your schedule. The schedule is now a set of routines, and we need to start blocking out defined times for work, and personal time.

Define your work hour day

No one can work 24-7. We need to plan for events that are important to us, and our families. To maintain a balance in our life we need to plan for personal downtime, exercise, and family time. We need to give ourselves a chance to rejuvenate so that we are most productive in the time we have given ourselves.

The work hours you have planned should be within the most productive hours of the day. If you are a morning person, then going to the gym in the middle of the morning, may not be your best plan.

Block those personal times in your schedule, and give yourself permission to maintain your balanced life. There now you have a defined workday, but we need to plan that workday.

Planning the workday

When planning for your workday you want to work on tasks from your to-do list during your most productive periods. These tasks are the ones that will move you closer to achieving those goals. They aren’t the tasks that are put there by others, and they certainly aren’t prioritized by those that scream the loudest.

It is important to not over-schedule those tasks as well. Define smaller chunks of time to achieve one task, rather than grouping a large chunk of time for several tasks. If you define a time period per task then you are focused on that one item during that time. If the list is too long and the period is too large then you will lose focus and become unproductive.

Meetings and Appointments

Add a block of time in your weekly schedule where you allow meetings and appointments. Call clients during pre-planned scheduled blocks of time. Set-up meetings during blocks of time that work for your schedule. These will be outside your most productive hours of the day.

If you let others dictate when you are in meetings then you will lose valuable productive time and won’t be able to focus on tasks as efficiently. Tasks take longer to complete if you are working through them when you are drained and distracted.

Emails

Set time in your schedule to attend to email. Emails will control you and is a time waster if you don’t manage it effectively. During your most productive period of the day, avoid looking at your inbox.

Block one or two small email sessions in your day to give yourself time to review and focus on responding as needed.

Group common small tasks

Use your time efficiently, by grouping common tasks. Most mothers do this naturally throughout their day, but it is important to bring to your attention anyway.

Common tasks might be defined as setting time to run errands, around outside meetings that are scheduled. It may include reviewing emails when you are waiting for your daughter at her dance class. How about grouping all of your phone calls into one block of time, so that your phone can be set aside when working on other tasks?

Plan for Murphy’s Law

Let’s face it, schedules don’t always go as planned. Things go wrong and tasks take longer than planned or things out of your control take priority, messing with your schedule.

When this happens and our schedules are booked solid, we will not be able to make up the time to stay on track with our goals. Productivity will suffer and stress will increase.

Plan a block of time each day for contingencies. These are times set aside to work on tasks taking longer to complete, surprise meetings, or for tasks that got delayed due to other emergencies. Things happen, but you can plan for it.

Weekly Power Hour

It is important to set up an hour of your time at the end of the week to review what went well, what didn’t go as planned, and make plans and adjustments for the next week. This weekly power hour will allow you to focus on your goals and determine what works best for you to stay productive.

When I was looking at my schedule I saw it as an event planner. What I didn’t do was block my most productive time of the day and keep that for my personal projects. I let others plan when I would go to meetings, and I filled my day with a long to-do list with no plan of how long each task was going to take. In short, I hoped for the best but didn’t plan for the worst.

When I let others plan meetings during my productive times, that left very little time to work on my tasks. Finally, I didn’t plan my personal time into my schedule, so my brain was going all hours of the day and I wasn’t really “with” my family. This was affecting my balance and my relationships.

Goals weren’t being met as quickly as I had planned and I was working harder than required to get the job done. Changing the way I looked at the schedule and creating a routine that worked for me, helped my productivity and my stress level. These honestly are the best scheduling rules ever. What do you do to manage your schedule?