Plan Your Day Ahead

by Thibaut - September 3rd, 2008

You may have already heard the maxim fail to plan, plan to fail. I believe this sentence is especially true when applied to our day at work, weither we’re self-employed or work for a company.

Losing control of the day

You’re hard at work, it’s 3pm and suddenly you hear yourself saying:

  • I’ve done nothing worthy today
  • I’ve done plenty of things but these things are not the things I wanted to achieve
  • how did I end up doing this specific thing?

When I’m in that situation, even though I’ve been working all day long, I don’t feel happy. I don’t feel confident.

A tip to get back in control of your tasks

The tip: spend the first 30 minutes of your day writing down the tasks you’d like to achieve and prioritizing them. Be rude: eliminate the extra stuff, things that are “nice to have”. Only keep the 20% that bring 80% of the value.

And when I mean the first 30 minutes, it’s really the first 30 minutes: do that before checking your emails or you’ll most likely get out of control. An even better alternative is to do that at the end of the previous day instead.

My own experience is that Mind-mapping works great to carry out this prioritization of work.

Each and every time I do this (and it’s almost everyday now), the day is a lot more rich in accomplishments.

And it feels a lot better to accomplish things than to “just work”, isn’t it ?


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