How To Plan A Productive And Fulfilling Day (Even If Your Life Feels Chaotic)
“The clock of life is wound but once, and no man has the power to tell just when the hands will stop, at late or early hour. Now is the only time you own. Live, love, toil with a will. Place no faith in time. For the clock may soon be still.”
Is it possible to throw up the white flag before the week even starts? By Sunday, the dreaded overwhelming thought of Not another Monday sinks in. Your mind has done what it does best, slipped into a focus of the mountain of work you need to get done in the upcoming week. You spend the rest of the weekend distracted, irritated and frustrated — you're sick of feeling like you never have enough time to get everything done. You're exhausted and can't help but feel like your home life is suffering. You're struggling to be present. This isn't the life you want.
This is where I struggle the most because you want to be present with your family and friends. You want the ability to end your workday feeling fulfilled as you've really accomplished something worthwhile. You want your time to be your time. You don't want to keep putting off things that are important to you. You want to be healthy, wake up energized, dialed-in and ready to take on the day and live your best life. But where do you begin if you have no idea where to start?
When you lose track of time, you are either living your best life or wasting it on things that don't matter.
This is what author Beverly Adamo is hinting at when she reminds us, "It's not about time, it's about choices. How are you spending your choices?"
Your career, your health, your family, your life... these are all choices you make each and every day.
Your choices either align you with the life you want, or your choices create a bigger gap between where you are and where you want to be. This comes down to what you choose to prioritize in life.
The bigger the gap, the bigger the disconnect in your everyday life.
You can't help but feel hopeless, overwhelmed and stuck when you don't see how things can change. Your dreams, goals and ideas of what you want to bring to life get lost without a feeling of control over how you're going to make them happen.
Routine and structure give you control over your life. And control gives you the confidence to handle whatever crosses your plate. That confidence is what feeds your ability to make choices that align you with your best life. It helps you filter your choices through the trivial many, so you can focus on the vital few. These few are what makes life meaningful and purposeful.
Structure lets you view life from a perspective that is liberating and hopeful. It gives you control over what matters. It's a reminder that there is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important thing.
Ask yourself, is what you're doing today getting you closer to where you want to be tomorrow?
Don't push on because you tell yourself you don't have time to ask such silly questions. This question is an intentional fork in the road. You can choose to continue down the same path of frustration and endless demands on your time, or you can choose to take control of your focus. You living the best damn life you can possibly have is at stake. Answering this question was like an icy cold wake up call for my life. It gave me the power to hit the reset button on my life.
If you can't say with certainty that what you're working on today is moving you closer to where you want to be tomorrow — you're wasting your time living someone else’s life. You don't have a plan, you have a life of someone else’s making.
If you're ambitious and want to make an impact in your career and life, you need a daily plan that aims you in the right direction.
This gives you the freedom to be creative and innovative because you can trust that you've mapped out the steps of how you're going to make it happen. Before I had put these steps into practice, I always felt like I had too many ideas bouncing around. Too much on my plate. And too little time to get anything done. This daily plan changed everything. It’s designed to supercharge your success and slash stress from your life. You start to experience the freedom of a better, more peaceful day when you can wake up knowing exactly what you need to do (and what you need to avoid) for a happier life.
Step 1 - What are your big three for the day? Not all work is created equal. Far from it. Much of what we find on our plate can be chalked up as busywork, responding to other people's demands or tasks that don't have clear objectives. This is a recipe for burnout, feeling overwhelmed and disconnected from our work. Not sure where to start? Ask yourself, if you only had three hours to work today, what would you work on during those hours to be most effective? These three get put on your schedule before anything else.
Step 2 - What four daily habits will give you the energy to breathe life into this day? Here are the four areas you want to cover: Physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. Don't know where to start? The following four bricks give your foundation the strength to weather any storm. Hydrate, Move, Meditate, Contemplate. These habits will only see the time of day if they make it on your schedule. Not putting these on your schedule is like saying you don't have time to fill up when your car is out of gas. You can work on them separately or stack them together as part of a daily ritual like a morning routine.
Step 3 - What else would you like to get done today? Check your email, clean the bathroom, run errands, doctor's appointments, etc. There's never a shortage of things vying for your time. The more we pack into our day, the less effective we become because our focus gets scattered. Those who chase two rabbits catch none. Before a task makes it onto your to-do list ask, Is this truly necessary? If it is, put it on your schedule so it gets done.
Step 4 - How will you celebrate? What makes work meaningful and satisfying is a clear relationship between effort and reward. The brain needs justification for why you're putting in hard work. Without it, you're stuck battling with procrastination and emotions that run wild. This is a costly approach that rarely works. So, why is it important that you accomplish this work today and how will you celebrate?
This framework gives you a powerful playbook to organize your work and life. Say goodbye to confusion. Say hello to peace of mind.
This idea is like taking control of a cluttered dining room table. The mess takes on a life of its own when everyone covers it with stuff they don't want to deal with. The chaos comes from each item not having a home. It's damn near impossible to focus on what's most important if your priorities don't have a home on your schedule. It feels magical when you free up this valuable mental real estate. It gives you a birds-eye view of your day so you have the energy to focus on decisions that matter.
Don't worry about perfection when you have progression on your side. This isn't about creating something of perfection, it's about giving you a plan to roll with the punches. Perfection is a fool's errand because it's based on the assumption that it can't be improved. This plan is based on a 1% improvement over who you were yesterday. Progression is what gives us that deep and satisfying feeling that everything you're working on is worth the effort. And feeds the motivation to do it all again tomorrow because your life is aimed in the direction you want to go. It's a powerful belief that starts to take hold when you remember that the future comes one day at a time.
You might be thinking that this sounds impossible based on your current life. And I'd probably agree with you. If your approach doesn't change, your results stay the same (or continue sliding off course). If you keep doing what you've been doing, you're going to keep getting what you've been getting.
Author Jonathan Safran Foer was talking about reducing meat consumption when he shared this idea, but the principle is universal:
"Instead of imagining all the meals ahead of you, focus on the meal in front of you. Don't give up burgers for the rest of your life. Just order something different one time. It's hard to change lifelong habits, but it's not that hard to change a meal. Over time, those meals become your new habits."
You don't have to plan out your entire life, drop everything that's not working and live as a monk. Focus on the day in front of you. Create a plan for today. Over time, this daily planning will become your new normal.
You might feel that you're far too busy and have way too much going on to make this work. I'd argue that it's worth going back to reflect on what Beverly Adamo said, "It's not about time, it's about choices. How are you spending your choices?"
If you are busy, stressed out and overwhelmed, this is part of the choices you're making. Don't take it the wrong way. The truth is that we bring something to every interaction we experience. So a better question we should be asking ourselves is, how are you contributing to your own struggle?
This is what fueled John Wooden's mission when he chose to do the impossible. He won ten National Collegiate Athletic Association national championships in a 12-year period as head coach for the UCLA Bruins.
His life motto stings with the bite of a reality we face when we don't make the hard choices to change our approach.
If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?
The sobering answer is a painful thought I spent a lot of time thinking about. I don’t want to get to the end of my days and be faced with a life of regrets. Life is short.
Lucky for us, this is an easy obstacle to overcome. Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are in balance with a daily plan like you're about to create.
Are you ready to create a habit that lets you wake up feeling healthy, energized, dialed-in and ready to take on the day and live your best life? Let the words of educator F.M. Alexander point us in a direction for our first steps: "People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures.”
