5 Reasons You Need to Be Planning Your Days

Start the night before by brain dumping any thoughts, ideas or reminders on to paper. Record your top 3 tasks for the next day.

Focus & Clarity

When you’ve planned your main tasks, you know exactly what you need to be working on and therefore, you know when you’re not doing it. You can wait until the end of the day to realise that you got off track and didn’t get much done, or you can consistently remind yourself of your focus throughout the day and get it done.

Priorities

If things come up and you end up getting less done than you’d like (hello, every workday ever...)  by focusing on the most important things first, you can ensure that they get done. If only three things get done all day, make sure they’re the three with the biggest impact.

Optimise Time 

You can use techniques like task batching to group similar tasks together to save time. (See our How-To Task Batching post for further reading). Planning your day out in advance means you can see what needs to be done and arrange your day so that you’re not flicking back and forth between different things.

Accountability

Knowing what you need to work on means that it’s a lot harder to do that thing that is technically work-related but isn’t really what you should be doing and convince yourself that it’s “work” (I’m talking to you, procrastination organising! Let me just tidy up these folders and clear my inbox of spam emails from 2018.)

Peace & Less Stress

When you have so many things to do, it can feel overwhelming. Planning your day helps take a load off by making a clear action plan. There’s a lot to do, yes, but you know what you’re getting done tomorrow and it’s not that much to handle. One day at a time!