How to make an effective “schedule”
Posted by | Posted in Productivity and Goals | Posted on 05-08-2009
originally published on my previous blog
Remember when you were in elementary school and saw all the grown-ups scribbling away hastily on their black, spiral-bound planners? Remember when your mother had a calendar on the wall and jotted down tidbits like, “Take Suzie to soccer, 3pm”? Remember when your high-school teachers told you to “not forget” an important due date?
For a student like me, this doesn’t even require rapid recall to understand the prevalence of a list of tasks in our lives. We live as if dictated by the clock, and in a very literal sense this is true. Thankfully, this doesn’t mean you have to panic right at 10pm every night due to “being unproductive” during the day, because you have an amazing tool called “the schedule” that you can employ to get your to-do lists down on paper (or pixels) in a form that prompts an eagerness to accomplish it.
The importance of a schedule is threefold:
- to view at a glance the items that need to be completed on a day-to-day basis
- to offer a means of “instant gratification” upon competing an item
- to map out goals and plan long-term projects in small, manageable chunks
For many people, the preference is to utilize a software program such as a mail client (Evolution, Thunderbird, Outlook, etc.), Google Calendar, or Rainlendar to create “to-do lists” and schedule appointments. This works nicely for major events like networking seminars, performances, or lunch dates. However, when we start delving into micro-scheduling (such as planning study schedules), this common “calendar view” turns out to be very overwhelming – most of the time, trying to micro-schedule in a software program ends up taking longer than simply writing it down.
And there’s the solution: write down (or type) your schedule using the micro-scheduling technique
Below the “read more” link, I’ll share with you the extremely effective setup that I use to assure I get things done in a timely manner, along with incentives and easy integration of to-do lists and nutrition logs.