How are you using your time? Are you someone who often says “I don’t have time?” We’ll I like to change my phrasing around this and instead say “I’m not prioritising that right now,” because we all in fact have the same 24 hours in a day. In today’s episode, I’m going to show you that taking time to plan your day is going to help you achieve what you want to get done, and that planning is more important that not having a plan at all, even if you’re going to have interruptions.

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I’m going to take you through a short process that allows you to plan your day, that you can apply to both a work day and a non-work day. Many of you will be working part time, but even if you work full time, it’s likely that most days are a combination of home and life admin responsibilities, and leisure time, and you want to make sure you’re choosing your tasks intentionally instead of just doing what’s habitual. I’ll of course also mention some of the findings in the scientific literature because that will help you understand what works and what doesn’t when it comes to planning.

Daily Audit

Let’s start with a little bit of an audit. I want you to think about a regular day for you – is it really chilled out, no rushing, you procrastinate by scrolling on social media or clean out that little cupboard in the laundry, and then you check your emails for a while, and all of a sudden you look at the time and it’s time to go and pick up the kids and we all know that most of the day is gone after that. Or, maybe your day is much more pressured than that, where you scribble all your ideas on a sticky note, you jam as many things in to the day as possible because goodness knows there’s a lot to do. You split your focus across different parts of life, you race around all day, and then you get to the end of the day and wished you’d had time to exercise and play card games with the kids. Or perhaps you are the third option. You wake up early to have a quiet morning and do a morning routine. You enjoy breakfast with the family and do school drop off, you do focused work all morning and then prioritise a healthy lunch, and exercise afterwards because you know that helps to perk you up for the afternoon. The kids might go to after school care some days because you know you need help and can’t run everything yourself, and then you have a set log off time from work and spend the evening connecting with the kids again, and your partner, and prioritise an activity for the evening that fills your cup more than watching Netflix does. If this last option isn’t you, but sounds like the kind of day you want to have, you are listening to the right episode.

The reason you should plan your days is to achieve exactly this – you want to allocate your time to the things that are most meaningful for you. Your most fulfilling day would probably look completely different to the next person’s, so it’s important to plan this with intention so that you’re not just doing the basics of work and chores. We also want our days to be sustainable, so we’re not actually trying to plan the perfect day, we’re trying to create a reasonable and practical daily plan that you can stick to most of the time.

Short Term Planning

There is scientific literature on time management, and an older study from 1991 by Britton and Tesser looked at different time management strategies and their influence on university performance over a period of four years. They found that short term planning, so things like planning the day, having daily goals, and honouring priorities, were more important than long term planning, like having 90 day goals, and only working on things at the last minute. So we can have these big grand goals, but it’s translating that into daily plans that is the most important factor in having better outcomes.

How to Plan Your Day

So let’s go through my tips for planning the day so that you can do what you want to be doing without the stress.

Choose a Layout

So the first thing to do is really just a once off thing – you want to decide how you’re going to record your plan – the best method is the one that is easy accessible and that you’re actually going to use. Do you have a work diary that you use a lot? Do you do everything on a computer and like a digital option? Do you use your phone a lot and so that’s the most accessible? Pick one method and stick to it. I recently polled my Instagram audience and the most popular form of planning was actually with paper, so if you’re choosing that, then a good option would be to use a notebook so that everything is contained and easy to find – I would discourage you from using something like sticky notes that are too small to fit your daily plan onto, and it can get lost. I have a downloadable daily planner in the online store which you might like to look at, and it explains the science that I’m talking about in this episode so that you know exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing, and it has a one page planner layout that you can print off and use as needed. Now once you’ve decided how you want to plan, make sure you have it there in front of you and keep it visible throughout the day. If you’re someone who regularly plans, then you might already have an option, but just have a think now about whether that option is working really well for you and if it’s in a place that you can look at throughout the day.

Make Time to Plan

Ok, so the next step is actually something you want to do to prepare for planning. It’s funny, we’ve got to “plan to plan” – but this stuff is really quick and easy, it’s literally just a matter of spending 5 minutes doing this next step and DECIDING that YOU and your goals are important enough to actually commit to and prioritise. Even if you believe that you are not a “planner”, you can decide to make changes to how you do things. You can try this on for size, see how you like it, and do the little tasks that make a big difference even if you haven’t been that kind of person before. So this step is about deciding WHEN you want to plan your day. Do you want to take 5 mins at the end of the previous day to make a plan for tomorrow? Or do you want to do it the next morning? My favourite way that I find most effective is to actually plan it the end of the previous day, and I do this for two reasons. One, I’m already kind of “in the zone”, so I have everything in my mind of what I’ve been doing already, and I can really efficiently prioritise for tomorrow based on what I’ve already done. And second, I feel lighter that evening because I know I’ve already written down what needs to be done the next day and I don’t have to think about it again. So I would encourage you to try this, make a habit of doing this right as you finish work before you have dinner, or maybe in the evening before bed. If you can link it with another activity like this, then you will get into the habit of doing it.

How Do You Want to Feel?

So now you have your five minutes of planning time allocated, let’s get started. The first think I actually want you to think about is how you want to feel. Hold this in your mind and body as you think of it. Do you want to keep doing things the same way you’ve always been doing them? Or do you want to feel more relaxed, or maybe more accomplished, or maybe more successful. Write this down at the top of your planning document. You can just leave that as is, or you can tie it in with an intention for the day. Your intention isn’t necessarily your biggest priority task, it might be an intention on how you want to act to embody this feeling, or maybe it’s about thinking a more helpful thought, or maybe it really is an important project that has to be completed today. It can be anything, but you want it to be something that you can build your day around. Another way of thinking about this step is to ask yourself, what would I have to be, do and feel so that I get to the end of the day thinking that “today was a good day.” What does that mean for you. So write this intention down, and notice how the planning feels easier with this in mind.

Contingency Planning

I want to now talk about a really important concept. It’s called contingency planning. I’m going to talk about a study that was done, and then talk about how you might try contingency planning for yourself. There is a really interesting study by Parke and colleagues from 2018 who looked at the way in which a group of workers planned their day. Some people didn’t plan – they just reactively went through their day doing whatever needed doing next, often driven my interruptions or requests from others. Some people had a rigid plan for the day, which was basically a list of tasks and the time it might take to do them. Other people in the group did contingency planning, which is where they anticipated that there would be interruptions in their day, and they planned to adapt to them. Then the researchers measured things like goal progress and also work engagement, how they felt about work, and how well they felt they concentrated. A key point they made in investigating this, was that when we plan rigidly, and we have interruptions (which are INEVITABLE), then it can actually make us feel less engaged and put us off the idea of planning at all, so we want to try and avoid that. The standard way of planning looked like making to-do lists, setting priorities, and allocating a certain amount of time for each task. The contingency planning involved anticipating interruptions, making alternative plans, and making plans flexible. The results of the study showed that both types of planning were better than no planning when looking at performance and work engagement, and they found that both types of planning (so the rigid planning method and the contingency planning) were related to performance and work engagement when the interruptions were low, but that it was contingency planning that was most effective when interruptions were higher. So this means that planning is better than not planning, and we feel a lot better about our activities and we achieve our goals when our planning is flexible.

Contingency Planning in Action

So let me give you a bit of a picture of what contingency planning might look like for you in a day. I would say that on any given day, your biggest interruptions are going to be either your work colleagues (whether you work from home or not), or your kids, if you work from home. There might also be other things like people coming to the front door, noise in the office, and your phone making noise. Think about what is happening today, and what kind of interruptions you’ve had in the past, and try and anticipate them. Of course we won’t get it perfect, but if I know that if the younger kids have homework, I’m going to get lots of questions, and if I know that my partner is taking the kids to the shops after lunch, I know I’ll get some uninterrupted time then. You can mostly guess what’s going to happen. I want you to then think about your priorities for the day – what are the things that are absolutely non-negotiable, and what are some other activities that need to get done.

There is a really well-known matrix of prioritisation from Steven Covey, that gets you to think about tasks on scales of urgent or important – so the urgent things need to be done, but the trickiest situation is trying to find time to do the important work that doesn’t seem immediately urgent. While this is a good formula to follow, I also want you to think about another factor, which will help you structure your day using contingency planning – and that is – which of my priorities need to get done in which section of the day? So when you think about your day, I want you to anticipate when you can get deep work done, and when you can do the shorter tasks or tasks that don’t require as much concentration, and WHEN does it make sense for certain tasks to get done.

Let me give you an example to help you understand what I mean by this. I like to exercise every second day. On the days when I want to exercise, this is one of my top priorities. Yes you can think of it as important but not urgent using Covey’s matrix, and that would probably tell me to do it first in the day, but that’s actually not super helpful. At the moment I work from home, most of my kids are in school, but I have a baby at home who has two naps a day. I use the first nap period to do my biggest projects that require less interruptions. Then when she wakes up (which will happen at an unknown time), I stop work and I feed her morning tea, and then I exercise with her playing on the rug. If I did exercise first just because it was most important, I wouldn’t be matching the task with the most appropriate section of the day. Then during her second nap, I never quite know how long that’s going to go for, so I usually finish up whatever I was doing during the first nap, and also leave the shorter tasks to that section of the day, knowing and anticipating that I can be interrupted with her waking at any time. I also never exactly know what we’re all going to do with our afternoons once I pick up the boys from school. If they want screen time, I can work, if they need to do homework, I usually sit with them or clean the kitchen, if they want to go to the park, I either go with them or one of their older brothers goes with them and I can work at home – so you can see how I’m using flexible planning for the after-school section of the day. I still need to clean the kitchen, but if it doesn’t get done while the boys are doing their homework, then I might leave it until after dinner, thus being flexible with my task list.

Another way to match tasks to the most appropriate section of the day is to think about is how much energy you have – if you know you do your best work in the afternoon, then put the creative or bigger projects there, and use the morning for meetings or admin tasks, even though these are not the most important things. So contingency planning isn’t about having two separate plans (like a Plan A where there are no interruptions and a Plan B with interruptions), it’s more about having options and being flexible with matching your activities to the best section of the day, and knowing that you can flex to another task if and WHEN there are interruptions.

Using Your Planner

So that was contingency planning; the next part is putting the plan into your planner.

Before you write down your flexible plan for the day, do a brain dump of all the things you’ve just been thinking about when considering priorities and contingency planning, and there is a section for this brain dump in my daily planner from the online store that I mentioned.

Now you can take the tasks from the brain dump and plan your day step by step. Write out the times OR the sections of the day, and allocate tasks to each of these. Then when there are interruptions, you know you can just go back to whatever task is next in that section.

Breaks and Rest

Now – a note on breaks and rest. Yes – you need breaks, rest, and pleasurable activities in your plan. Your plan is not a minute-by-minute allocation of time to tasks. It’s a physical roadmap to help you remember what’s important that day. Breaks and rest are not only important but they are necessary, AND gaps in your schedule help you catch up on important tasks that got waylaid for some reason.

Beware the completely full day – no wiggle room makes for a very stressed human. So put in white space, breaks, time to eat lunch, and don’t overschedule yourself. If your tasks don’t fit in your day, then they can’t be on this daily plan. Instead, have a different list or document for things you need to do on other days, or general ideas, so you don’t feel so overwhelmed in a single day.

Realistic Expectations

Seeing your plan laid out on a single document reduces the stress associated with a full plate, and helps to set realistic expectations about what you can actually achieve that day. I think this is where a lot of people have trouble, I know I do, I have operated like this a lot in the past, I want to do all these things but there are only so many hours in the day, so physically seeing what you can do, and what you actually got done once you get to the end of the day and look back, helps you learn to set more realistic expectations for your day. Having said that, your plan also combats the beliefs you might have like “oh I don’t have time for that” when in actual fact if you prioritised it and kept that commitment to yourself, then you’ll find that you do have time for the important things, even if you are working a lot or have a lot of home duties.

Review Your Plan

My final step is actually a bit of a gold nugget, and if you can do this then your planning will get easier over time. Remember how I said to spend 5 mins at the end of the day planning the next day? Well, when you do this, take a look at what actually happened today, and see how well you stuck to your plan. What insights can you take from the day to apply to the next day’s plan? Did you need more white space? Did you wildly underestimate the time it took to write a report? Did you get your daily priorities wrong? Have a think about what’s important and then see what makes sense to put on the list for tomorrow given what sections of the day you will have coming up.

Take the Next Step

So this has been a practical episode on the best way to plan your day in a flexible way, but there are many other aspects to sustainable time management, and so I’m really pleased to tell you that my signature time management course TIMEWISE is reopening on Monday October 7th this year, 2024. If you would like a full course on how to manage your time so that you are doing meaningful work, AND having quality play and restful sleep, using methods that work with your brain and are based in cognitive science, then you need to get on the waitlist for TIMEWISE. Go to liveanintentionallife.com.au/timewise and get on the waitlist now so that you can hear all about the special offers I have for you for launch week. Even if you’re not listening to this at the current time, TIMEWISE will be available to join ongoing, so go to the website to check it out, and I’ll put the link in the shownotes.

That’s what I have for you today, I hope this has been helpful, give these planning steps a go and let me know how you find it, you can send me a message on Instagram. For now I’ll end with my favourite quote, it’s from Mary Oliver, “Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” See you next time.

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References mentioned in the episode:

Britton, B. K., & Tesser, A. (1991). Effects of time-management practices on college grades. Journal of educational psychology, 83(3), 405.

Parke, M. R., Weinhardt, J. M., Brodsky, A., Tangirala, S., & DeVoe, S. E. (2018). When daily planning improves employee performance: The importance of planning type, engagement, and interruptions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 103(3), 300.