Are you planning your day?

There is no bravery in working for 12 hours every day and in the process compromising your health and family life.

You should have a clear distinction between your work life, family life, and yes “ME” time.

How to go about it?

First things first: YOU have to take control.

People around you can only give advice but for effective changes to happen, it’s you who will have to DO it.

The human study tells us that your concentration remains at the optimum level for 50 minutes at a stretch. Ideally, it’s best that you work for 50 minutes and then take a 5 minutes break. And let me add you can’t work at a stretch for more than 4-5 hours. This means you need to take a longish break after 4 or 5 hours. Even after following this protocol the best you can give in a day is 10 hours of work including all your breaks. And by best, I mean worthwhile work.

Today most people are working from home. I see many people taking this event too casually because they fail to keep a proper routine when working from home. Just because you are working from home doesn’t mean you should change your work schedule and be too flexible with your timetable.

So how do you plan your day?

This is what I suggest!

1. Create a timetable for work
2. Start on time and end on time
3. Eat together with family
4. Keep half an hour before sleep just for yourself – meditation, reading, listening to music, etc.
5. In the morning, spare at least one hour for exercise and your personal time which can be reading or writing, or meditation!

Creating this plan is good but what will really help you is when you stick to the plan!

I have seen colleagues telling me that it’s not possible to make and stick to such plans because they have a lot of unknown work that keeps popping up. 

I tend to agree with this argument. 

Every day something new or unwanted stuff comes up which is mainly fire fighting, especially for managers. By the time they douse that fire a lot of time gets lost and then they struggle with their time management. This eventually leads to them working long hours! But, the fact is that you will lose steam and stop loving your work if you follow such a rigorous routine.

One hack that I can suggest to you, is to follow the Eisenhower matrix in your work schedule.

As you can see if you can prepare a matrix in this format and keep updating daily you will be able to eliminate a few tasks which don’t need your immediate attention. People fail to plan this and when you fail to plan properly you will end up putting up long hours at work.

Extended hours at work is very bad for your physical and mental health. It also creates havoc in your family life. Did I tell you that your quality of work also reduces when you do too much work in a day?

If some unknown activities come up on a particular day, rework the task priorities using the Eisenhower matrix but ensure that you finish the most important tasks without fail. People fail to prioritise their activities because they do not have a mental model at hand. With the Eisenhower matrix, you can very well schedule your priorities or reschedule them at any point in time.

Remember the golden rule:

1. Work Time
2. Family Time
3. Me Time

And each of the above activities should be part of your routine every weekday.

Do not show your frustration in front of your colleagues that you are working long hours or on weekends because you can control your work hours IF you want to control. What’s needed is a little bit of focus in planning your day and activities better.

How do you plan your day? Are you wasting your time on activities that are of less priority? Have you used the Eisenhower Matrix before? Did it help? Or do you have some other suggestions?

Please do share your views and thoughts – I am all ears!

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