Be inspired to plan your day
Are you celebrating your successes? If you are not then you are probably not setting any goals. Here are my 3 top tips for successfully planning your day and feeling like you have achieved something.
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Plan to do your top 3 tasks
Every morning, make a list of the top 3 things you want to achieve that day. You may have a bigger “to do list” and that’s good but you need to prioritise them. Select 1 big one and 2 small easy ones. Ideally the 2 smaller ones can be knocked off in one day. With the big one you will need to have several sub goal because it is so big. See my blog on Planning a Successful Year to help with this. It is important to set yourself up to have a good day and feel you have achieved something. If you don’t plan to achieve anything you will constantly feel like you never achieve anything. Logical right? So many people just get up and look at all the tasks and try to get as much done as they can. Stop doing this. You need to see progress.
For me the small tasks are things like – get out todays orders or get out 10 orders in 2 hours or spend 2 hours answering emails. If you just sit at your computer an answer all your emails or fill every order you may never get to anything else. You may need to set up an auto email response to say you aim to answer all emails within 2 working days. You may need a similar one for orders that state when an order will be filled. If you can do better than your stated response time you will and this will make the customer happy but they knew not to expect anything else.
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50/10 rule
Work on one important task for 50 minutes and then take a 10 minute break. Refocus, start a fresh and get back to your to-do list (see point 1). During this 10 minute break I recommend:
- you don’t just have coffee during this break. Do something physical like stretching or go for a quick walk around the house or garden.
- you make sure you have plenty of water to sip on during the day and reduce your coffee in take to 2-3 cups a day.
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Use a diary
You might use a paper diary or a digital diary but if you don’t use it well you will not feel you are on top of things. I use google calendar on my phone and this syncs with my online calendar in google. When I first started using my digital diary I also used a paper diary as I like to see things on paper. It might take you a while to let go of your paper diary too. Find something that works for you. The thing I found hardest was talking to clients and booking the appointment at the same time. I eventually found a way to fix that. What I did was to have an online booking system with set times I was available. This sent them a reminder too which helped with no shows. There are lots of online booking systems and the free ones don’t have reminders. I found it was worth paying for it.
You can invite clients to an appointment on google calendar and hope it ends up in their calendar. That’s free. This relies on you to take the booking and set it up. If you pay for a system you put in your time slots and clients choose a time. This saves heaps of time if you are looking for time savings.
Let me know how you are going with these. Give us your feedback on Facebook or here in the comments.
Kerri Bainbridge
