Becoming an effective planner is undoubtedly one of the great life skills. However, there are many areas to effective planning, with many of them requiring additional expertise. For example, financial planning is something with which everybody should be become adept – to some extent. Nevertheless, there will probably come a point during that financial planning when the advice of a professional accountant might well be necessary.
There is also long-term planning, which involves not only a series of projections about your progress towards a goal (for example, buying a house) but the incorporation of all that into the daily planning.
This just shows how diverse and complicated planning the many different things in life can actually be, but they are all underpinned by what you do every day. Daily planning, therefore, is arguably the most important.
Next Level Daily, a company creating high performance planners for daily use, say that it also works the other way around. You cannot make an effective daily plan if you cannot see it in terms of your weekly plan. As we widen the timescales out to months and even years, the amount that you will be able to plan will decrease, but you need to see each day as both working through the week and, in some way, working towards your long-term goals.
Structure of a Daily Plan
The structure of your daily plan is not something set in stone. For most people, a daily plan will normally split the day up into time slots – normally hours – with a different task, or no task, assigned to each one. This basic structure holds good even for more complex plans.
Nonetheless, you should not necessarily restructure yourself to only the traditional planning methods. The massive advances made in modern information technology means that there is now a plethora of aps, computer software, and their digital organization technology which can completely digitize how you receive your planning information.
PDF plans that can be viewed across devices are common, and so too are more innovative planning software such as apps which arrange all your daily tasks in their own unique way and offer the ability to enter much more detailed information that can be updated in real time.
However, if you structure your daily plan with this recent technology, try to avoid using an app or software that is ultimately more trouble than its worth. For example, these apps can often become cumbersome, prompting you to input useless data or reminding you about tasks which are no longer as important. A lot of them tend to require constant updating.
Tips for a Daily Plan
Whatever planning tools you ultimately end up using, there are still a range of traditional tips for creating a daily plan. Here follows a few:
Break the Week into Focus Areas
Chances are, some of your tasks will be repeated on a regular basis. These are the ones to arrange intelligently throughout the week, taking into account Monday grogginess and Friday laziness!
Plan Each Day
If you can set aside some time every morning to update your planner and to look over the day’s tasks, planning will much more easily become an integral part of your life.
Make Daily Priorities Achievable
Do not just assume that the reason you are failing to achieve certain tasks is because they are not achievable in a day but do take care not to give yourself too much work. If a task is constantly failing to get done, there’s some clear scheduling changes to be made.
Planning is one of life’s great skills, and it starts with daily planning.