How To Stick To Your Schedule
By: Drew Morrison
Tags: Scheduling, Optimization, Planning

Making a schedule. It sounds tedious and boring. It’s something that no one wants to do. No one wants to have to do it but it is an essential for time management.

Most people say they don’t make a schedule because they don’t want to “have to do” these things. That’s where you go wrong. You don’t have to be a tyrant to yourself. The importance of making a schedule is just to have some kind of foundation to your day. It’s a structure but it’s not building.

Lists Vs Schedule

I’m a big list maker. I just use my Reminders app on my iPhone and put in reminders to they alert me.

I have two lists on my phone. I keep it simplified. I have a “To Do Today” and a “To Do Later.” I purposely do this to keep it simple because if I have found that if you have ten different lists for ten different categories of things, it starts to become overwhelming and you don’t pay attention to it anymore.

However, there are some things during the day I don’t put into my calendar because they’re usually things that take about 2 minutes. If anything is less than a 15 minute task, I don’t put it into my calendar. I just jot it down on my list.

Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash

Determine If You’re A Paper Or Digital Person

I’m a digital person. I’ve tried for years to be a paper person. I’ve tried the bullet journal thing. I’ve wasted entire days before crafting my bullet journal to look like the one in the picture above. I wanted it to look perfect but then I never ended up using it. I hated having to bring a journal with me everywhere. That’s why I also migrated to utilizing a digital journal as well.

I am a heavy digital person. I prefer to have all my books as ebooks. I buy the hard covers if I really enjoy the book though. I like writing on paper for note taking but I quickly scan them and usually end up tossing them out later. The burden of searching through notes is just something that I see as inefficient.

If you are a paper person, I do think the BaronFig planner is a good place to start. It’s minimalistic and has blank dates so you can fill in your planner.

Photo by Ron on Unsplash

Your Schedule Is Just A Structure To Your Day

This is important to note. When it comes to time management, you need to know exactly how long something is going to take and probably over estimate it. If I schedule a workout and I think it’s going to be an hour, I usually schedule an hour and a half.

So many people say that they don’t have time to do things. I work 9am-6:30pm every week day with a 35 minute commute. I manage to find time to workout everyday. Hell, I’ve worked out on my lunch break before just so I didn’t miss it.

Time is a resource that we all have that’s the same. It’s like we all are allowed the same amount of money on a day to day basis but we have to know how to utilize it in the ways that we want. How do you do that?

Find What’s Important To You

If something is truly important to you, you will find some time to do it. It’s usually possible. There are many days that I wished I could write but what I ended up doing something with my girlfriend because my relationship is priority over me writing for two hours. With time, comes sacrifice.

Photo by Phil Desforges on Unsplash

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