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Planning (Don’t leave home without it!)
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Planning goes a long way in helping your productivity. Whether you use a paper planner or a digital one, such as a PDA or a new iPhone is not the issue. You should use what works for you because you like it, not because everyone has one. The real benefit of having a planner of any type is actually using it to plan.
Set aside a time weekly that you can look forward into the next week to 30 days and review your appointments and assign your tasks. Making a giant to-do list, is not planning. After the to-do list is made, you will then need to assign a date or time frame to them. Without a deadline, how can you be accountable to completing a task?
Time blocking is a helpful tool to being more productive. Time blocking involves consistently setting aside a set amount of time for the high priority activities. For example, if you need to make sales calls, you would set aside a block of time each week, where you make those calls. This time should be uninterrupted. Let your emails go unanswered, close your office door and focus on the task at hand. Some may even find it useful to use a timer.

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We use recipes to cook food, GPS tools to map the routes to businesses, yet we don’t have a plan for our week! The most overused excuse is “If I had more time, I would….” I believe that if one wants some control over their 24 hour day, they must plan! Planning does not mean having to take the Franklin Covey course and hefting around a 5 inch binder or becoming tech savvy and purchasing an iPhone.

Planning your week does not need to be complicated. In fact, planning your week can be liberating! I like to call the time I use to plan my week a “Brain Dump”. I sit down on Sunday afternoons and write down every thought, idea, have to, want to, need to item that is flying around in my brain. This is similar to brainstorming. A free flow of information out of my head and onto paper. No time constraints set, no due dates established, just capturing the thoughts and actions first. I like to use categories as I do this exercise as a way of helping me keep my life balance in perspective. You can make up your own categories, I have listed mine just to give you food for thought:

1. Personal
2. Family
3. Friends
4. Speaking
5. Business
6. Marketing
7. Networking
8. Service

Once I have written down everything I can think of for each of these categories, I then take a look at my scheduled appointments and commitments I have already made for the upcoming week. I would then write down any other timed commitments that need to be made as a result of my brain dumping exercise. What’s left? Essentially a task or to-do list.

Again, looking at my calendar, I begin to assign a day to the remaining tasks. The date assignment depends on several things: proximity to a needed location (running an errand for example), availability of non-appointment times (in which to complete the task), and the level of urgency or importance. Taking these factors into consideration I begin to funnel the tasks into each day of the week. One day may be heavy with tasks because I have few scheduled appointments, another day may have less tasks because I am busy with appointments.

In the end, the important things to remember is to plan your week, every week at the same time each week. I plan on Sunday afternoons, but you may want to plan on Friday mornings. This exercise works with a Franklin planner, a Daytimer, Outlook, a PDA or an iPhone. How you choose to capture the data is up to you, the point is to capture it and plan it out weekly!