Learn to plan work: The unscheduled way
Often at work we have situations when we have tons of work to do, have to juggle with the other people’s work too and at the end of the day we actually find ourselves struggling with the never ending meetings or procrastinating the work and realize that the entire time went in managing the work rather than working itself!
These situations are common at work as well as at home where we often struggle to keep the balance between the planned or unplanned events.
In this article I will share with you a technique that helped me get rid of my procrastination and motivated me to be efficient in planning work time and at the same time be more productive.
The technique is simple, just “Unschedule” your work.
Plan for the work that you have to do, to manage time for the work that you want to do
Devised by Neil Fiore and detailed in the book “The Now Habit” is a powerful time management technique.
The basic idea to follow is to
- Get started with a week’s plan, use any calendar that supports week view or create yourself in a spreadsheet or even a paper-based calendar
- Divide each day of the week into 30 minutes slots
- Put all the work that is planned for the week and is certain to happen in appropriate time slots .
Include activities such as lunch break, tea-break, blogging, etc. that you do on a regular basis - Leave everything else blank
This way you know how much “blanks” you have until the next “planned” stuff is scheduled to happen.
Next, is just to get started with the tasks and start filling the blank spaces with the actual work done. Download the template for quick start
Rules of Thumb
- For every task done, if the time spent is half-n-hour or more then, add that task on the calendar in the time slot when you did the task
- Highlight that portion to make it distinct and clear
Do not add any task that hasn’t taken your half-n-hour like a quick walk, a phone call, time in washroom, etc. The reason to not include these is pretty simple , the exercise doesn’t intend to keep a check on everything you do.
A tip
- At the end of every 2 hours of continuous work always give yourself a break of 5 minutes before starting the next task.
The free minutes will refresh you and help you get more focused
Though, this article puts more emphasis on bringing the technique to your work tasks, it can be easily used to manage even personal tasks or both.
What did you learn?
To many of you, it might be an extra work to keep filling the blanks on the top of an already busy schedule, but at the end of the week you will realize it was worth doing it.
A visual where you can actually see the amount of work you did will give you a satisfactory feeling of your accomplishments.
In case if you didn’t do much work, then also you will realize something. See, it’s good anyway round!
On a better note
- Your day becomes more productive
- It brings in a sense of confidence and frees all the guilt of not being able to do things
- It brings the realization of time when you are most productive and least productive in a day. So, from the next week you can always plan better to perform important tasks in your “most” productive time
- You will learn to work and complete the tasks in a time-bound environment
- It is fun doing the stuff and will keep you motivated to strive for more
Planning your day is always better than managing the day
Try “unscheduling” your work. It’s motivating. It’s fun. It’s simple!
