Keeping ourselves organized and productive is hard. What’s worse is, the more grand our ideas, the harder they can be to work on. We often have a clear picture of what we’d like our project (or life) to look like, but feel so far away from our goal that we don’t even know where to begin!
One of the first recommendations I give clients is to use a calendar. By blocking off times each day, you can break up big jobs into smaller, more manageable tasks.
Unfortunately, clients often come back reporting difficulties following through. Here are five easily avoidable mistakes people often make when trying to plan out their lives:
1. The Overbooked Schedule
So you’ve decided to change your life and start being productive. Excited, you sit down and open up your fresh new day planner iCal and begin scribbling out the next month in exhaustive detail. After spending the next hour planning out your week, you proudly examine your calendar, which has items listed for every waking hour (and some sleep hours too!) in all its multi-color glory. A week later you notice the calendar collecting dust on your desktop, and can’t quite remember when you last consulted it.
Problem:
When you created your calendar, you really created a graphic to represent everything you thought was missing from your life — a picture of your desires and frustration with today. It’s less a realistic plan and more a diary entry, leaving you with expectations you couldn’t possibly meet! After missing an appointment or two, you become disheartened at your “laziness” and eventually stop looking at the calendar, which has become a reminder of your failures rather than a motivator for success.
Solution:
Keep your expectations more in line with where you’re at right now. Much like lifting weights at the gym, we can’t lift 500 lbs over our heads on our first day back. We want to ease ourselves into our new lifestyle, setting smaller goals and working up. If you’ve been spending most of your days at home over the past few months unable to work, you can’t expect yourself to suddenly leave the house and take care of 30 different tasks the very next day!
Be kind to yourself, adding only one or two tasks to your current routine. Once you get used to accomplishing those goals regularly, you’ll start noticing times where you can add new items to. Remember: The addition of one or two additional tasks into a routine is considered a great success!
2. The Superman Schedule
It’s Day 1 of your new life, and you’ve arrived at the local gym for your 9am workout. You wrap it up after an hour and start heading home for your 10am study session. Traffic was heavy, so you don’t start studying until 10:15, but that’s okay (we’ll make it up during lunch break). By 2:00pm you’re now three tasks behind, and by Day 3 you’re simply angry at how much you suck at accomplishing things. You’re angry at how slow you are as a human being compared to the rest of the world.
Problem:
When you planned out your new tasks, you didn’t give yourself enough time to actually do them. We are terrible at estimating how much time is needed for a task, and our natural inclination is to only put down the time needed for the task itself, not all of the “auxiliary” time that goes with it.
Solution:
When adding a new activity to your schedule, consider all of the additional time needed to get it done. Look at any detailed cooking recipe and you’ll always find both cooking time and prep time (which is often longer than the actual cooking time!). If your new activity requires a drive, consider commute time, traffic, and even the extra time it takes to get your keys/wallet/purse. If it’s a new activity for you, add even more buffer until you really know how long you need. Be kind to yourself — provide extra time to ensure success, not unrealistic goals that set you up for failure.
3. The Obsessive Schedule
You know exactly what to do, and maybe know precisely how long it takes. In fact, you’ve put down each part of the job in excessive detail on the calendar.
Around 9:25am you realize you’ve been reading a news article that you clicked on during your research talking about some new discovery from the Mars rover, and have been taking notes for a different article. By 10:00am you’ve only finished 1/2 the first paragraph for this article and made a few notes for three others. Once again you’re frustrated with yourself for “not staying on task.”
Problem:
When you wrote out your plan, you were likely over-excited about getting started. In the moment, all of your mental energy was dedicated to this new task, and you had a glimpse of exactly how you would do it right then. Unfortunately, when Future You starts working, they can’t follow the precise instructions left for them by Past You, and again end up feeling like a failure for “not following simple instructions”.
Solution:
When preparing your schedule, give yourself enough flexibility to actually work! In the same way that each person does the same job a little differently, we do things differently each and every time. Instead of being overly specific (“9:00am: Research, 9:15am: Writing”) give yourself a more general block of time (“9:00am: Work on research and writing for 30 minutes”). Remember: The goal is the goal — how you get there can change from day to day. You wouldn’t want someone to come in and micro-manage your day, so why do it to yourself?
4. The Freedom Schedule
You’re not a micro-manager. Indeed, you’ve blocked off great swaths of time to take care of everything. Unfortunately, after a few days you again realize the calendar has proved useless, as you’ve accomplished nothing during the “Work” time you so carefully set aside.
Problem:
In an attempt to “remain flexible”, often because you’re not entirely sure how to accomplish your goal, you put down some vague indicator for what you want to do (“Homework Time”). When the time actually came, you weren’t sure how to begin. The result? A feeling of paralysis caused by a lack of any real goals.
Solution:
As you plan your days, strike a balance between general and specific goals. If “Do My Homework” is too general, try “Do Math Homework” instead. Of course, you don’t want to end up with The Obsessive Schedule, but somewhere in between is likely the most effective choice.
In addition, you may want to try putting a more general goal on the calendar (“Do My Homework”) and then create a separate checklist of items you hope to get done during that time (“Math”, “Science”, “English”). As long as you do any one of the tasks during a scheduled homework session, consider it a success!
5. The Workaholic Schedule
Ten hours, ten tasks. You’re a machine! Each task was carefully selected to only take one hour, so you know it’s quite doable! You even scheduled in a lunch break, so no one can say you overbooked. Yet, by the end of the day you’ve missed some tasks, done a few quite sloppily, and generally feel like you’re bad at doing things. Frustrated, you throw your calendar iPhone across the room and sit down to watch some TV.
Problem:
The human body and mind are not designed for non-stop hyperfocus on a single task. Studies put the human attention span anywhere from 30 minutes to about 8 seconds (depending on how you measure it and what you mean by attention). When you require yourself to keep working past your own limits, you set yourself up for frustration. This frustration makes it even harder to concentrate, leading to even more frustration and so on.
Solution:
Give yourself a break! (Or, more accurately, multiple breaks). For most people I usually recommend starting with 30-45 minute work sessions followed by at least 15 minutes of “do nothing” time to unwind before starting up the next task. As you get to know your own timing you can substitute in more accurate blocks that work for you.
Your brain needs some rest time: you can’t sprint for 10 hours straight! The more you allow yourself to do nothing, the more you’ll find yourself successfully doing something.
Be kind to yourself, and watch out for these easily avoidable traps. Most of us create calendars when we’re frustrated with our current lives on some level, and the reflex is to go to the opposite extreme, setting ourselves up for failure.
Be flexible, treat yourself with kindness, and remember: small, regular changes to our lives work far better than giant leaps!