Why Daily Planning is Critical for Focus, Attention & Top Priorities

Recent business news reported that prominent companies like Walmart and Starbucks are starting to think consciously about how they schedule their employees’ work shifts.

Why?

Because their employees and their employees’ families want and need predictability, stability and flexibility.

We’ve all been there.

We’ve all felt the panic, frustration, and stress of waiting for someone else to provide the project plan deadlines or confirm whether or not our vacation request has been approved. It is stressful because your schedule reverberates far beyond you – it impacts the time, schedules, and routines of your team members, partners, and children.

Bottom line: When someone else can influence and impact your schedule, it’s hard for you to structure your time.

Which brings us to what I think is one of our innate human needs: structure.

And the best place to start creating structure in your life is to focus on what you can control – where you choose to allocate your time and energy.

To create more structure and direct your time and energy towards high return on time investment projects and tasks it is time to take your daily planning to the next level.

Daily planning is designed to focus your attention on your top priorities for the day, ensuring that you have a laser-like focus on what you want to accomplish during the day. By deciding what to focus on before the day actually starts, you can minimize the impact of distractions, competing projects and other people’s agendas that often come up.

Here are the recommended steps to plan for tomorrow.

Review your current projects and tasks. Before you do any work (including checking email), decide on your top three priorities for the day. Use these to guide and structure your day.

Go high-value early in the day. Start your day by tackling your highest-value task—one that is aligned to your goals and relates to the revenue line, which is where you and your organization make money.

Respond smart. Respond to shifting priorities and demands, and decide what to do next during the day by considering the following:

• Check your required tools. Do you have all the tools necessary to complete a given action on your schedule for today? Many to-dos require a specific location (at the office or a client site, for example) and/or a specific tool (a phone or computer application). Make sure all the tools you need are in place as you start your day.

• Check your buffer time. If you have only five minutes between meetings, your action choices are limited. Try to re-arrange one or more activities to give yourself some breathing room in the course of your day.

• Check your energy availability. Some projects and tasks require significant amounts of fresh, creative mental energy. If necessary, move one or more activities so that your most demanding projects and tasks are scheduled for the times when your energy is likely to be highest.

Prioritize your activities. Considering the required tools, time, and energy available, which to-do offers the highest return on time investment?

Each of the daily planning best practices above work for all of the Productivity Styles. However, there are slight differences in each style that need to be considered for optimal planning.

How You Plan Daily if You’re a Prioritizer: As a Prioritizer, you are naturally goal oriented; planning your months, weeks, and days to achieve your goals is easy for you. At times, however, your focus on the outcome tends to impact your understanding of how the work needs to be completed, who needs to be involved, and why it is important. On a daily basis, make sure you start your day with your highest priority project or task.

How You Plan Daily if You’re a Planner: As you would imagine, planning comes naturally to the Planner. At times, however, your focus on how to complete work can create a myopic plan that overlooks or minimizes what actually needs to be accomplished, who needs to be involved, and why the work is important. Because of that, make sure to schedule open or buffer time each week to allow for unexpected opportunities, issues, or problems.

How You Plan Daily if You’re a Arranger: You intuitively know what work needs to be completed and by when. At times, however, your focus on the people involved in the work or project can overshadow what the goal or outcome is, how to efficiently complete the work, and why it is important. To avoid letting that focus on others to take over, schedule specific time in the day to connect and interact with people.

How You Plan Daily if You’re a Visualizer: You are a strategic, big-picture thinker, and long-range planning is in alignment with your natural preferences. At times, however, your big picture orientation tends to interfere with your determining the shorter-term intermediate goals and action steps needed to realize a broader, strategic goal. Keep your calendar visual at all times and stick to simple, basic time frames

People want to succeed—to take on meaningful, purposeful tasks and produce high-quality work. Your team – and you – will make this valuable work happen when you know there’s a structure in place that you and your leadership team adheres to, respects, and appreciates. Start structuring your day – today.

What you can do right now:

• Did you love the concepts of the Prioritizer, Planner, Arranger, and Visualizer? Find out your style here.
• Procrastination can be a daily, professional stalemate that’ll throw off any structure in your day. It just might work for you though. Read here how high-performance procrastination might work for your day or for someone else’s day.
• Order Work Simply for additional ideas, tools and strategies to invest your time wisely and plan your days, weeks and months.

Carson Tate is the founder and principal of Working Simply, a management consultancy. Our mission is to bring productivity with passion back to the workplace. We do this by providing tailored solutions that help people to work smarter, not harder.

Her new book, Work Simply, was published on January 2, 2015.