Have you ever noticed how life just kind of runs you over unless you take control of the day when you get up? There are two ways that a day will go if you just let it, either you will just do busywork and at the end of the day not feel like you accomplished anything, or you will jump from one burning crisis to another throughout your day and end it exhausted.
This would not haappen if you planned your day before bed the night before or at the kitchen table in the morning.
Planning your day can be as simple as making a list of the 5 or 10 things that you want to get done today, things that you do not want to have on that list tomorrow. Some people have taken this to an art form and will actually plan their week on Sunday night prioritizing what has to happen when.
The above plan of just sitting and creating a todo list is great if you are not getting anything done. If you do not have a plan for the day other people will make their tasks your plan for your day and this is not good. If on the other hand you are fighting with issues that are coming up day after day then you are probably stuck in that endless loop of refixing problems that were not resolved correctly before.
The best way to setup prioities for the day I beleive is to create four boxes like below:
Now get all of the things that you need to do and give them a number based on their priority and urgency. The best time that you can spend is in box number 2 important and not urgent. For all the time that oyu spend creating solutions for the long term in box 2 you will have less crisis times, you will have fixed things for the long term.
Everytime that I start to get stressed at work or at home it is because of everything above. I am either not creating and feel like I am not making things better in my life or those around me or else I am scrambling. As soon as I feel myself scrambling I will go and look at those four boxes again and see what I can do in box 2 to make my life better and more managable.
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