In our last episode, we talked about the benefits of planning FUN before you get your work done. Many have asked, “That’s great, but then how the heck am I supposed to organize my work time?!” Today I’m back to show you how to plan your day more efficiently. With these new strategies, you’ll be able to take MORE breaks while finishing your work earlier…leaving ample time to actually enjoy your life. Get your pen ready, because we’re going to cover prioritization, mindset, delegation, automation, and so much more!

See transcript below:

Steve Napolitan: Welcome to More Business More Life Daily. This is episode five and we’re going to talk about how do you plan for your day so that you can take more breaks and get out of work early. So there’s a lesson that I teach called Plan Tomorrow Today. Now, there’s a lot more to it. We have a whole program that we’re releasing soon that goes through the whole process of this, but I can give you the specific tips that you can take into your life right now that can start helping you. Because on the last episode, if you watched it, I talked about how to plan your fun first and then you might be saying to yourself, “Okay, great, if I plan to go have fun or go on more dates with my significant other or play with my kids more or go out and learn foreign language, great, but I’m not going to get as much work done.”

Well, this means we have to be more efficient. So I always say plan tomorrow today because at the end of the day, before you leave, if you can give yourself five or 10 minutes to look at the day and say how did it go and then look at what you need to do the next day and then we’re going to do a bit of prioritization, but I’m going to give you a couple tips before we prioritize because the fact, the first thing I want to say, I want to take a quick tangent. Most of us put more on our plate than we can accomplish, which is not really a good thing. If you have so many things to do, then what happens is then we always feel like we have undone things. We have a list that’s a mile long. So many lists depending on where you’re watching this. Maybe it’s a kilometer long, but it’s so long that we never get it all done.

So you leave dissatisfied. I didn’t get enough done, I didn’t get everything done. You’re never going to get everything done if the list is so long. So we want to start creating the amount of, like if you were doing projects, there’s a thing called scope or scope creep. There’s got to be a scope, like a measurement of what or the amount of what is going to be done, what’s appropriate to get done so that we can manage that and be successful. And our mind, just to get on a mindset thing for a second, our mind feels unsuccessful when it feels that things are uncomplete. Well, it depends on how your feelings are about it. I take that back. We all have different feelings about it, but if you’re feeling like you don’t get enough done every day and the list is a mile long or a kilometer long and you’re not getting it done, then it starts to react inside those feelings, if you’re having those, register as, I didn’t do good enough, I didn’t get enough done.

So when we’re planning the next day, you want to appropriate what’s most important. And I encourage people, which I’ll probably talk about in another episode, one thing to win. So if you can appropriate what’s the most important thing for tomorrow to get done and put that down as your number one thing, then if get that done, there’s a huge amount of satisfaction and, “Wow, I got that done,” and that’s success. And that goes into our mind and our mind starts to feel more successful on an ongoing, everyday basis.

That’s why I’m a big fan of goals and stretch goals. So if you have a big goal and you always go for big goals and then you never quite get there, you’re telling your subconscious, I never quite get there. I never quite get the success I want. But if you can actually appropriate the right scope of work, the right size that you’re going to do the next day, you’re going to start being more empowered and you probably will get more done. This is what starts to happen and you get more and more efficient.

So here’s the quick tactic. When you look at what needs to be done, first, we need, before you prioritize what’s the one thing or maybe you say three or four things, whatever that small amount and you can see every day if you keep doing this, do you get that done? Was 10 things too much? Should I try eight things, five things? And it depends on the tasks. Before you do that, when you look at what needs to be done, I want you to think of three things. What can I eliminate, what can I delegate and what can I automate.

And you might not have any employees or someone helping you. Maybe you’re in a position where you’re the one that’s helping someone else and you’re getting all these things put on your plate. You can figure out though, when you start asking yourself, is there anything I can eliminate? Is there any things here that I shouldn’t be doing? Just by asking yourself, you’ll start to find it. Even sometimes I’ve found things took me weeks and then finally I’m like, “Why am I doing that?” So just keep asking.

The delegation. Maybe there are other people in the company that can do a certain task better than you or maybe you should hire a virtual assistant. Just because you have a job doesn’t mean you can’t hire someone. I know that might sound crazy, but we can talk about that in another episode, but you can find people to delegate to. And I’m going to run out of time for this episode, so I’ll definitely share more about that in another episode.

And then automation, what can you use with software to make things? So when you look at all the things that need to be done, there might be software out there that you can do. Now, some of these things might take a little while to implement, but you can start carving off your list. Once you do that, eliminate, delegate, automate, then you want to apply that to the list and then pick what is most important for that next day. And then you just keep redoing this every day and you get better and better and better at it. So plan your day so that you can leave and also plan more breaks, which I’ll also talk about more.

But what the bottom line for this episode is figure out what’s most important for you to get done and get that done. A lot of times, we do all the other stuff and we don’t get the most important thing done and then our business and our career suffers. So make sure you’re designating that each and every day.

I hope this has been helpful. Please comment. Let me know how I can help you further. If you liked it, subscribe to the channel. I look forward to seeing you on our next episode. As always, choose gratitude and create freedom.