Crafting a daily schedule you can stick to is something everyone wants to master, but few ever do. Keeping up with lectures, meetings, work, assignments, and a social life seems impossible. I’m sure all the trial-and-error has you exhausted. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
This post will give you some ideas for forming a schedule that might make it easier for you. We’ll explore different methods to help you build a daily schedule that works well for you and helps you get things done.
How to Create an Effective Daily Schedule
Table of Contents
The Brain Dump
What is it? Writing down your thoughts and everything you need to do on paper.
Why you should do it? You should do a brain dump when your brain is overwhelmed with information. Everyone has a hundred thoughts speeding through in their head. Is there something you’re forgetting? Have you replied to that email? The brain dump is an effective way to declutter your mind. Once you write everything down, you can stop feeling bothered by a vague task and make it more real.
How do you do it? You need a piece of paper, a pen and some alone time with your thoughts. Write everything that comes to mind until you feel a sense of relief. The list doesn’t have to be well-defined and you don’t need an action plan. That’s where the next steps come in.
Make Time to Plan Your Daily Schedule
Effective planning takes time. Set aside a few minutes a day to plan your day. If you are most productive in the morning, give yourself 15-20 minutes to organise your day ahead. If you are more productive in the evening, that would be the perfect time to plan what you need to do the next day.
Prioritise Your Tasks
I cannot overstate the importance of prioritising your schedule. It’s easy for your day to get cluttered with trivial things giving you little time to tackle the important tasks. Ticking minor tasks off our to-do list is a brilliant way to procrastinate on the big things. You can fool your brain into thinking you’re being productive. Things are getting done! You organised all your books alphabetically; you’ve made a playlist for every mood. But you take a moment and realise that the scholarship application you’ve been putting off is due tomorrow and you haven’t studied for your most important exam.
How do you make a priority list? Take the items you wrote in your brain dump and re-order them in order of what is most important and urgent. A good framework to help you organise your list of priorities is to use the Eisenhower matrix (pictured below):
Do a task as soon as possible if it is both important and urgent. If the task is important and non-urgent, plan when you will do it. If it’s urgent but not important, try to have someone else do it. You should remove the tasks that are both unimportant and non-urgent from your list.
Create your Daily Schedule
The point of a priority list is so that you can focus on the most important tasks first. It’s much easier to start your day with the easy, smaller tasks, but you’ll procrastinate on the important things.
Some people prefer a rigid schedule like the one below, with each hour of their day accounted for. However, most people find it too restrictive. If you try to account for every hour of the day, it leaves little room for unexpected events. One small derailment can ruin your whole day.
Another way to plan your day that has a good balance of order and flexibility is to use Time Blocking. With Time Blocking, you allocate chunks of time to certain tasks. For example, if you are a writer, you could block out two hours a day for writing. Whether you do actual writing or do research for your characters and setting is up to you. However, during that time, you allow no room for distractions like checking emails or responding to messages.
The benefit of Time Blocking is that you make time for all the tasks that are important to you and you are less likely to fill your day with things other people want you to do. However, time blocking makes it easier to say no to things you haven’t planned for. It is also better to schedule tons of free time for any eventualities.
Check out the example below. The descriptions are a guide to the type of task you will do during that time, but it isn’t fixed. So if something more important than finishing an essay or meeting for a group project comes up, your time is still allocated to whatever academic activity is most urgent.
Avoid these common scheduling mistakes
- Overscheduling so that you have no time to adapt to unexpected events
- Not scheduling any breaks
- Not prioritising your tasks or dealing with trivial tasks first
- Underestimating how long a task will take
- Trying to schedule many tasks when your energy is low
- Not managing distractions
- Saying yes to people/things when your schedule is already full
Summary
Creating an effective daily schedule is an art. It can be overwhelming if you have no idea where to start. That’s why it’s important to write everything down so that you know which tasks are the most pressing and which ones can be delegated or deleted from your to-do list. Finding a structure that works for you is just as important. Besides the ones I’ve mentioned in this post, there are tons of resources on time management strategies and finding what works for you might take a bit more research. However, if you avoid some common pitfalls, you’ll be miles ahead of the rest.