Four tips to super charge your day!
How many times have you arrived at work late? That familiar story of endless traffic, perhaps the chaos of the school run or breakfast routine, and all while remembering you've forgotten to write that all important To-Do list the night before? Arrival at work begins by heading straight into a meeting or maybe getting lost in email reactivity. By this point you have a low chance of recovery to own your day. The business world is about to take it from you.
From my experience, here are 4 tips I’ve found helpful towards owning my day:
1. Find a quiet space to plan: Either the night before or early in the morning find a space away from the computer or distraction to sit down and write out key objectives and the to-do items for your day ahead.
I began using an iPad, but soon reverted back to a writing pad & pencil. The simple reason being I guess, that there are too many distractions on an electronic note pad that can take you away from thinking and planning.
2. Identify what it actually is at a high level that you want to achieve and focus there. It's all too easy to write a to-do list that spans 2 pages and at the end of your day leave the office without actually knowing or feeling if you have really achieved anything on there. The list was simply too long, non-relevant and unfocussed.
Think forward to the end of the day and what at a high level would you like to have achieved, I recommend not having more than 5 items. This will keep you focussed on outcomes rather than filling your day with tasks for the sake of it.
Example strong objectives:
Publish blog
Complete draft business strategy
Follow up to all 5 meetings from yesterday
3. Use sharp, relevant and actionable To-do items: Keep your list pointed towards your objective(s) for the day, (there may be some that are separate though). Items should be singularly actionable there should not be multiple tasks within one item. If you have an item that has a number of tasks, have sub tasks.
Stay precise with your to-do list, don’t use it as an excuse to fill up your work day, the aim is to hit your objectives in the quickest time possible. I could write here about the 4 hour work week, but thats for another time...
4. The use of symbols: Hands down, one of the best techniques that I have found over the years is the use of colour coded symbols to quickly identify which objectives and tasks to focus on, see examples below:
🔴 = Quick win, simple task.
◼️ = Requires effort and dedicated time
$ = Revenue generating
❗️= High priority
Enjoy scribbling out your list and own your day!