It’s not about doing more. It’s about doing less.
When you first read the headline, you might've felt overwhelmed.
You might’ve imagined a Type A individual from high school who always brought their A-game to class. They were the ones who were in the honor society, had straight A’s, and were in all AP classes.
Even worse, you might have felt anxious at the very thought of outlining your day hour by hour. I’m here to tell you that you should actually feel less stress and anxiety.
Scheduling out your day is not important so that you can do more with your time. After all, we all only have 24 hours a day.
Scheduling out your day hour by hour is important so that you do less.
It’ll force you to stop wasting time on activities that aren’t moving you forward. If you track your typical day, you’ll most likely notice that you waste a lot of time.
We all do it.
For a lot of us, it’s binge-watching Netflix. It’s scrolling mindlessly on social media. Maybe it’s taking a nap or watching YouTube.
The point is, we spend a great portion of our day on mindless activities. Work is eight hours of our day. We need to sleep for another eight.
That leaves us eight hours in the day that is our “free time.” By the time you subtract doing errands and completing other mundane tasks that need to get done, you don’t have much time left in the day.
When you add in three hours watching TV and two more on social media, you have no time left for anything else.
When you are consciously tracking your activities throughout the day, you’ll be aware of the time you are wasting.
When you eliminate the mindless activities from your schedule, you’ll discover that you magically have more time.
Funny how that works.
It’s the old adage of addition by subtraction. Time is your most valuable resource. You need to make sure you are investing wisely.
Scheduling your day also allows you to prioritize what’s the most important. You can prioritize one or two tasks that absolutely need to get done for that day. When you get one or two things done early in the day, you are more likely to continue your momentum through the day.
It’s Science. Objects that are in motion will remain in motion. People are no different. If you wake up with a plan for the day, you’ll get more done earlier.
This leads to opening up time for the things you want to do or something you want to work on. Be wary of the leaches that want to suck the time out of you.