How To Use A Daily Planner Template To Achieve Your Goals?
Practicing daily planning is one thing. Making sure your plan actually moves you toward your bigger goals is something else entirely. Use your daily planning session to ensure your daily responsibilities align with your long-term goals. Here are some steps to get there:
Break Down Your Big Goals
Break your business goals down into daily tasks. You can’t put “grow the business” on your daily to-do list, but you can put “ask for a referral from one customer today” or “call a prospect.” When you sit down to plan your day, review your personal and professional goals and add things that will help you get closer to both.
If you struggle to create realistic daily to-do lists that represent all of your goals, you may have too many goals. Overexerting yourself isn’t just exhausting; you are also unlikely to make substantial progress in all of these areas. Complete an inventory of commitments and focus on the goals that are most important to you. As a general rule, avoid more than five major goals at once and consider a mix of short-term and long-term goals.
Look At Your Week As A Whole
Planning the day starts with planning the whole week. You certainly have several goals, a number of potential tasks to achieve them, and only so many hours in the day. It’s alright. While some goals benefit from daily activity, others can gain momentum by working on them several times a week. Maybe you work out on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. On other days, you may want to batch tasks and focus only on tasks related to one professional goal. You can also do your personal assignments on the weekend. Spend some time on a Sunday night or Monday morning slowing down and mapping out your week into blocks of time so you know what goals to focus on and when. Maintain specifics for your daily meeting planning.
Add The To-Dos Last
When most people organize their day, they start with this step. They start with their scheduled appointments, must-haves and pressing deadlines, and then try to accommodate them with goal-oriented work. Consider leaving this step until the end. This forces you to prioritize your to-do tasks around your target tasks, rather than the other way around.
In an ideal world, we would only focus on the day-to-day activities that move us toward our long-term goals. In reality, we have duties and responsibilities to fulfill, some of which have little bearing on our personal or professional development. Limit your obligations and responsibilities as much as possible: reconsider recurring meetings, think about dividing responsibilities and feel comfortable saying “no”. However, it is acceptable to have items on your to-do list that need to be completed. Just make sure they don’t consume too much of your time and energy.
