Everyone who wants to do productive work also wants to learn how to make a productive schedule to complete all tasks without being drained. Without scheduling no one can do useful work. It is more necessary for everyone to schedule, to be disciplined, and to be consistence to become productive.
When you read or watch biographies of any successful personalities, you find many common or repetitive points; in all these points making a productive schedule will be necessarily available. Successful persons understand how to make a productive schedule at an early age, so they get successful.
Getting success is not easy, it is also not luck or by chance, but it requires being creative, innovative, critical thinking, and consistent. These all can be possible by making a productive schedule. Let’s learn step by step, how to make a productive schedule:
1. MOST IMPORTANT TASK FIRST
All successful persons choose their important tasks and schedule them before less productive or less important tasks. This is the best technique to do more and more work. Unsuccessful people distract by many less important tasks and forget to complete their useful tasks, due to forgetting creative tasks people are disastrous.
Make a list of all your daily tasks or your next day’s tasks, sort these tasks according to their importance, and schedule the most important in the beginning. You will create more in your day and your business. By sorting you will forget unimportant tasks rather than forgetting most important tasks.
For example, if you are a student reading, walking, exercising, meeting with friends, dinner at a favorite hotel, shopping, writing, and attending classes is your daily schedule. Sort these tasks according to their importance, starting from writing and reading, then attending classes to exercising. Keep shopping, meeting with friends, and dinner at favorite hotels at the end.
If you will be tired of your early tasks you will leave a balanced task on next day. The balanced tasks are meeting with friends and dinner at favorite hotels, and these tasks are not so many important and time-bound. You can meet your friend and have dinner at your favorite restaurant, whenever has spare time.
2. TIME BLOCKING
Time blocking is a technique to block one task only at a selected time. You have to manage all distractions away during this selected time. Keep your full focus on your selected goal, and then take a short break for another task. This is boring for beginners but very productive. You can notice the result after some practice.
All successful persons adopted time-blocking habits in their life. If they attend any meeting, they switch off their phones, they don’t touch other gadgets. They only focus on the agendas of the meeting and also participate actively. But when they read they also avoid all distractions to learn more and more from the readings. When a layman read for half an hour with a mobile phone or other distractions, the average focus time becomes less than half i.e. 10 to 15 minutes.
Other people can’t steal your time when you set barriers in the way of time blocking. Mostly people who work on large, creative, and innovative projects take more benefits from time blocking but it is also beneficial for the public if they understand the impact on their life.
3. THE POMODORO TECHNIQUE
The Pomodoro technique is best for reactivating the mind and body. In the Pomodoro technique, you have to fully focus for only 25 minutes on a single task and then take a 05-minute break to re-activate your mind and body. You can also split one task in more than one Pomodoro time block or more than one task in one Pomodoro time block.
It’s depending on the length of tasks, not on the time block. It means you can’t change in 25 minutes time block but can easily schedule tasks. It’s also very boring in the starting days but very useful for practice. You have to be consistent to take benefits. The Pomodoro technique is an experienced and proven technique for productive work.
4. ENERGY FLOW (50 to 90MINUTE SPRINTS)
Everyone has some productive hours or minutes in 24 Hours, in which motivation and energy for any productive work in at their peak. Everyone has the strength to deal with difficult tasks in an energy flow time sprint but most people waste it. They don’t know the importance of the energy flow. The average time of the energy flow is 50 to 90 minutes only.
Know yourself, your body, and what is your peak time. When you find your peak time or energetic time, schedule your most important, creative, and innovative task for that time. You will amaze to watch the outcome. You will be able to think critically and introduce new techniques to expand your business and improvement of your and other’s life like creative and successful people.
Most of the time and most people don’t know about energy flow techniques. They waste this charismatic time on unimportant activities. To know you are the most necessary to be successful, and to know other and businesses.
5. TASK FLOW
In the task flow technique, you should have to schedule similar tasks at one time. The human brain is disturbed when it switches from one task to another and tired early. But we can keep it active human brain for a long time to schedule the next similar task after one.
For example, you can observe teachers in famous universities, they teach continue with Pomodoro methods. They never tired during teaching, and they never read or experienced, or surveys during teaching time. They schedule evening time, or separate days for surveys and experiments. We have to learn from teachers to schedule because they are successful people, and they are our inspirations. Teachers adopted this technique after many studies and research.
To take more creative, innovative, and productive work from the brain, we should learn how it works. It works more with task flow technique and tired with switching from one task to another difficult or new task. Adopt the task flow method as soon as possible to be successful.
6. THE CHATFIELD METHOD
The Chatfield method is to know about the time duration of every task. Write down how much time you completed your tasks. It will be helpful to schedule your next day and week because mostly we repeat our tasks and new tasks are very rare.
Without knowing the time limit of every task how we can make a productive schedule? It is very necessary for achieving goals. Most people thought, recording time is a waste of time but it is not a waste it is a saving of time.
Due to technology, it becomes easy, there are many free and paid apps available on the internet for recording time for every task, which we can use for the next scheduling. These apps require only one click on starting and ending of every task and provide different reports, which you can analyze to make a productive schedule for the future.
7. BURSTS AND FLOW
We waste most of our time on checking and replying to messages and emails, receiving calls, chatting, etc. According to many studies and researches every person check email and message after every 6 minutes. It is an average time and it is repeated among most of the important tasks.
As I mentioned in the Chatfield method, the human brain tired early when we switch from one task to another task rapidly so we should schedule similar tasks. Therefore receiving calls, checking messages and emails also switch from one task to another among the other productive tasks.
Schedule a separate time for messages, emails, and phone calls. The time may be after the most important tasks. Experts suggest the best time for emails and calls afternoon when have coffee or tea. In the beginning, it will be very difficult to handle and stay away from mobile when a message rings.
8. THE A/B OR SPLIT SCHEDULE
In A/B or splitting schedules, we have to schedule different days for different tasks. Whenever we switch from one task to another, our minds are confused, and we are unable to provide more focus. Companies also schedule meeting with employees on other days instead during important tasks.
So the best method how to make a productive schedule is to schedule focus days for core work and buffer days for planning, managing, meeting, and scheduling. Know yourself which are the focus days and buffer days. Mostly starting of the week are the focus days and the last days are the buffer days for everyone but you can schedule according to you.
For example, if your job is coding and developing software, which is hard working and also time tasking, you will be unable at the evening or end of coding to manage, plan, and schedule due to exhaustion. Therefore schedule buffer days for these tasks.
9. CHOOSE YOUR PLANNER
How to make a productive schedule to choose the best planner? Planners are also different types for different types of personalities. Choosing the best planner for scheduling time is also difficult, when you will choose a planner which will match your behavior or personality or jobs, you can’t do productive activities.
Creative type, minimal effort type, and tech-savvy type are the famous types of planners but other many types of planners are also available according to the jobs and personalities. You can search on the Internet according to your job and requirements to find the best one.
10. REFER TO YOUR PLANNER OFFER
If your planner is hard paste it in front of the working desk where you can refer again and again, but if you have a digital planner keep it in front or main screen. To be loyal to the daily schedule it is very necessary to refer again and again.
In the beginning, being loyal is very difficult but when it will develop into a habit the difficulties also over. You can’t live away from your planner. You will be loyal to your scheduled tasks and you will start productive work. Referring to your planner is the best way to make a productive work schedule.
11. REWARD YOURSELF FOR COMPLETED TASKS
Whenever you complete a task reward yourself with different awards. But whenever you failed to complete your task punish yourself in different ways. Your brain will understand which tasks are better and which are bad. It decides on your reward and punishment basis. The human brain is always in search to remain to procrastination, peace, relaxation, and avoid to struggle and hard work.
Every successful person teaches their mind and trains their mind to work hard. Failures do not know to train their mind. Therefore training the mind for difficulties and hard work is an actual way to be successful. In scheduling, you can train by rewarding and punishing your mind.
12. MAKE ROOM FOR UNEXPECTED EVENTS
Many events are not in our schedule but happen accidentally. Such as, your family member might be sick or hospitalized or any pandemic, flood, natural disaster, etc. might happen to you. You should always be ready for these unexpected events.
When you will not make room for unexpected events and be loyal to your schedule, these unexpected events will hurt you more than you make room for these events. We can avoid unexpected events but will make ready ourselves with our savings and train our minds.
Whenever these unexpected events happen, we all should delay our daily schedule and be should struggle to deal with an unexpected event. If unexpected events take a long time like COVID-19, then we should re-visit our daily routine to make a productive schedule with the unexpected and difficult situations.
13. ASK EXPERTS ALONGWITH SURFING
Ask any query of life by experts searching on the internet, the internet might provide some incomplete and wrong information to you, and this information will affect your decisions and your future events. Every field expert has more knowledge, expertise, skills, and hacks which you can’t find on the internet.
Asking experts in the field is the best way of learning and saving time. we waste our most precious time searching about any required topic, many times we can’t find the best answer but on many occasions we got success. But when we ask every query from an expert and develop it as a habit we will learn more and also will save our time.
14. AVOID ALL DISTRACTIONS
We commute toward offices, markets, etc. for jobs, businesses, and shopping purposes but we utilize main roads or highways where we face many distractions in the shape of traffic, speed barkers, etc. but we can find other ways where we can reach our destination with peace and fastly.
This is one example of roads, in every task and destination we have many options other than the famous one that we didn’t try till now. We should research easily and without distraction methods for every task, there are many methods for each task available, and we have to learn and implement them in our life.
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