3 TIPS to delight in a daily plan

I’ve recently started a new habit.  
And it’s been a game changer for my mental wellbeing and productivity.  

That habit is: making a daily plan.

I know, shocking.

How could I operate for so long without this basic thing that grown-ups supposedly do? 

For longer than I’d like to admit, I lived in a survival state of daily lists.
In this dark cave of list-making, I sensed that there had to be a better way.
But it was only this Fall, as I began to tune-up my work flow, that I woke up to my primitive list-living existence.

No longer would I merely survive in this dreary state of list after list after list.
It was time to thrive!
No more subjecting myself to an infinite number of items with no pecking order, no purpose. 
No more helplessly hacking away at a pile of blah - only to feel disoriented, drained and defeated by day’s end.

Failing to plan is planning to fail

There’s a difference between writing a to-do list and effectively planning out the day.  The former is entirely a left brain exercise while the latter is a collaboration between both left and right.  And, whole brain collaboration always produces best results.

Making a daily plan brings focus to the flow and flow to the focus. There is an art to it, I’m learning. And, here’s the cool part, we first need to experience the being of it in order to excel at the doing of it - more on how I can help you with this at the end of this piece.

So, what’s wrong with simply having a solid to-do list?

The problem with a standalone to-do list

How often have you had every intention to tackle an important work, home or family priority only later in the day to realize that you got swept aside by the tide of I don’t feel like it?

There’s no accountability, no inspiration to a standalone list.   

A to-do list is a free loader’s pass for a bail out.  

TIPS for an effective and fulfilling Day Plan

1. Make it Specific

If we want to achieve something specific, we have to make it specific.  This means looking ahead at the day, the calendar, the time windows available, and literally putting the action item we want to accomplish into our schedule.  It also means being realistic about how long we need to work on said task as well as what time of day is best for us to access optimal mental bandwidth for the task.

2. Get Accountable

A successfully accomplished daily plan begins by sharing it with someone else. When I started building this new habit of planning, I asked a friend to be my accountability buddy to help me stay committed.  After time-blocking key to-do items into my daily schedule, I would text her my priority “three things.” Somehow, outing myself about what I was going to accomplish helped close the thinking-doing gap. 
Overkill? For me, the aforementioned dark cave was somewhere I refused to return.

3. Imagine your Ideal Day

There is an art and science to accomplishing the important things we want to achieve in life.  This is where the right and left brain come in. The left brain is the master list maker and also the scheduler.  It’s the reasoner, sequencer and fact-stater.  The right brain, on the other hand, is where positive emotion, visualizing and creativity reside.  

Can you see where I’m heading with this one? A plan without our right brain is flat, uninspired, rote. But when we turn on our right brain - the plan becomes 3-D, alive, energizing.

There’s a simple and powerful way to integrate left and right brain into our day-to-day flow. And I’d love to share it with you!

Sign up for one of my upcoming December End of Year Reset Workshops and set yourself up for a joyful and purposeful end of 2022 and start of 2023.