How To Plan Your Time To Achieve Your Life Goals
Do you find it difficult to keep up with everything that you need to do each day? Does it feel like you’re banging your head against a brick wall just to stay afloat? Have you got goals and life dreams that you just can’t seem to get moving?
Don’t worry, you’re not alone. We are all under pressure to get more and more done every day. Everyone has to face the big challenge of steadily working towards longer term goals in the face of continual interruptions and distractions.
The good news is that you can achieve your dreams despite the pressures you are facing every day. Here are some useful tips for you.
Achieving Your Dreams is easy…
So you have dreams and goals you want to achieve, what do you need to do to get there?
Having absolute clarity about your goals is important. If you don’t know what you want, how are you going to get there?
Understanding where you priorities lay and being ready to eliminate things that waste time is also vital.
You probably already know it’s important to spend some time planning how you’re going to achieve your dreams, breaking the journey down into a series of small and realistically achievable steps that will get you there.
Then there’s the decision to act. Simply take action, one step at a time and you’ll get there…
It’s doing it that can be hard - unless you’re organised!
All of those principles sound simple when they’re written down, and they are…
They are that is until you have to face up to the day to day reality of living your life. The real world isn’t always like that.
You need to be able to fit everything you have to do into just one 24 hour day while still remembering the bigger picture of where you are going and remembering all the small but important stuff as well! You have to navigate round a whole series of obstacles and face frustrating setbacks and disappointments, adjusting your plans to suit.
The piece of the jigsaw you might be missing is to get organised and plan the use of your time to squeeze as much as you can out of every minute of the day.
Have you noticed how really successful people seem to effortlessly achieve so much more? They’ve mastered the art of managing their day to be as effective as possible. How do they do it?…
The secret of managing your time better
One of the keys to managing your time better is to do what we as a species do best and start using one or more time management tools! It’s that simple, if you use the right tools consistently and regularly, you’ll get better and better at time management.
The problem with trying to do it without tools is that to plan effectively you will probably need to juggle 10 or 20 or even more tasks around as you put your plan together and then as you put your plan into action, you will need to carry on juggling all the tasks while doing all the other things you need to do in your day to day life.
It’s been well established that your mind has a very limited capacity to process and juggle multiple pieces of information. Studies have shown your mind can handle about 5 plus or minus two pieces of information at any one time. So it’s no wonder you find it hard to make progress to your goals in the mad frenzy that is today’s world.
Using some simple tools can help you stay on top of your day to day activities while sill moving towards your goals. So here’s a few different things you can use to plan your day.
To do lists
These are a favourite of many people. Simply take a piece of paper and write down a list of things you need to do, then cross them off as you achieve them. A variant is to prioritise them and group them once you’ve got them written down (if you’ve got the time!). You can even rewrite the list in the order you want to do them :-).
The benefit of to do lists is that they are very cheap and simple and, being on paper, are easily carried round with you. There’s also the boost of motivation every time you tick off another item you need to do.
Useful as they are, to do lists have their limitations. They are not good for understanding how your day to day activities are moving you towards your long term goals. If something urgent crops up, your to do list can be blown out of the water unless you’re going to rewrite it…
To do lists really work best for one day – I’ve tried to use them for longer periods of time like a week but they really don’t work. They are like shopping lists – a simple list of all the things you need to tick off in the next few hours.
Post It Notes and 3×5 Cards
A variant on the to do list is to write down individual tasks on post it notes or 3×5 cards. The idea is that you can shuffle them around as your circumstances change.
I have never been a fan of this method. The problem is that if you try to get to any useful level of detail that lets you realistically plan your day, you end up with a whole pile of these things either stuck all over your wall or in a big stack that you’re supposed to carry around. Then they either come unstuck or you drop them, leaving your plan all over the floor :-(!
Post it notes are great if there’s one thing you really must remember.
They are also very good if you want to brainstorm a plan – write down all your ideas, one per post-it and then organise them into a sensible plan. This works if it’s just you doing the planning or if you’ve got other people involved. In fact it’s a really good way to build a plan.
Diaries
Diaries can be paper based or on your computer, your phone, your PDA… There are diaries available just about everywhere. Even though a lot of people have access to diaries, surprisingly very few actually use them for planning.
The benefit of a diary is that it’s good to remind you of appointments and things to do that are in the future. I use one regularly to make sure that I plan my time for the future. You can, if you want, write your daily to-do list in your diary so you can track that as well.
The other great use for diaries is in reflecting on what has happened – spending a few minutes each week reminding yourself of what you did and figuring out what you could have done better and how you could have done it better is a worthwhile thing to do that can teach you how to be more efficient or do things better in the future.
Although diary is great as a tool for reacting to requests for your time and reminding you what has happens, it is not useful when you want to work the actions you need for your long term plan into your day.
Freemind
What you need is a tool that lets you:
- brainstorm ideas
- collect them together in related groups
- move them around to form an organised plan
- print a list of tasks to be done each day that you can tick off one at a time.
The tool also needs to be easily adjustable to respond to events that you couldn’t anticipate. And you’d like it to be as cheap and available as a piece of paper.
Sounds like a tall order right?
Well it is, but there might just be something that goes a long way to solving the problem.
I’ve started using a piece of software called Freemind that you can download to your computer. It’s completely free open source software. What I really like is that Freemind is very easy to install and use, especially if you are familiar with the normal Windows or Mac applications.
Freemind is a very adaptable piece of software – I’ve used it for planning this article, brainstorming the plan to get to my next goal and printing out a detailed list of things I needed to do one day.
Freemind can help you take your high level goals, break them down into tasks, sub tasks and even smaller steps. These can all be related to each other and grouped in different ways. The really useful thing is you can juggle them round at will until you fit the tasks together into a plan that make sense.
I can’t claim to have discovered Freemind, in fact it was suggested to me by a friend - Bob Jenkins. If you want to find out more about Freemind, I suggest you take a look at Bob’s article. He’s put a link on his page to let you download Freemind ( of course you can download it directly from the open source website, but that can be challenging unless you’re a tecchie 
).
Bob has included a couple of other useful things to help you use Freemind more efficient. Bob is also offering some videos to help get you up the learning curve faster. I was there when they were recorded and they certainly helped me to get familiar with the tool. Of course you’re free to go to Bob’s article and just download Freemind.
To sum up, if you’re going to achieve your high level goals and life dreams, you’ll need a plan that’s going to get there. You’ll also need a one or more tools to manage your time so that you can work your plan every day. Whatever you use it will need to enable you to quickly adapt your plan to unforeseen events and circumstance.
Freemind is a power, easy to use piece of software that fits the bill very well. Take a look at Bob’s article to find out more about it and download your free copy today.
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