Habit: Manage Your Time Your Way
“Time management” is a term that people use to mean a lot of different things. But, most time management strategies are meant to provide guidance for deciding what to work on and how to get that done during the day. There are a lot of experts and enthusiasts with a lot of different suggested approaches. You may have seen mentions of things like “Time Boxing”, “Eat the Frog”, and the “Eisenhower Matrix”. These are all strategies for deciding what is most important to get done today, and in what order you should attack those things.
We don’t believe that a single approach works for everyone. A big reason for this is that people’s jobs have drastically different work styles. Some people are in complete control of their time while others are constantly “on call”. Some work remotely with flexible schedules and others are on-site. Some people may have mid-day family duties and others don’t.
SECTIONS IN THE DAY PLANNER
The Day Planner is divided into “Sections” which can be used to split up your day in whatever way makes sense to you. By default, these are named with parts of the day like “Morning”, “Afternoon”, etc. Using the Sections as the distinct parts of your day can be helpful during day planning by giving you a guideline to think about how much you can expect to get done. But, you can rename these to start planning your day in a way that makes sense for you.
TIME MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES = PLANNER TEMPLATES
The Day Planner has an option that allows you to select a Planner Template. A Template is simply a set of Sections that will be applied to the Day Planner when chosen. You will see Templates that you’ve used before in the My Templates tab.
There is also a tab to browse a catalog of Planner Templates that are based on popular time management strategies. When you choose one of these Templates, it will be imported into your My Templates list and you can customize it from there.
For example… The Planner Template named “Time-Boxing” is a very popular strategy that many people employ to manage their time during the day. With this strategy, you break your day into one or two hour increments and assign tasks to those increments. This can really help you think through how long tasks will take you and set hard limits for yourself.
DIFFERENT DAYS
Some people have different “themes” for different days of the week. For many, a “work day” will probably look different than a “weekend day”. You may also have certain days of the week where you perform a different type of work, e.g. you are focused on recording a podcast every Wednesday. That is a great reason to have multiple Planner Templates that you switch between for your different types of days. The Daily Review Assistant has a setting to quickly change your selected Planner Template when starting to plan your day.