5 tips on how to use a planner agenda
In this article, I will give you some useful tips on how to use a planner agenda in order to improve your productivity, better manage your stress, overcome procrastination and achieve your most important goals.
In another article, I have already exposed the obstacles of time management, i.e. the factors that can have a negative impact on the way you manage your time.
In this article, you will find practical tips on how to make your schedule a great travel partner that will help you stay focused on your most important goals.
Let’s move on to the tips.
1 – Choose an agenda that suits your needs
Choosing the right agenda is essential to improve your productivity.
This advice is particularly relevant for paper agendas.
Avoid having two agendas, as this is a waste of time and productivity.
Instead, use one planner, but make sure it’s big enough.
Here is a selection of planners that I recommend you choose to increase your productivity.
Once you have chosen the format that best suits your needs, it is essential to plan all your appointments in it, not just your professional tasks.
This way, you will avoid unnecessary stress and maintain a better balance between your personal and professional life.
The idea of scheduling your personal activities in a single agenda may sound a little daunting to some of you.
For example, some people see this decision as a lack of freedom or spontaneity.
If you have any doubts, I invite you to test this tip for a week to assess whether or not it is useful.
The next tip is to connect each task to an important goal.
2 – Link each activity to a goal that is important to you
To effectively follow this tip, you must already have a clear vision of your most important goals or at least the most important goals for this year.
If you don’t know how to do this, I recommend you read my article on how to set and achieve goals.
Let’s assume that you already know your most important goals.
At this point, I suggest you plan your agenda by linking each activity to an important goal.
For example, let’s say your most important goal is to increase your company’s sales.
In this case, you will need to identify the activities that will allow you to achieve this goal.
You will then plan these specific activities on a daily basis, measuring their contribution to the achievement of your goal when possible.
Over time, you will remove ineffective tasks, prioritizing only those that will bring you closer to your goal.
If you find that some of the planned activities in your agenda are not related to an important goal, try to understand the need that these activities allow you to fulfill. Then find a more productive way to meet that same need.
Sometimes you may find yourself scheduling a large number of urgent and important activities, i.e. tasks that were important but that you procrastinated on and that have become urgent over time.
In this case, it may be important to understand why you have been putting off this activity.
To learn more about procrastination, I suggest you read the article 10 tips on how to stop procrastinating and how to overcome procrastination at home and at work.
On other occasions, you may schedule important tasks and still procrastinate in their execution.
When this happens, you need to understand what is holding you back.
Procrastination is often caused by a lack of awareness of your values, priorities, and needs.
In other situations, it may be due to low self-esteem, fear, or difficulty communicating well with others.
To better understand the difference between urgent and important tasks, I suggest you read my article where I propose a new interpretation of Eisenhower’s matrix.
The next piece of advice is to not schedule too many activities.
3 – Leave some blanks
One of the most common mistakes people make when trying to improve their productivity is to plan too many tasks.
But this only increases stress, and in the long run, this strategy can have negative consequences on your health.
Therefore, I recommend that you leave gaps between each important task and adjust these time slots according to your energy and concentration level during the day.
You can use these time gaps for different purposes.
For example, you can utilize them to easily handle unexpected events at work. I’ve already covered this topic in a previous article on how to deal with unexpected events at work.
As you already know, it’s very rare that anything goes wrong at work, so it’s best to plan ahead to handle any events.
These gaps in your schedule can also be used to create time to reflect or find original solutions to the issues you face in your life.
This is an opportunity to use and strengthen your creativity, for example, to become more productive at work or to find new ways to do your work better or faster.
These moments without planned activities can also enable you to take some extra breaks in case you need to recover your physical or mental energy.
These free moments in your schedule can also be used to assess whether your actions are bringing you closer to your goals or whether you need to change your strategy.
As you have probably realized, you can use these unplanned time slots to adapt them to your needs and to have more flexibility on a daily basis.
4 – Plan for breaks too
Your health and productivity depend on your ability to manage your physical and mental energy.
This requires that you plan and take the breaks you need.
It is not possible to define an optimal break length for all individuals, as everyone is different.
However, it is essential to plan the length of these breaks and not make excuses for not taking them.
Many people say they don’t have time to take breaks because the pace of their work doesn’t allow them to do so.
However, these same people don’t realize that the fewer breaks they take, the less productive they are at work.
If you let your workplace define your breaks, you reduce your productivity and increase your stress.
Depending on your level of autonomy at work, try to take the breaks you need.
If someone tries to prevent you from taking breaks, as is the case with some overly stressed managers, explain to them that the quality of your work also depends on your breaks or advise them to read one of my articles on productivity and time management.
To learn more about productivity, I recommend you check my article on 13 scientifically proven tips to become organized or my article on 14 tips to be more productive.
5 – Set intermediate goals to achieve each month
In the previous tips, I pointed out the importance of setting your most important goals in advance.
Among these goals, some can be achieved within the current year, but others will require more time.
You can greatly increase your chances of achieving your goals on time by scheduling intermediate monthly goals for each of your important goals.
This is important for several reasons.
Having an in-between goal can increase your motivation to keep doing your best day after day to move closer to your goal.
On the other hand, while an ambitious goal may discourage some people who see it as impossible to achieve, an intermediate goal may be perceived as easier to accomplish.
Moreover, an intermediate goal allows you to adapt your strategy to the difficulties you encounter in real-time. This allows you to avoid wasting time and energy.
Conclusion on how to organize your agenda
In this article, I shared with you 5 practical tips on how to organize your agenda in order to improve your productivity, reduce your stress and reach your goals faster.
If you are interested in the topic of productivity, I invite you to discover all my articles on productivity.
If you are looking for tools to improve your time management skills, I recommend you read my article on the best time management apps.
To take advantage of the expertise of a time management coach, write to us using our contact form, call us at 06 69 46 03 79 or contact us on WhatsApp at +33 6 69 46 03 79.
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Français : Comment organiser votre agenda professionnel ou personnel