Summary
Would you believe me if I told you that the most important part of your day actually happens the night before?
A common trait of many top performers that I know is that they all block out a chunk of time each evening to ruthlessly review and scrutinize how they plan to spend their time the next day. They know that their days are finite and too precious to spend with any uncertainty about what to do or work on next.
I have adopted the tactic of using a daily efficiency planner to prioritize and map out what I will be focused on the next morning. This ensures that I immediately hit the ground running from the moment I wake up. If you are going to make the effort to wake up early each day, you owe it to yourself to ensure that you use each minute to its maximum utility.
Read on to learn more about how you prepare to win each day – by starting the night before.
Transcript
600 Seconds.
Doesn’t sound like a lot of time, does it? And yet carving out just ten minutes a day to focus on your priority goals can make a big impact on driving toward your long-term goals.
Maximize The Use of Your Time
The key to maximizing even such a small chunk of time is efficiency. If you know how to wring the most value possible out of every minute, you can indeed make such small blocks of time really count. This is why I am a bit of a zealot for efficiency. I swear by my Daily Efficiency Organizer, which helps ensure that I control each day – not the other way around. I use it to list my goals and projects that I am driving toward completion of, as well as the contacts that I need to make them a reality, my “must do” activities of the day, and any standing appointments. Having my priorities and associated actions reflected in an easy to understand tool helps me to hit the ground running each morning.
Especially in the day of perpetual connectivity, you will find no shortage of demands and requests for your time crossing your path at all hours. If you aren’t deliberate about how you use the power of your email and social media tools, you can very easily spend your days – and consequently your years – simply playing “catch up” on other peoples’ priorities. The truth is that there is always an amount of busywork and nonsense drifting around out there vying for your attention. You need to be ruthless about isolating these “make work” activities from your real agenda. If you don’t make decisions about how your time is spent, plenty of others will be more than happy to do that deciding for you.
The 10 Minute Game Plan
The key here is to spend ten minutes each evening reviewing how you will be approaching your game plan for the next day. How many of us simply wake up and let the day happen? All of a sudden, the evening has come and we are no closer than we were to achieving our goals when the sun came up.
This planning extends to matters that you might consider to be minutia like your choice of clothing or lunch for the day. But recognize that your decision-making abilities can become sapped quickly if you allow yourself to be overwhelmed by making too many choices. This is one reason why some busy professionals elect to always wear the same gray or black suits – it frees them up for more pressing and consequential decisions that they need to be making.
Laying out these choices in the evening will allow you to quickly hit the ground running when the sun comes up. You want to spend your time in the morning to the best effect, since so many successful people are – either by nature or by willpower – morning people. Those uninterrupted hours each morning give you excellent opportunities to write undisturbed, exercise at an emptier gym, or even spend time meditating or mentally preparing yourself for the challenges of the day.
If you spend part of these ten minutes each night scripting out time chunks for your schedule the next day, you will know exactly how to prioritize what you need to get done. This includes segmenting these activities so you know which ones are absolute “must’s” and which could potentially come down from the schedule if there is a conflict.
Build A Consistent Routine
It will help if you are going to sleep around the same time and striving for a consistency in your schedule. It will help enormously to ensure that you approach each day feeling relaxed and energized. Sleep deprivation is an enormous drain on health and productivity. Too many hard-charging types continue to brag about putting in long hours and running on no sleep, when they would very likely achieve much more on their plates if they were taking care of themselves through a healthy balance of sleep, exercise, and eating right. Working for yourself can obviously mean long hours, but it’s incumbent upon you to set limits for your schedule and your energy. Burning out will do you little good in reaching the heights you want to attain.
It makes no sense to tackle each day focused on how you can grow your financial wealth if you aren’t also keeping an eye on the most important resource of all – your time. Unlike dollars and cents, the hours that spend can never be replenished (at least, we haven’t come up with a way yet). Don’t spend an hour carelessly if you would never dream of throwing away money in the same frivolous way. It all adds up to a quality life over the long run if you are thoughtful about where you are investing yourself.
Prioritize and Set Boundaries
As you consider what will be on the top of your list the next day, try to focus on the most impactful activities possible. These very likely involve the “bread and butter” of your skill set. This means that if you are a writer, the bulk of your time should be spent in writing; programmers should be coding. Activities like meetings, on the other hand, can often grow exponentially to demand your time. Obviously many meetings serve critical functions in allowing teams to work together and collaborate, but many meetings are just called and maintained out of inertia or an inability to take a hard look at how time is best spent. Be ruthless about what meetings are good uses of your time – don’t be afraid to request copies of meeting minutes instead or dialing in over the phone so that you can keep momentum on other priorities. Make your default response to new requests a “no” unless you can communicate to yourself how this use of your life will either benefit you, fit into your core values, or bring you true pleasure. Setting boundaries can feel unnerving sometimes – many people will go along with any demands or norms to avoid rocking the boat. It can be uncomfortable sometimes to suggest halving a meeting or cutting to the essential agenda point, but it is necessary to keep the momentum of your day moving. Even though you may upset some folks with being this deliberative with your time, you may also ultimately gain their respect and provide an example they will want to emulate.
Setting boundaries on your time can be expedited with a number of “hacks” to defend your time. You may want to institute a firm policy of not answering the phone or immediately getting sucked into emails. You can instead carve out specific times of day for responding to these communications so that you are writing back from a place of having had time to think about what you want to say, rather than reacting when someone else happened to contact you. (Or you may prefer to respond to all communications immediately in rapid-fire fashion – it all depends upon your personal preferences.) Be diligent about screening out folks who want to drop in on you – simple cues like answering the phone standing up or not inviting chit-chat will help convey that you need to be moving along to your next priority rather than engaging in endless small talk.
Try it out tonight. Spend some time looking at the overview of the next day and ask yourself – how can I make it the most effective day possible? How can I make this day a masterpiece?
Be sure to share with us the strategies you are already using to streamline your schedule. You can also learn more by visiting my website: tonyneumeyer.com and registering to receive free trainings articles and more. Also subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Facebook. You can get your copy of The 7 Minute Millionaire and check out my other books here: https://tonyneumeyer.com/books/.
