How to learn to plan: 4 practical tips

Strategies and guidelines to learn how to plan and organize your time better, step by step.

In the hectic world we live in, we have the feeling that we lack the time to do everything we had planned to do. Work tasks are a priority and mandatory and, of course, we have to do them but, at the expense of them, we often do not enjoy our leisure and interpersonal relationships.

Not planning our time means feeling how the hours, days, weeks and months become smaller and smaller, slipping through our hands while we feel that we are wasting our life without being able to do much to avoid it.

But the truth is that we can change, improve our time management and the tasks we have set ourselves. If you are one of those who wonder how to learn to plan your time betterIf you are interested in this article, the following is of interest to you.

How to learn to plan: 4 psychological keys

Time is that substance, that imaginary fluid that slips through our fingers without us being able to avoid it. It is curious how as we grow older, the passage of time seems to accelerate, to go faster, making what used to be hours now feel like minutes, and minutes like seconds..

Our days go by so fast, they vanish, they fade away while we feel that everything we wanted to do is not finished because the day does not give us enough time to do it.

But there was a time when it did: our childhood. At least for me, when I was a child I had time for everything without even thinking about it or planning it. I would go to school, learn there and do what the teachers told me to do, play at recess without feeling that the break was too short, finish school, get home and do my homework before lunch. The afternoon was wonderful, giving me time to play, study, watch TV and meet up with a friend once in a while.

My child self was, unintentionally, apparently much more responsible and efficient than my adult self, and it was all because of his perception of time. When you are a child the hours are longer than they are, and you don't get the feeling that by doing one thing you lose time for others. At least in my personal case, leisure, personal relationships, hobbies and academic responsibilities were well adjusted and, when I went to bed early, I didn't have the feeling that I had wasted the day.

It is true that when we were little we had our parents behind us, but really, if at that age we were able to manage everything, how can we not be able to manage our time when we grow up? Simply it is simply a matter of learning to plan, to be constant, patient, to know how to differentiate between what is a priority and what is not and to accomplish what we set out to do. Whatever our age, days will still be 24 hours, 1440 minutes and 86,400 seconds. It is up to us to make the most of our time.

But in order to do so, we need to know how to do it...

1. Organizing our lives. The importance of the to-do list

We cannot manage our time well without properly planning our day and, to do this, we have to organize ourselves.. This sounds like a truism, and for many it may be, but in practice people often underestimate the importance of being clear first thing in the morning or first thing in the workday about what needs to be done today/this week.

It often happens that the fact that the day has seemed shorter than it is is due to the fact that we have started it badly. We leave the difficult things for the end, thinking that if we do the easiest and shortest things we will be more motivated and prepared to face the complex things at the end of the day. The problem is that as we have invested all our strength in easy things during the morning, when we get to the most difficult things we are overwhelmed, overwhelmed and we do them reluctantly and poorly.

Other times, what happens, more than having to do with the difficulty, has to do with the problem of not knowing what tasks there are to do. the problem of not knowing what tasks need to be done.. In other words, we do know them in the back of our mind, but since we do not have them written down in a list and we have not made a schedule, as the day goes by we have to remember these tasks. As human memory is not infallible, we may remember to do X or Y late in the day, do it in a hurry and feel frustrated for not having remembered earlier.

Whatever our possible case may be, all this can be solved by doing something very simple. We just need a little time, reflection and patience: a to-do list. Easy, isn't it? Simply by putting on a piece of paper or a mobile application that reminds us of what needs to be done we will be well aware of what tasks, goals or objectives to accomplish throughout the day or week. When we finish one, we will simply have to look at the list and see what the next one is, without going into a crisis or wasting time remembering what was due next.

In this list we will not only put the tasks to do, but also the time we calculate that they will take us. This is very subjective and, in fact, in theory we are more optimistic than in practice. By this I mean that if, for example, we believe that a task is going to take one hour of our lives, the reality is that it will probably take much longer. One recommendation is that, to the time we calculate that we are going to take, we should add 30-45 minutes of courtesy. Thus, if we take longer than expected, we will not despair that we are wasting time on the next task..

Making a list or writing down our tasks in an agenda is something that we should do with some frequency, ideally every day so that we acquire the habit of planning our day already in the morning. In this list of tasks we should also We must also incorporate possible unforeseen events, anything that could cause us to lose time.. This depends more on us and the type of tasks and jobs we do, so it is very important that we remember the unforeseen events we had in the past, noting the time they made us lose and write it down on the list as a potential time to lose.

Tasks within tasks

Once we are clear about the tasks to be performed throughout the day and the associated objectives, it is time to divide them into small activities. The reason for this has to do directly with our motivation.. At least my case is the following: if I have to do a huge task, for which I estimate that I have to spend a lot of time, I start to get very lazy to even start it. It seems that the longer the task is, the longer it takes me to do it.

On the other hand, if I subdivide the same task into small tasks, which will take me say 20 or 30 minutes, I get more motivated and I may even do them all at once without even realizing it. Little by little I make progress and, when I look at everything I have done up to that point, I feel even more motivated to do what is left. Working this way makes me see the glass half full instead of half empty, or in this case, the task half done and close to completion.

Admittedly, this depends very much on the task at hand, but in most cases all of our goals for the day can be subdivided into as many goals as the task at hand.. For example, we have to write a report in our office that we have calculated that at least 2 hours will take us out of our lives. Instead of seeing it like that, let's see it as we have to do 5 sections that will take us 20-30 minutes to do each one. We have turned one big task into 5 smaller ones that motivate us more to do them.

3. Setting priorities

Once we have made the list and we have marked in each one of its sections smaller tasks, the moment arrives to establish priorities. What we consider a priority or not will depend on many things, although one guideline is to prioritize what takes the longest time, basically because leaving the most complicated and heavy for the end of the day, when we are tired for having done the rest of the pending tasks, is going to overwhelm us more. and, on top of that, we will feel that we are doing our job worse.

We should establish the urgency, importance and duration time of each task and evaluate according to these parameters the priority of doing them.. We must be realistic and understand how we work, understanding that if there are things that are really difficult to do, it would be best to prioritize them, lest they accumulate and make us even more overwhelmed by having to do them.

Everyone is free to mark in the way they like the most what indicates what is a priority and what is not. We can use color systems, question marks, underlining, highlighting with a symbol... anything is valid to remind us what is most important. We can also redo the list and put things in order according to their priority and set alarms on our cell phone to warn us of what needs to be done at each hour, so we will not forget to follow the order we have proposed.

Here we insist that all this must be done every day or, at least, with some frequency but, and almost more important than anything else, to respect it. It is absolutely useless to put on a list what we have to do, to indicate the importance of each task and how much time it will take us to do each of them if, afterwards, we do not respect our own planning.

It is true that unforeseen events may occur and we may have to change one task for another during the course of the day, but that's one thing, and another is that we want to start with the easy things and leave the complicated ones to the end. and leave the complicated stuff to the end. This is not a good idea.

4. Planning our life is planning everything

Up to this point I have insisted a lot on work-oriented planning, but that is not the only thing we should organize in our life. Leisure, personal relationships, our hobbies and life goals are all part of life and are aspects that we must also plan for if we want all areas to function as we would like them to if we want all areas to function as we would like them to. if we want all areas to function as we would like them to.

Not everything in life is work and, if we let work absorb us, the frustration of not having time for activities and needs that satisfy us will make us perform worse and be unhappy.

For example, if we have the desire to learn a new language, that should also go on our daily to-do list. The goal of learning the language in question can be broken down into smaller tasks, such as learning new vocabulary, practicing pronunciation or reading a book in the target language. Planning this, breaking it down into quick and easy to do activities, will make us feel like we are achieving this goal we have set for ourselves.

Whatever personal desires we want to fulfill, we cannot ignore them.. Planning our lives applies to absolutely everything and, if we do it and fulfill it, we will feel like we did when we were children and had time for everything. Let's plan our lives as much as possible to feel more productive and happy.