Overplan Your Day

Want to increase your productivity? Overplanning your day will help you stay focused.
We all know how important it is to plan our time and make the most of it. But sometimes we shortchange ourselves by not paying enough attention to planning our daily activities.
Work expands to fill the time allotted. If you plan to accomplish one task on a particular day, you'll accomplish that task. But that task will have consumed a lot more time than it would have if you had other goals to accomplish that day, too.
If you plan to accomplish three tasks in a day, you'll get all three of them done. If you plan to accomplish twelve tasks in a day, chances are good you won't complete them all, but you'll get seven or eight of them done.
The more we have on our plates, the more we're likely to accomplish. Overplanning your day will provide a pressure to get more done, and to do that, you'll be more likely to delegate and be less tolerant of interruptions. Instead of lollygagging or giving in to distractions, you'll stay focused on what you have to do.
Planning to do more than you can actually accomplish in one day will help you concentrate on the tasks at hand, and give you a real sense of accomplishment when you discover that you can accomplish so much more than you thought you could.
By Susan Ward