Plan Your Day Like This If You Get Easily Distracted

If you haven't set up your Month Map yet, start with how I plan my month.

One Priority Per Goal Channel

You've got five different goal channels: work, health, relationships, community, and spirit. For each one, you select the single most important activity. What's the number one thing you want to do in work? You set a duration and add the activity.

For work, say it's create proposal. Put an interval of time. Let's say it's going to be 60 minutes. You add the activity.

Then you go on to your health channel. You could say, okay, I want to go for a walk for 30 minutes. What you want to do is take your best prediction and assumption based on the goals you set at the beginning of the month. Your daily schedule should have the most important things.

This is how you keep yourself focused. If you have ADHD, if you have a hard time focusing, you're not sure how to make sure that you have the right path, well then this is the way that you do it. You clarify, you define.

In relationships, this could be maybe calling a family member or a friend that you need to reconnect with or making time for your kids or your partner. You want to be very intentional and there's an opportunity to have these goals and to have discrete actions that you take every day.

The beauty is that for them to be worthwhile and valuable, they don't have to take a lot of time. And that's the thing, when we make our goals too big, we often are indecisive about them or don't take the action. So you want to quantify your time. You want to put an interval of time. It's not that you're going to get the full result, but you're going to take action towards that goal. And you're going to always make progress. You're always going to learn something.

For community, you define it. It's your unique experience, your unique personality. It's you who are deciding what really is the content in these goal channels. Community could be developing an online community where you're passionate about blogging and writing and sharing your ideas. It doesn't have to be community service or being involved in a religious group. It can be, but that's up to you based on who you are.

For spirit, let's say meditate. Maybe I don't want to do it for 30 minutes, so we can do 21 minutes. For my TM practitioners out there, maybe it's 21 minutes here.

Now you've got 5 activities for the day that are critical and essential. You only want to put the most important things here. I'm not saying you're not going to do anything else. If you're employed, you're going to have other activities and things that you're going to need to do throughout your day.

This is not to create a schedule for everything you need to do. This is the most important things you need to do that are must-haves, that if you do them, then you've made the most progress and traction throughout the day.

Time Intervals That Match Your Deep Work Capacity

Most people, from my own experience, wanted to know, well, how long does it take to actually achieve something? How long does an activity take? If you're writing, if you're creating an email, if you're doing a presentation for work, or if you need to do a training. You want to break your things up into digestible bits, but it's great to know the output you get from an interval of time.

I find that 30 minutes, 60 minutes, and 90 minutes are very helpful units of time. You don't want to go too wide. Cal Newport, in his book Deep Work, talks about how you have really about 3 and a half hours of deep work, deep focus where you can do your most important work. And I like to get all of this work done before 12 o'clock.

Notes Connected to Each Activity

When you're doing the activity, something can happen. You might get a flash of insight or a note that you need to take. That's why it's built right in, that you've got a note that's specific to this goal channel and this activity.

You take this little notepad, you pop it open, and then you might learn something. So whatever insight or whatever feedback you want to give yourself, edit it how you want. You can create bullets. You can put numbers, you can put checklists, which I actually like to do a lot. You can add photos. Maybe you're taking a class, for instance. Maybe you're getting a graduate degree and you want to put screenshots of some recording that the instructor made. You can put it in here and keep your notes.

The difference here is that it's connected to the activity and connected to that goal channel. You can pin it to your dashboard.

Every goal channel has its own note. So even health, if you had an idea that maybe you tried a different route or maybe you did something different with your health goal, you can document it there for each one. And it's archived. So you always have it, you have that note, that journal entry for that task so you can reflect later.

The Timer: Focus Without Multitasking

The Day Map holds you accountable. You have the timer. That's what's really great, you have the visual and feedback, the time element. So when you're creating this proposal, maybe you don't know how long it's going to take, but maybe you need to do 2 sessions, 2 sixty-minute sessions, and you can split it over. But you hit that timer and you see the activity and then you're in it, like you're in it working on the activity.

Don't multitask. Focus on that one thing. There's actually more of a cost to you when you switch between tasks. There's a ramp up to get into the task and a ramp down to get out of the task. So don't set yourself up for failure. Go in and do, when you have that interval of time, commit to it, go all in and do that activity the best you can. It doesn't matter the result. It just matters that you're doing that specific activity for that duration.

The beautiful thing about using time intervals is not only do you have the feedback and you have the track record as completion data, you get to step away from the activity. So there's a relief of pressure. You're not building it up and so stressed out. You get to relieve that pressure. But now you're being very selective and intentional with your time. You know exactly what you're doing.

Daily Notes for Reflection and Ideas

You do have a daily notes section. This is separate than the notes for the activities. This is like your overall notes for the day. Sometimes things will happen or you want to journal or have some other information you want to write down that pertains to the day and it's not to a particular task.

This is like your normal area that you'd write, you journal if you want to journal morning or afternoon, or your stickies, your sticky notes. You just put all that information in here. You can expand it and you have the voice control if you want to jot down things with your voice as well.

It's just a good way to capture your thoughts and ideas. I like to use this when I have different activities to kind of, overall, it might point me in a different direction or have a different overall plan or things that I want to get back to later. That's a good place for this.

Completion Rate and Carry-Over

When you're done with a task, you want to make sure that you mark it off as complete. And this will factor into a completion rate. That's a really important metric that you need to see is how many activities are you completing.

What's beautiful about this too is that if you don't get to it, it will carry over to the next day. So you'll always have it there for you ready when you're ready to do it.

Go to sprygoals.com and get started with your very own Day Map.