Planning your day effectively is the difference between going to bed at night feeling accomplished and satisfied, as opposed to tossing and turning due to feelings of frustration and guilt over another day wasted.

In an age full of constant distractions, it is important now more than ever before to plan your day in advance to ensure that you get the most out of it. 

Whether you’re a student, a parent, a business owner or in full-time employment, you need to set yourself up for daily success which will ultimately lead to your long-term success; and you do this through effective planning and sticking to that plan.

Throughout my own journey in business over the past 5+ years, I’ve fallen and failed many times. At the same time, however, I’ve learnt and grown so much.

We started our online arbitrage business based in our living room; we’re now based in our own 10,000 square foot warehouse, where, as you can imagine, things are more complex than ever before. My main takeaway from all of this is that without meticulously planning each and every working day, none of this would have been possible.

So how can you plan your day to be as efficient and effective as possible?

Here’s my method...

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1. CREATE ULTIMATE VISIONS

Create an ultimate life vision

Start with creating an ultimate vision for your life. After all, if you know where you’re going, it will be much easier to get there.

Imagine yourself in the future, coming towards the latter stages of your life. Looking back on your life from this perspective, what is the story you want to be able to share with others? What have you experienced in your life? What have you achieved? What have you created?

Take all of the answers from above and transform it into one paragraph, that you can refer to as often as you need. This is your ultimate life vision.

Create an ultimate business vision

You can then go on to create an ultimate business vision. Looking back in 40/50/60 years, what was the ideal business you created? What was its purpose? Who did you serve? What did you achieve? How far did your impact go?

Again, create a one-paragraph statement of your ultimate business vision and make it as powerful and impactful as possible. DREAM BIG. Use this as your focus to create daily, weekly, monthly and yearly visions for your business.

Create a daily vision

Now that you’ve done the above, you can begin to hone in and focus your attention on what’s most important on a daily basis to bring you closer and closer to your vision. This takes us to the next step...

2.ORGANISE YOUR TASKS

You now need to focus on deciding on and organising your tasks on a day-by-day basis. Remember, every task in one way or another needs to be one that feeds into your ultimate vision.

I divide my tasks into the following categories:

Maintenance tasks

These are tasks that maintain your business - they keep everything ticking over smoothly (e.g. managing your emails, regularly ordering products...etc.) but don’t necessarily aid in the growth of your business. These are tasks that need to be done but don’t have to be completed by you. These are the kinds of tasks that can be outsourced - and those that aren’t, I factor into my daily schedule.

Growth tasks

If you’re serious about developing and growing your business, these are the tasks that will take your business to the next level. Whether that’s developing systems, developing your team or focussing on your marketing to bring in new custom, it is highly important to focus much of your attention on your growth tasks.

I have one growth task that is instrumental in taking me to my ultimate vision. This is what gets me out of bed ready and pumped to take on the day, every day. I then make sure I factor in three growth tasks every single day to ensure that every day is a great success.

3. SCHEDULE YOUR DAY

Now you know what needs to be done, it’s time to meticulously schedule and organise your days. For me, this means that from the moment I wake up through to my night-time routine, I know exactly what I’m planning to do in each and every hour. I am intentional about my day.

If you set yourself a schedule for your day and write it down somewhere that you can see or refer to easily, you are more likely to stick to it. What gets scheduled more often than not gets DONE.

Fitting in perfectly here, I wanted to share the idea of Deep Work Sessions with you. These are set times in the day (e.g. 11 am - 12 pm, 2 - 3 pm) where you go all in and focus on one particular task with no distractions whatsoever. This is where you do your ‘deep work’, as per the title, and I honestly find these sessions of so much benefit. Schedule in at least 2 deep work sessions every day.

4. LIMIT YOUR DISTRACTIONS

I know this pretty much speaks for itself, but I just wanted to highlight how important this is.

As parents, or business owners, or even just due to the fact that we’re living in the 21st century and are constantly surrounded by new technology, our world today is FILLED with distractions. 

If you’re serious about making your day as effective, productive and successful as possible, you need to cut out the noise. Especially during your deep work sessions.

Log out of social media, turn your phone onto airplane mode, put a ‘do not disturb’ sign on your office door and put yourself in the ‘taking massive action’ mindset. Do whatever you know needs to be done to ensure that you can get the most done.

Some final thoughts…

So above you have my philosophy of how to effectively plan each day. Commit yourself and stick to the above and you WILL see progress.

Finally, to summarise, here are the rules that I stick by daily to ensure I get the most from my days:

1. Know your ultimate goals
2. Be very specific
3. Be intentional
4. Get everything in your calendar done - including appointments with yourself
5. Have deep work sessions
6. Limit all distractions

I hope you can take something from these tips on how to plan your day effectively for success.

For more help and guidance in this area, get my Massive Action Manifesto absolutely FREE here.

As John Wooden said, “Make each day your masterpiece.”

Take massive action and you will achieve massive success.

Kev