The skills you ACTUALLY need to plan your time: Part 2

There's what you THINK you need to plan your time, what you ACTUALLY need to plan your time and what's standing in the way of you planning your time effectively. For the next 3 days, we're going to dive into the 3 skills you need to have in order to plan your time well so you can stop spending your time on what isn't working and shift into what will.

Let's start with what you might be thinking it takes to plan your time well: a planner or calendar, identifying what you need to do, and putting those things in your calendar. 

Depending on which time management strategies you've tried before or which programs you've purchased, it might be more intricate than this, like: deciding ahead of time how long each thing will take, identifying urgent/not urgent/important/not important, doing, planning, delegating, or eliminating tasks, writing things as what you will produce in that given time, or identifying the five main things you'll accomplish today - to name a few. 

These are all great strategies but if you're here, they probably aren't working for you. At least not consistently.

Here's why: planning well requires you to consider how you'll most likely be thinking and feeling (both emotionally and energetically) in the future. AND it requires you to make decisions on what you'll do in the future, not for who you are now but who you want to become.

It's no wonder that planning well is a challenge! We're planning for someone we don't yet know for things we have never done before! 

And to top it all off, our brains naturally want to fight against us.  That's because our brain likes to repeat the familiar. Anything new that registers as requiring energy, potentially painful in some way (either emotionally or physically), and not full of enjoyment and pleasure, our brain interprets as potentially life threatening. 

When you want to get frustrated with yourself for not being able to plan better, just remember, you're fighting your own biology. And like anything else you want to get good at, this is a practice. You will get better!

Here's why you haven't gotten better with planning yet: you're judging yourself for not being better. Learning cannot coexist with judgement. Drop into curiousity and see what you can learn about the latest plan you made. What was great about it? What didn't work as well as you had hoped? What will you learn and take into your next plan?

When you're curious and you drop into learning everything you can from your fails - whether it's with planning or any goal you're after - not only does it feel better, but you also create what you want to create much faster (and easier). If you loved this and you want to learn more about how to plan well, schedule a consult to see if we're a good fit to work together.