Planning for the Day

Working according to a preset plan is always better than haphazard working. Since, today is the most important time-frame in a person’s life-time, planning for the day is the most important element of planning for a life-time.

Every day, we perform three types of activities – developmental leading to new frontiers in life, essential routines which have to be performed under all circumstances, and formal routines.which may be left out if time and other resources do not permit.

From a general observation of the tasks to be performed, it looks appropriate to finish essential routines first. With this, it often happens that we spend the whole day in these routines only leaving nothing to developmental activities. As we perform essential routines, more and more activities, may be from the formal routines, keep on entering this arena which keep us engaged. This make the strategy undesirable.

Since, developmental activities are important for progress, we must pay our utmost attention to these. But these can not be undertaken leaving behind the essential routines. To solve this problem, we must devote some time to estimate, based on our resources, the time needed for performing essential routines. Now subtract this time from the total available time, and thus get the time we may devote for developmental activities.

After this estimate, start your day with developmental activities but limit your involvement for the period estimated above for these activities. After that, go on for your essential routines. This strategy ensures that you keep yourself limited to what is really essential and don’t allow yourself to drift to formal routines performing as essential routines.

This strategy ignores your formal routines. To compensate for this, fix a day in every week when you will devote some of your time to these formalities at the cost of developmental activities.

For example, I have three types of activities for every day of mine on Internet –

Essential Routine – Replying to email messages.

Developmental Activities – Reading other Blogs and Writing on my Blogs.

Formal Routines – Social Networking.

Everyday, I devote myself to my Internet activities for a period of 6 hours. My email messages take 2 hours of my time. With this, I must start my day with reading other blogs and writing on mine and keep busy with these activities for 4 hours. Then, I must take up replying my email messages for the balanced 2 hours. To limit myself to two hours, I have to limit myself to important messages only ignoring others looking like spams. Every Sunday, I devote 3 hours to social networking so that my developmental activities are there for 3 hours only. Thus, my two hours time remains intact for replying my email messages.