Have you ever noticed how you sleep better when you are prepared for the next day? And have you ever noticed that the best way to get prepared is to know – in advance – how you will be spending your time? It doesn’t take much time to do it. Here’s what I do:
At the end of each day, I go through my priority list of things to do. I then decide which of those I absolutely must to tomorrow. Some of these can have a lower priority than others; that is to say, it’s not a given that I will do all of my top priority items tomorrow and leave all the lower priority ones to another day. We all know what would happen if you followed that thinking!
For example, there maybe some lower priority tasks (compare “buy birthday present” to “finalize presentation for investors”) but your birthday present has a specific deadline that you simply cannot miss. So, with that knowledge, you schedule in a mixture of priorities.
This takes me just 10 minutes at the end of each day. It’s the very last thing I do before I leave my office. And it’s also the very first thing I look at the next morning, as a refresher. In-between, I have very sound sleep with the knowledge that I’ve got my day planned out for me, and that I also have sufficient flexibility should unforeseen events pop up.
In SmartTime, I can organize the next day very easily. I go to SmartView, and I use the Filter to see only Tasks. I then select the Tasks that I must to tomorrow, and I give them a deadline of tomorrow. That way, they move to the top of the queue. I then remove the filter, and go to the Calendar view to see how those SmartTime has scheduled those Tasks to fit in with my existing Appointments. If I want to ‘fix’ the time of some of those tasks – for example, buy that birthday present during my lunch break – then I just drag the Task to the 12:00 time slot and SmartTime automatically converts it into an Event at that time. Sweet!
