Manage Your Day to Manage Your Life

Life is nothing but a collection of approximately 32,850 days, each one starting afresh every morning. If you can learn to manage your day, you are more likely to end up with a satisfying life.

It must have been around 15 years back when I happened to read the master book by Stephen Covey, The Seven habits of Highly Effective People. There is one learning from that book that stuck. It stuck so rigidly that it is a part of most of my planning activities in my daily life since then.

Let me summarise the learning.

He took a big glass bowl, around 6-7 big rocks (around the size of a football), and 20-30 smaller rocks (around the size of a table-tennis ball). Rocks were not perfect spheres like football or table tennis ball, but were of haphazard shapes, as rocks usually are.

In Part-1 of the example, he first put all the smaller rocks in the bowl and followed it up with the big rocks. It was clearly visible that the bowl was not big enough to incorporate all the small and big rocks.

In Part-2 of the same example, he emptied the same bowl, but this time, he put the big rocks in first, and then followed it up with the smaller ones. And guess what, the same bowl could not only fit in all the rocks but had some spare space as well.

What was the learning?
Big things first. Smaller things later.
Small ones can adjust to the available space, while big ones cannot.

The same goes for the basic principle of creating a list of tasks to manage your day. The big (or the most important) tasks should get first into your task list, and the smaller (or less important ones) can be adjusted somewhere in between the schedule. 

With experience, I have learned that there is another strong reason to follow this golden rule. If your Task list schedule goes haywire, which it will in most days, at least you would have completed the important tasks of the day.

So, to manage our day, we essentially need 3 things:
1/ An Application: To help us manage our tasks.
2/ Task List: List of Tasks with clearly defined priorities (High, Medium or Low) (Big, Medium & Small Rocks)
3/ Rules: A set of rules that we must strictly adhere to.

1. APPLICATION

You need an application or a system, which allows you to:
1/ Enter your tasks quickly along with the date and time when it should occur
2/ Reschedule them quickly
3/ Enter repeated occurrences - like daily, weekly, etc.
4/ Enter for any date in the past and future
5/ Set priority
6/ Set the time of the task occurrence.
7/ Shows you the tasks segregated for today, and arrange ether as per priority or as per time assigned.
8/ Haver a centralized storage so that you can enter/update tasks from anywhere - mobile, laptop, any device.
9/ Automatically move the completed and repetitive tasks to the next occurrence e.g. next day for daily repeating tasks.

Which App?
There are hundreds of free and paid apps available. Recently, the one which I truly found very useful (after many trials) is Tick-Tick. I have been using this for almost a year now, and it is the best so far.

Why App?

A system takes off the pressure you have put on your brain and offloads all the stuff to itself. With an efficient system in place, you are letting the system do the memorization and reminding work, while you focus your energies on applying logic in solving problems.

2. TASK LIST

Tasks can include the big rocks like writing a book (which will be a daily repeating task), or medium rocks like cleaning my almirah (which repeats once a week) to even smaller rocks like calling someone on his/her birthday (which will be yearly repeating task)

Here are some of my typical Big & Medium Rocks with their time schedule clearly staggered across the day. It is important to assign them the time first, and the smaller rocks can fit in somewhere in between later on.

4 am: Listen to Gurbani / Jaap / Spiritual Talk
5 am: Write my latest Book
6 am: Exercise, Yoga, Walk
7 am: Veg. Gardening / Kitchen Gardening / Kalpavriksha
8 am: Self Talk, Recommitment
8:30 am: Breakfast
9 am: Early Morning Calls
10 am: Power Nap
11 am: Respond to Emails
12:30 pm: Learn new stuff
1:30 pm: Day Chores
2:00 pm : Lunch / Movie
3:00 pm: Household Activities
3:15 pm: ELITE Reviews
4:00 pm: Read a new Book / Learn new stuff
5:00 pm: Local Mkt / Family Time
6:00 pm: Spare time for innovative stuff
7:00 pm: Calls
9:00 pm: Dinner / Family Time
10:30 pm: Night Chores
11:00 pm: Sleep

Smaller Rocks like calling someone, reminding someone, online banking tasks, online shopping tasks, etc. are all listed as tasks and completed in between the day. Nothing is left to the brain. It is all documented and executed. The mind is relaxed and free - to do better things in life.

3. RULES

The deeper you go to set the rules, the better will be the efficiency of your day, and therefore, your life.

Now, the rules that you must strictly adhere to:

1/ Tasks should appear in a sequence in your application. The screen on your mobile or desktop should show you at most 7 to 10 tasks in the queue. Seeing the entire list can be overwhelming and therefore demotivating at times for some people.

2/ Sequencing of the tasks should be arranged depending on either your priority or your time assigned. e.g. for me, writing the next book comes as the 2nd task of the day (the task starts around 5 am in the morning). The first task starts sharp at 4 am.

3/ You are not allowed to move from Task 1 to Task 2 unless you have completed Task 1, or you are 100% convinced that Task 1 cannot be executed right now.

4/ Resist the temptation to go to easier tasks or smaller rocks first. There will always be a set of tasks that are easier. But that is what we were doing without the list. Now, we want to do important tasks first, even if it means doing a lesser number of tasks per day.

5/ Mark Task 1 as Done, as soon as it is done so that it is off your list immediately. Seeing the tasks go off the list has a big positive psychological impact.

6/ Take a mini-break (1 to 3 minutes) between each big task. Reward yourself with fruit, shake, or something delicious.

7/ There will be times when you will find the current task extremely boring. In exceptional cases, you can move to the task just after that, but never beyond it.

8/ At the end of the day, learn from the day and retune your tasks for their timings and their repetition, and/or their priority.

9/ Slowly, try and become more efficient by doing multiple tasks at a time e.g. I do my walk and listen to Gurbani from 4 am to 5 am every morning (use a headphone to listen while walking)

10/ Nothing is cast in stone. You know yourself and your situation the best. You can even tune the above rules in a way that helps you become more efficient.

With the above trio of Application-Tasks-Rules, you can definitely take better charge of your day. A better day leads to a better week, which leads to a better month, a better and therefore a much better and satisfying life.

Regards

Manoj Arora
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