Plan ahead and organize

I never planned when I was in school. That's just how I rolled. Now I know what I missed. 

Myths about planning that I bought into [not anymore]

1. It’s not flexible
2. It takes time
3. It won’t work (I just knew it instinctively. Bad instincts!!)
4. It’s all in my head. 
5. Eh. I don’t know (sadly, the most popular)

Here’s the thing. 

Give it just one day. We spend hundred of hours on candy crush and angry birds. Just spend 5 minutes (it won’t probably even take that long) to plan out what you are going to do / learn/study tomorrow. This is important. You have to plan a day in advance. Sleep on your plan. Wake up and start working on your plan.

That’s it. 

I am not going to give any detailed instructions. I just want to make a plan whichever way you like at night before you sleep and I want you to work on it the next day.

Now go ahead and do it and continue reading after that.

After you did the plan...

I see you still haven't planned. Go. Plan. and continue from here.

For some reason, I have a feeling you still didn't do the exercise but I will continue. But just wanted to tell you that just reading will do you no good. You have to follow through as well. Otherwise, it's almost as good as not having read any of it. 

If you can, come back here and let me know in the comments how it worked for you. Tell me what you accomplished and how you accomplished and how much time and effort it took.

Why does it work?

The first important reason is to make the list before you sleep. When you make the list at night, your brain works in subconscious how to work on the list the next day. So you make your day better literally while you sleep. 

The second reason is clear objectives. A list gives you clear objectives. These clear objectives are really hard to impose on yourself unless there is an immediate danger. That’s why people often keep doing urgent tasks first which may or may not be important and relevant to their long term goals. 

The third reason why it works is that when you write the tasks down, you stop thinking about all of them and it helps you focus on just the one task at the top of your list. It frees up your mind of all the unnecessary noise and clutter of remembering stuff. With that, your memory is freed up and you can now think of the actions you need to do the task at hand. 

How to plan?

Plan every day in advance – this seems too rigid for most people. However, if you keep on conceding to every urgent (not important) demand, you won’t find time to do things which are important and really matter.

Take a few minutes, preferably the night before, to plan out every activity of the coming day. You need to keep following two simple basics for planning:

1. Always work from a list.
2. Always think on paper.

Self-discipline

In the words of Brian Tracy “Self-discipline is the ability to make yourself do, what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not."

Most people can do things when they feel like doing them. Great people, however, do things even when they don't want to.

It’s not just willpower. It’s how they set their mind.

Great people think long term and associate pleasure with the result. Slackers associate with the pain of the action and focus on short term pleasures. 

Track time spent

This is very basic and one of the most important thing you can do. Just keeping a record to see where your time went will have a massive impact on your productivity. The idea is not to modify behavior, the idea is to just notice. Behavior modification will follow itself. It's just like meditation - you observe anger or a negative emotion from a distance, and the emotion just evaporates. Keeping food logs and taking pictures of what you eat works the same way. People get thinner by just clicking their food. It’s not magic. It’s just about being aware.

Most people are clueless about where their time went. You don't want to be in that category. 

Tracking gives you the information on which it’s easy to act. Running on autopilot, usually, doesn’t do that. Awareness is the key word here. 

Prioritize

If you have multiple goals, once written, you need to prioritize them in order of importance. Prioritizing will help you to align your actions accordingly. 

That's important because it's not possible to achieve all the goals with equal intensity at the same time. Every time you have a conflicting decision regarding various goals, all you would need to do is see your prioritized goals and you would be able to make decisions quickly – one of the key qualities of consistent high performers – making right decisions QUICKLY. 

Separate urgent from important

We have a habit of being busy nowadays. Everybody is busy. But most people are busy doing stuff that doesn't matter. They are focussed on doing the things that are immediately in front of them, not the things that actually matter - things which are important. 

It's a very vicious time trap, one that you have to know in order to escape from it. The following table gives an idea of things which are urgent and/or important from a student's perspective.

Brian Tracy says - There isn’t enough time to do everything. However, there’s always enough time to do most important things. 

Chose your tasks carefully

Robert Fulghum — 'Anything not worth doing is worth not doing well.'

Most successful people chose the tasks that will make the biggest gains, not the tasks that make them appear busy. So, if you focus on important things, rest will take care of itself. The idea is to do things which are effective, not to do things efficiently, when they won't give you as good results.

If you are working effectively, you can be inefficient and still be miles farther than someone who is being efficient at the wrong things.

Source: http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/08

Start early

Notice: I didn't say start on the very first day something is assigned. Research has shown that if you keep thinking about a problem / what you need to do for some time, it usually works better than if you jump on it immediately. However, 

The above is only for creative tasks.

It's also important to not leave things to the last moment. Pressure is good. It helps you focus. However, the pressure of last moment may also result in shoddy work. So you have to balance it.

For non-creative tasks, it's better to start as early as possible and get them out of the way and free up your mind to do something else. Nobody works best under pressure for this kind of task. Putting off assignments may not only take more time but would result in poor quality as well.

It’s true some people work better under pressure than other people but if compared to ones own self, everybody works better when relaxed.
The reason why many people think they better under pressure is because they don’t let themselves distract themselves by unimportant tasks when working under pressure.

I have seen people turning their cell phones off and locking themselves up to get the task finished at hand. If a similar commitment is shown when not under pressure, you will come up with nothing short of spectacular results.