How I Deal With My Overambitious Scheduling!
Hey Everyone,
I hope you had an awesome weekend. Today, I want to share some insights about a habit I've noticed in myself—and maybe you've experienced it, too. It’s about setting goals that are too ambitious at the beginning of the week.
Setting the Scene at Start of Week...
At the start of each week, whether on Monday morning or Sunday night. I lay out my game plan with a list of goals and tasks. I have high hopes for what I can achieve, but more often than not, I end up with a task list that keeps growing as new ideas come along.
In fact, I rarely accomplish everything on my list in a single week.
Over the years, I've learned not to be too hard on myself when that happens. The key is to understand that while you can achieve a lot, it’s natural to overestimate what can be done in the time allotted.
My Strategy for Staying on Track.
Here’s how I handle those uncompleted tasks, which tend to happen every week.
- Review and Prioritize: At the end of the week, I review the tasks I didn’t manage to check off. I decide which ones are still important and carry those over to the start of the next week.
- Weed Out the Extras: Some tasks that seem critical initially might lose their importance over time. I weed those out or push them aside to avoid cluttering my schedule.
- Use Task Lists as Idea Lists: I treat my task list as an ongoing idea list. Not every item has to be done immediately. I create a separate side list for tasks that I may tackle later when I have extra time.
If you find yourself setting overly ambitious goals, remember that it’s okay not to complete everything in one week. By reviewing, re-prioritizing, and managing your ideas effectively, you set yourself up to be more productive over time.
I would love to hear your tips and strategies for organizing your week efficiently. Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Recent Comments
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Great advice as always Kyle! I do seem to have an enormous amount of tasks to complete at the beginning of each week as well, but... prioritising the most important ones, no matter how long they take is how I role!!
The rest, well.... they carry over until the next week or month or never!!
Enjoy the rest of your week my friend! :-)
I like your approach. I think a lot of people tend to ditch projects part way into them, to jump to the next thing which leads to a lot of incomplete projects.
Completing the task at hand before moving to the next one is also something that I aim to do, otherwise I find that I am in a state of overwhelm with a lot of partially completed tasks.
I never like to leave 'incomplete' projects for too long Kyle, but....saying that, unfinished projects from the past can move into newer projects for the future as we evolve and adapt want we wish to do moving forward!!
Nothing is ever set in stone for me and I absolutely love the challenges that await in the future! :-)
Hi Kyle,
At the beginning of the week, all my tasks that I want to accomplish throughout the week are in my head. I probably should create a list and write everything down. When I check my stats to see what visitors clicked on from the previous day, sometimes I get ideas for new posts and start researching keywords for another product. So some of my productivity is not preplanned but just happens as a result of what I am currently doing.
Awesome, that is great Sandra. Sounds like you have some good organization naturally built into your schedule, which is great!
I think you have a chronic case of temporal chronologitis - which is an inflammation of the imagination that makes you think there are 48 hours in every day!!
On a more serious note, I'm totally like you - I am forever adding things to my lists on bits of paper. Then I put a star next to the ones I really need to do, then perhaps they get underlined, and finally they are surrounded by a big, black circle!! Then I know I really have to get on with them!
On my site, I've written about the important/urgent matrix which is a much better way of aligning tasks on a daily or weekly basis. The principle is that you draw a matrix like the one in the image below. You have to deal with box 1 first; most of the work that moves you forward fastest is in box 2; box 3 you delegate to others (assuming there are any) and box 4 you ignore.
There's a better explanation on my site if anyone is interested, just PM me and I'll send the link.
I've also been investigating Trello recently and I think that will at least get my scraps of paper and backs of envelopes into a digital format.
We can only see - must dash though - I have to collect my daughter at 32:00 hours on the dot....
Haha, you mean there aren't 48 hours in the day? I could have sworn there was at least that many!
I love your matrix that you have created, very cool. Sounds like you have a good handle on how to effectively manage our natural tendency to overestimate how much we can accomplish in a day.
The thing is my new day with AI typically has 10-15x what my old day has in it. So while I am accomplishing way more, as I get more efficient my brain naturally wants to do beyond what I am capable of. Go figure!
I'm the same - even though I'm doing way more than before, it's still not enough and my brain ideas are in overload.
Even though I try to keep it short, I write a list for the day on Monday that I would like to accomplish. It almost always becomes my list for the week and not the day. LOL
But that is okay. I understand myself and just go with it for the week then. I accomplish way less than I want to, but more than I probably would if I fretted over not being able to cross out Monday.
Excellent, I love doing this on either Sunday or Monday. Organizing my week. I often times use AI for this as well, which leads me to being more efficient than ever. ;)
I agree with your point Kyle of not beating yourself up if you don't do everything on your to-do list. There are always things that, for one reason or another, don't get completed. Accepting that is part of being an Entrepreneur.
However, my system is a little different. I use "Forward Planning" by bringing tasks from the future, breaking them down into bitesize and working on them today.
It takes a lot of planning, discipline and good systems but I no longer have the pressure to complete everything on a to-do list today as they are all tasks for a date in the future. They are a combination of business and personal goals.
Think of it this way, you want to lose weight you don't wait until the deadline date to start a diet. You plan it in advance and each day take action to achieve a future weight loss goal.
Use the same strategy for business and your personal life. Set goals, break the action steps down into bitesize and pull today's to-do from future goals.
The result - better productivity, less stress and work life balance.
Absolutely Karen, and well said. I think we all have a tendency to put too much onto our schedule, and how we schedule that will dictate our productivity. ;)
Good morning Kyle,
Thank you for your scheduling tips, it's always good to hear how successful people schedule their work week.
Like you, I rarely complete all my tasks, but it's good to have goals to work to. I believe that many of us set overambitious goals, but I guess it's better that way than the other way.
If we have too much on, I feel that overwhelm can step in, which is definitely a negative. Distractions for me can also interfere with schedules, when I'm in the flow, I like to keep it that way!
Have a great week.
Roy
Yes, Kyle, this resonates with me. Thank you for sharing your productivity habits.
As I mentioned in a previous post to someone else, I write "tickets" -- post it notes placed where I can see them: three bullet points -- "Create Post, "How to become a successful affiliate marketer?; Breathe; Stretch . . . etc. Done.
I use a sharpie.
Once a ticket has been "fulfilled," I put two lines across and write in between, "Done."
I love work -- meaningful work.
When I get stuck, I read.
Last night I found a free sample of a book on Google Books.
Cheers,
Kyle, I have a laundry list of things that I want to accomplish, and that list continues to grow. My content calendar at this point is simply a suggestion.
Like you, I get started on one task, and realize that in order to get the first task finished, I have to undertake another task. That second task leads to a third, and a fourth.
Yesterday's YouTube video ended up being a "short" at 57 seconds. I learned that you cannot add a "custom" thumbnail to a short. It can't be done from your phone either! Things you didn't know that you didn't know.
My FB post promoting the video was sitting there waiting for a link. I got cranking on extending the video, and noticed the color scheme was off. My brand kit was not updated in Canva. It wasn't updated because over the weekend, I updated my site colors and fonts.
I would also like to give a shout out to everyone who kept telling my my logo was "too busy". As part of the overhaul, after almost 2 years my logo was finally simplified (thanks Teri). So now my fonts, colors, and logos are "modern" according to ChatGPT. How this came about is a a post for another time. It was from another one of those Shiny New Thing moments that ate most of my Saturday.
Based on what I learned Saturday, I have also adopted the position (right or wrong) to publish my videos to "unlisted" first, giving it 24 hours to simmer in the YouTube vat before serving it up to the general public.
Needless to say, FB is still waiting for the YouTube link.
I have a ChatGPT session that is simply my ideas that I want to accomplish. I check in at the end of the day and say, I did this, and this and this, but not this, please add that to my list of things to do and reprioitize everything, adding in anything that I may have missed.
Those additions along with my thoughts has a never ending supply of things to get done. I mentioned that I had a content calendar?
So no, I can't get down on myself for not accomplishing everything. ChatGPT keeps giving me more to do!
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Hi Kyle!
Thanks for the sage advice!
Indeed, at the beginning of the week we think that we can accomplish so much more than we actually can but then reality catches up with us and we realize that we need to do some reassessment.
As you so rightfully said, we can not be too hard on ourselves because sometimes things out of our control get in the way of us accomplishing our tasks.
Therefore, it is wise of us to carryover the unaccomplished important tasks of the past week to the new week, and discard the ones that are no longer important or put them on hold to be completed at a later time and move on.
Have a great week ahead! Wishing you the very best!
Kind regards,
Nichola