How to simply plan your days to reach your goals

What are some of your daily, weekly, and monthly goals?  What thoughts come to mind when creating a plan to reach these goals?  Let's talk about the nitty gritty of planning, your schedule, and tracking. When helping my clients plan each day we focus on four simple steps: 

1. We write down what we say we're going to do. 

2. We do the actual thing. 

3. We allow the urges that come up.

4. We then repeat that process.

The fourth step is probably the most important because it takes CONSISTENCY. 

Repeating the above steps day to day, and experimenting with what works and what doesn't.  My clients have tried several different planning methods that simply didn’t work.  Many have brought me their own schedules they whipped together, they've tried creating spreadsheets, or they just weren’t taking any steps towards trying to plan their days.  

I knew I needed to help them get organized in some way, so I put together a weekly schedule worksheet that I give my clients, and that you can also download for free in my online trainings.  I also have a daily time tracker that has been very beneficial for me and those I work with!

So what’s so great about the daily time tracker? 

It’s all about your planned result and your actual result.  When we're planning our day, we're not just putting down “writing time”, right? We don’t say to ourselves “I'm just going to write that paper I'm working on between 6:00 AM and 8:00 AM.” 

This is a planned result.  The point is it's not just writing time, and it's not just what we're going to do during that time. It is what we are going to achieve. What are we actually going to accomplish?

For example, I wrote 500 words or I posted that piece or I sent those emails. That's the plan result. The reason I put it in two columns on the worksheet is so that you can track your actual results. And this is the part where we can see what actually happened. 

You might say that you plan to do something at 8:00 AM over on this column, but we want to see what you actually did from 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM. 

Sometimes my clients will say, “I'm going to answer emails during that time, and then I'm going to answer the emails for my students”. Then they’ve spiraled into a rabbit hole, and ended up watching multiple YouTube videos or scrolling endlessly through social media. And then before they know it, it's almost 10:00 AM and they only have minutes until the next meeting. When we talk about actual results, we would mark that down. We would put on the worksheet: I went down the social media rabbit hole.

If that's true, what happened in those moments?  What urge did we have to get distracted with something else, instead of doing the tasks that we said we were going to do?  It’s time to figure this out! 

Remember, sometimes you need to focus on the daily piece, and other times you need to step back and look at the bigger picture, or monthly goal. 

What are we talking about here? It’s all of those layers I work on with my clients.  The four steps.  You can follow these steps and do them yourself, BUT I'm more than happy to talk about this process with you!  The accountability and cheerleading that you get from me is why my clients decide to hire me.  We all need support and someone we know will push us to achieve our goals!  

Are you interested in learning more about other topics I help coach my clients in?  Make sure you're on my email list if you're not already, and you can receive weekly emails with my expert advice on how you can better manage your time as a busy professor!  Believe me, you will not be disappointed! 

How to Get Started on Improving Your Habits

We all have habits we want to improve.

Often our habits overlap too. We may have eating habits, exercise habits, cleaning and organizing habits that we want to start. Gretchen Rubin calls this list of common habits the "essential seven" because so many people want to work on them.

But how do we get started on changing our behavior?

That's the topic of this week's video. Check it out below.

I'm excited to talk to you today about how to get started to improve your habits and this is a really common technique, but something that gets overlooked too often and something I even forget to do myself sometimes.

Monitor what you’re doing now

When you want to improve a habit you want to change your behavior, one of the first things we want to know is what are you currently doing? And that means, are you tracking or monitoring your current behavior? I see this a lot with clients when they say, “I want to take control of my time” or “I want to change my schedule.” And I say, “Well, what does today look like?” “What did yesterday look like?” “What are you doing tomorrow?” And all of those moments seemed to be lost. They're not sure and maybe they can get a little bit of it, but without tracking, writing it down or putting it in their phone, they struggle to see where the time has really gone. It's such a powerful step to see all this in person when you can see it on paper, see it on your phone, in a document.

Change your behavior based on what you see

Some ways that this – this has really helped me two ways specifically even here in 2017, one would be that I knew I wanted to know where my extra money was going, that extra income of things I could spend whatever I want on.

But I resisted apps on my phone about it like, “I'm not gonna use that app. I'm just not feeling it out.” But my planner, my paper planner this year actually has a spot to track that extra money. And so, I was just able to write down every day here's what I spent and I get into that routine. Sure enough, all of that financial advice they say about lattes add up, yeah, they really do. And so, I was able to see not only do they add up, I can see exactly where they add up for me specifically, so things like that. That's one way I use the power of tracking in the past couple of months.

Watch good habits snowball

The other way would be from trying to brush my dog's teeth. I have two dogs, Calvin and Rosie, and the vet of course recommends brushing their teeth every day and I thought I probably only brush their teeth maybe once a month when I think about it, which is pretty bad I suppose. But I hadn't thought about this and I said, “Okay. I'm going to track when I brush their teeth.” And I have something on the side of my fridge where I can use a little dry erase marker. And I said, “Okay, I'm going to track.”

And I got excited to get the momentum going of wanting to check off all seven days of the week and then it snowballed of course, right? Because I want all seven days, I want the gold star so to speak – gold star junkie if we haven't met – literally, I give them out to my students – so, I wanted to check it off and then I could start to see the benefits. After a couple of weeks of brushing my dog's teeth every day, I could see that this really is helpful to them and I could make it part of my routine. But it was only through tracking and monitoring that I was able to enact those two behaviors.

So I want to ask you today, what is something that you want to work on in your life – a habit and how can you track it?

Is it on paper? Is it on your phone? Is it a recommitment to tracking that you've tried to track before but haven't been able to do it? What might it be?

I look forward to hearing from you about what you're tracking or monitoring and this new thing that you want to change.

Share your thoughts in the comments!