The Benefits of a Day Plan [with downloadable template]

In our distracted world, we tend to underestimate the benefits that time planning can bring to our lives. Making the time to write a Day Plan could vastly improve your work-life balance and can transform your stress levels, focus, productivity and overall happiness. Here are the benefits:

Helps you manage your time

Do you often run out of time and not get everything done? This is most likely because you are not planning your time effectively. Many people will go from one task to the next without thinking about what they need to do that day and what their priorities are. Using a Day Plan means that you can schedule each task, event, appointment or meeting, so that you set expectations and don’t run out of time. Setting goals and outcomes will help you to stay focused and hopefully provide you with some additional time to spend with your family or doing something just for you. Don’t just add work commitments to your plan – make sure that you are scheduling time for you and your friends and family too. Spending quality time with your friend, parent/s, partner, child/ren and doing things you enjoy will make a great difference to your overall wellbeing.

Helps to improve your productivity

Many people relate productivity with their work but it’s also as important to be productive at home. This could mean scheduling shopping, cleaning, clearing out and other home projects that you keep putting off. Regardless of what the task is, a Day Plan will keep you on track with individual tasks – you should move through them and on to each more efficiently and effectively.

Helps to reduce stress levels

Are you or have you ever felt overwhelmed because of a hectic schedule? Stress can be caused by too many demands and trying to remember, deal with and process these. As well as these internal influences, external influences also affect our stress levels. A Day Plan will enable you to move from one responsibility to the next without missing something, being late or having to cancel or reschedule. You’ll notice a big difference to your mood when you’ve achieved your big three targets for the day and this will prevent you from being too hard on yourself.

Remember: Use your Day Plan to schedule self-care activities

DOWNLOAD DAY PLAN TEMPLATE HERE

Helps you to stay healthy

Use your Day Plan to keep you physically healthy by keeping track of your diet and exercise. Scheduling regular activities such as a morning workout and fresh air outdoors in an afternoon when you have finished work, will keep your mind and body healthy. This should also contribute to reducing your stress and anxiety levels.

Helps you to free up more time for creativity and growth

Once you have mastered the art of daily planning and you are sticking to your schedule for your ‘must-do’ daily activities, you will start to see that you have more free time to undertake creative activities. This might be a hobby or activity that you enjoy, or why not try something new? Make sure that you are utilising the time to reflect, learn from your experiences and grow.

Helps you to stay on track

As you mark your tasks as complete on your Day Plan, you should acknowledge this as a success. This should boost your mood and give you the drive to complete the next task.  Likewise, you are kept on track as you focus on what is important to the business. Your planning will help you to answer the who, what, why, how and when questions about your business or project.

Tip: Don’t just give yourself a large ‘to-do’ list – this will become demoralising and impractical

Planning your time can greatly reduce your stress levels as it provides you with clear direction for achieving your goals. Planning can also help you to prepare for obstacles as it enables you to create a contingency should you encounter any unexpected problems. Planning serves as a way to monitor and evaluate progress as you work – scheduling your daily activities clearly illustrates whether you are achieving your goals.

Download our Day Plan Template – give it a try and see what benefits it brings to your work-life balance.