How to create a schedule that works for you.

When it comes to our daily schedule, most people fall into one of two camps:

• • The over-scheduler: Their calendars look like a kindergartener’s finger painting. Meetings overlap meetings while reminders for events, breaks, tasks, and more meetings are going off like it’s New Year’s Eve. Their days are determined from the moment they wake up to their evening routine.
  • The minimalist: Also known as “The Dreamer.” They’ve got one or two recurring events, but a whole lot of whitespace so they’re “free” (at least on paper) for long stretches of work.

The problem is that both of these are terrible. For their own reasons.

Being over-scheduled leaves us no time for ourselves. The more “in control” we are of our calendar, the less control we feel like we have over our lives. Not to mention we’re notoriously bad at knowing how long tasks take us to do. When your schedule is this jammed, even going 15 minutes over on your morning task will throw your whole day out of whack.

And the minimalist? Well, they’re just living in la la land, aren’t they? They’ve offloaded their schedule to some other format–most likely a to-do list, scheduling app, or series of angry emails asking “Where is this?”

By looking at how successful founders, creatives, and deep thinkers craft their own daily schedules, we can learn the best ways to design our own perfect day.

CREATE “TIME BOOKENDS” FOR YOUR DAY’S MOST IMPORTANT WORK

The most successful people consistently get their most important work done first.

Whether by “swallowing a frog” (i.e. getting your most difficult task out of the way so the rest of the day is a breeze) or blocking time for personal or meaningful work before anything else.

What they don’t do, is start the day with distractions, emotional triggers, and stress (i.e. email, social media, and Slack).

Build recurring time into your daily schedule for your most important work before everything else. Not only are our energy levels naturally higher in the morning, but completing a meaningful task first thing has a domino effect that pushes you through the day.

There’s tons of great examples of this, but one of my favorites comes from founder and academic Kevin Taylor, who sets recurring daily, blocks for his mornings:

As Taylor explains:

“If you’re like most, you schedule what others demand of you first and only later look for empty slots in the calendar where you might ‘fit in’ what is important to you. (Good luck finding focus time in that type of ‘reactively-designed’ calendar.)

“Instead, flip the paradigm by scheduling what is important to you first.”

Setting a recurring commitment to yourself first thing in the morning sets your day off with the right intention and ensures that no matter what else happens, you’ve done something meaningful in your day.

Another great way to do this is to schedule RescueTime FocusTime sessions to automatically start in the morning. This way, you won’t be distracted by social media or other attention-seekers.