It is widely known that the best way to deal with a day full of tasks is to plan them out. The reason for this is simply that keeping tasks in your head is more than just remembering what they are. You also need to consider what larger goals they contribute to, how time sensitive they are, and how they are to be completed.
For most people, enough of these tasks will necessitate investing in something like a full focus planner, such as the one created by Next Level Daily, as all this extra information, adjacent to the task but necessary to its completion, should not be forgotten.
Nevertheless, this reality can often downplay the importance of the human brain. For the tasks thatneed to be completed regularly and continually, it makes more sense to form a habit rather than planning them out each time as if they were something new. The best example here is daily tasks.Some of these are best crystallized into a good habit, asits infeasible to plan them out in your planner every day.
A quite simple example of this type of task would be having breakfast. How many people actually write into their daily planner “have breakfast”? Some highly organized people might wish to do this, but the majority simply make this a habit.
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The Power of a Habit
It’s easy to see then that if you can create a good habit and make it stick, then this can be an immensely powerful tool for productivity and organization. How great would it be if you just did what you should do without having to plan it out or think about it?
Of course, though, many of the tasks that we need to see to each day have to planned, because they’re not the same every day and they don’t always have to be done at the same time every day. We always need to plan out things like “have project finished by Friday” or “meeting with boss at 3pm”. You can’t exactly make a habit for these things.
However, what you definitely can do is create good habits that help you plan out these things much easier. Next Level Daily advise that the more you can do automatically, the less you have to plan. Moreover, if you can create a series of good habits, planning out the other things becomes much easier.
Tips for Making a Habit Stick
Create a Goal
A good habit involves you doing something – and that thing has a result. Accordingly, you should make that result an attractive goal that will spur you to repeat the thing you have to do until it becomes a habit. So, what do you want to achieve? Planning itself can become a habit.Perhaps you would like to plan out the whole week every Sunday evening?
Make it Fun to Repeat
The thing about repeating the same thing is that it’s not going to be new or exciting from the second time onwards. Nonetheless, you can make it fun – make a reward to give yourself at the same time every day too!
Allow for Flexibility
Build up too many repeating habitsand your day will always see the same. We definitely can over-habit. If something needs to be done at a certain time every day, youcan allocate the time following that for…precisely nothing! In that time, you can introduce a bit of variability to your day.
Habits are formed by repetition, and eventually become second nature. But repetition alone is not enough to form one in the first place. Perhaps this is the most important thing to keep in mind.
