Keep Yourself On Schedule

It is not uncommon to hear people complaining that their days at work are too hectic for them to be able to plan anything. Plans never work out, there are always changes: appointments being cancelled or new assignments being added, so that the preview and the review of each day have very little in common. This may be true, but maybe we should take a few moments to breathe and analyze this situation.

First of all, changing your schedule too often can only have bad effects in the long run, because it breaks time management habits . If you change your program and schedule tasks whenever something new comes up and nothing goes as planned, you will soon find it much less frustrating to work without any schedule whatsoever: if there is no agenda in the first place, you won’t have to worry about anything getting cancelled. However, this will eventually lead to a very chaotic day, likely to exhaust you even more than the continually changing schedule.

The next step in time management is deciding which tasks in your schedule must remain unchanged and which can be modified. The fixed task will form a sort of backbone in your plan, something for you to rely on. Furthermore, if you have decided from the very beginning that there are tasks that can allow some variation -- as long as these tasks don’t interfere with the main ones -- it will help you cope with changes much better. Also, practice saying "no" from time to time, when the main points on your agenda are threatened.

After a while, you will notice that you are feeling much more relaxed, and that your ability to stay focused has increased.

A Changing Agenda

Many people schedule tasks and feel frustrated when the points in their agenda do not work out as planned, or at least in close resemblance to the plan, particularly when new things come up and they need to be assigned a time slot. This often means that they will have to cancel other things in their schedule. When this happens, time management can become quite a stressful business. However, there is a very simple technique you can use to avoid working under pressure that goes hand in hand with the way to schedule tasks.

It is true that unexpected assignments can lead to an overbooked agenda, but, fortunately, this is not the only change that can occur. Or, from another point of view, you are lucky that you are not the only one with such problems. Other people will be confronted with the same issues, which will force them to cross out things they have planned. When activities or appointments that also concern you get canceled, empty slots of time are created in your own agenda.

These extra slots can be used for anything, so why not use them to work on things you need to finish? If there are any urgent matters that came up after you drew up your schedule, you can use the time thus created to concentrate on them. On a calm day when nothing unexpected comes up, you can just pick anything you were going to do at a later moment or on another day, which will lead to another free slot somewhere else.

As a result, you will always have enough room in your schedule and you won’t need to worry too much when you have to squeeze a new job among the day’s activities.