Planning the start of the week

Welcome to today's issue of The Daily Dose of Motivational Medicine. The e-zine of Motivateme: Breaking the Procrastination Habit. http://www.motivateme.info. Have you signed up for your daily dose yet?
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Monday - half way through the day, yes already. My question for you then is how is your week shaping up?

Have you waded straight back into where you left off on Friday? Or have you taken time out this morning to plan your day and your week? Keeping a time log of what you have done is all well and good, but that only tells you where you've been, it doesn't tell you where you need to be. If you don't spend time at the start of your working week to plan the days ahead (at least in rough form), then how on earth are you going to know whether you have done what you should have by the end of it?

Planning your week is like planning anything of value. Do you go to the airport and wait for the first flight to land and then get on it. Or do you spend some time beforehand working out the time, how you are going to pay for it, where you are going, who will be meeting you at the other end, and why you are getting on a plane in the first place? I'd hope so !!

Planning your week is about putting your personal appointments into place. For the new readers of the Daily Dose of Motivational Medicine, we spoke last week about keeping appointments we make with ourselves. If we're totally honest with ourselves, there are some times we manage to keep all our appointments - we cross things off the list, and we move on to the next items. But there are some days when the appointment book didn't get opened, we failed to do anything - sometimes this is our fault, and sometimes things happen that are out of our control. But as we have mentioned, if you don't put the appointments into place, you can conveniently forget what you were supposed to do now can't you.

If you want to get more out of every day, then it is important to set your appointments. And then once they have arrived, it is important that you keep them. Failure to keep your appointments with yourself is another subtle hint to your non-conscious thought processes that it is OK to procrastinate, to forget, to delay, to put off until tomorrow - because you can't be bothered to do it today.

How do you set your appointments? Apologies - some of these come under "duh" I knew that....
1. Put in the big items first. Do you have to be somewhere this week? Where? When? How long for? These external appointments are vital. So once these are in place:
2. Make sure you have set aside time to work out what you are going there for. Should go without saying, but preparation is extremely important. Get your notes in order before you go.
3. Factor in travelling time. Can you do something else whilst you are travelling? Are you going by bus/train - take something with you to read on the way.
Do you have a media player in your car - there are many books in electronic format these days.

Once you have the external appointments in place, then it is time to work on the internal appointments. These are your projects and work items that have to be done. (See I told you it came under the hard of thinking category).

4. What projects do you need to work on?
5. What reports do you need to write?
6. In-trays - do the important first. Don't get caught up with the urgent but not important - if you keep your appointments you should never have urgent items of your own making in your in-trays. And if they belong to someone else - do you have to bail them out? Or should they do their own work? Bailing people out all the time - does not teach them anything other than they can continue to procrastinate. Don't let other people take your time and energy.
7. Email - set aside time each day to answer these, and then turn the darn thing off. Unless you are waiting for important and urgent information regarding a project or external appointment - then you do not need it on and it will only interrupt your train of thought as the little envelope appears.

It may take a few days to get these new practices in place, but the technique will work for you - if you choose to use it. 
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