If you are like me, you have a lot of things that you want to accomplish in a day. A day is only 24 hours and we waste most of it. To prevent yourself from wasting it you may have thought about scheduling your day. (A very popular version of scheduling is time boxing or time blocking. There are some very well-made videos on this on YouTube. If you are struggling with scheduling the day, then look it up. Elon Musk is famously known to use this in his everyday life.
However, when the time comes for actually doing the things that you listed in your schedule, you might find yourself very unmotivated and wanting to do something else. I am writing this blog post to let you into my secret of how I deal with this problem.
The activities, we do every day, can be broken into 3 types: habits, obligations and others.
The activities that you plan to do at regular intervals and always at the same time, can be turned into habits. They don’t need a place in your getting things done list. These are activities like working out, meditation, taking a shower, writing morning pages, sleeping early, waking up early, going out for an evening walk etc.
Then there are obligations. Anything that you have a commitment with someone else to do at a given date in the future is an obligation. School or office times, exams, workshops, birthdays, dates etc. are examples of obligations. Obligations should be taken care of by timeboxing.
Then there are others. These are the things that need our willpower and careful scheduling. These are your passion projects/ hobbies/ homework. These have no supervision, neither are the habits that will automatically happen.
So, what I do is make space for them in my schedule first. Then I make sure there won’t be any obstacle towards doing them. Let’s say I want to practice python for a month. I would first make space for it between my habits and my obligations. Then I’d have to make sure that I have relevant courses downloaded and the computer won’t be occupied by someone else.
The last thing that could help in making these ‘other’ activities happen is to visualize them. Visualize the whole day, visualize yourself doing these ‘other’ activities.
So, in summary, the things that you want to repeat for a lifetime, should be made into habits. Then timebox the obligations. Lastly, make space for the ‘other’ stuff, remove obstacles towards them and visualize getting them done.
RaihanRiad 