How to Plan Your Day for Maximum Productivity
Why you need to trick your brain and what Latin has to do with it.
So many of us are overly busy. You might be able to relate to this fictional example.
It’s only Monday morning, but Mark — who works in a startup — is already feeling overwhelmed. The pile of tasks that he has ahead of him is starting to resemble Mt Everest. There are investors to appease, employees to manage, and it would also be helpful if he could pay enough attention to his wife so as to not risk a divorce.
Exhausted, Mark decides to set aside some time to plan the week ahead. Now, how should he go about the planning process?
Well, when I first got into weekly planning and scheduling, I often listed everything I needed to do (or thought I needed to do).
But I eventually learned that great planning comes down to a single distinction: the difference between a priority and a to-do task. Whereas a priority is a task with a high payoff, a to-do isn’t that important.
It also bears pointing out that we cannot have multiple priorities in the same area of life. As Gary Keller and Jay Papasan explain in their book The ONE Thing:
“To be precise, the word is priority, not priorities, and…
