How to Structure Your Day for Work, Rest, and Play.
As a coach, one of the first things I do when a new client joins my coaching programme is to help them establish a structured day. This is a critical step towards achieving their coaching programme goals.
Find out more about my coaching programmes here →
In many ways, having some structure in your day is similar to the pre-flight checks a pilot would undertake before a flight or a surgeon following a surgical checklist before a surgical procedure. No pilot or surgeon would ever consider skipping these steps before doing their work.
Yet many stressed-out and overwhelmed people turn up at work, open their emails and messages, and begin their day. They have no structure or plan; they just react to the latest and loudest demand. It’s no surprise why they find themselves in such a horrendous situation.
To change this, you need to run the day. Without structure, the day will run you, which will never end well for you. Important things will not get done, emails will back up, and you will feel under siege. It’s tough to feel motivated to do anything In this situation.
The good news is that taking control of the day is not difficult. It begins with having a set of rules. Rules that you set for yourself. To give you an example, here are my rules for doing my work:
Always respond to emails within 24 hours
Spend two hours on my core work every day (no excuses)
Prioritise clients and students
Plan the next day before I close down the day
Do a weekly planning session every week.
Five simple rules that not only ensure the right things are getting done every day but also provide a sense of relief by preventing any kind of backlog from building up.
Responding to emails within 24 hours means I schedule an hour every day to deal with my communications. This is usually at 4:00 pm when I rarely have meetings or other distractions. However, it is flexible. The important thing is I set aside an hour. I will find another time if I cannot do it at 4:00 pm. Skipping this for one day will require two hours the next day. Finding two hours on any given day will be a lot more difficult than finding one hour today.
Similarly, the two hours of core work is essential to complete my most important work. It’s no good hoping I will find the time to do it, hoping you will find the time is a terrible strategy. It would be like a pilot hoping there is enough fuel to get them to their next destination without checking.
Ideally, you would fix the time each day for your core work. That may not always be possible, but having a fixed time will help you to make this a routine. For example, I do my core work daily between 9:30 and 11:30 am. There are occasions when I cannot do that, but if I can get three or four days where that time is protected, it gives me certainty that I have sufficient time to complete my work.
Pre-deciding your priorities will make decision-making easier. I learned this from Hyrum Smith’s book The Ten Natural Laws of Time and Life Management. In that book, Hyrum Smith asks the reader to create their governing values, similar to Benjamin Franklin’s Thirteen Necessary Virtues. These guide you towards making the right decisions about what to do with your time.
This means that once you know your priorities, you can quickly decide what you will do based on them — your highest priorities come first, followed by the lesser ones.
Most people do not plan their days. Yet, it takes five minutes to decide what your must-do tasks will be tomorrow. That could be resolving a difficult issue, finishing an important proposal, or simply taking a rest. Knowing what you must do tomorrow means you will find relaxing at the end of the day easier and more likely to get a good night’s sleep.
That is certainly much better than spending the evening worrying about what you may have missed or what you will need to do tomorrow.
It can take a few weeks or months to create some rules, but the effort is worth it if you want to live a life where you control your time and know each day will move the important things forward.
What are your rules?
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