...Now that you see how beneficial it can be to harness your downtime, you may realize why a planner is so important! A planner allows you to milk your day for all it’s worth! From what I have experienced, here are some of the benefits of using a planner, combined with a proper to-do list.
1) Never missing appointments
2) Timelines - visually seeing which activities will take which amounts of time
3) Knowing where you need to be, and when
4) Fewer worries about remembering the correct times of events
5) Freeing your brain to focus on the task at hand
6) Remembering key dates (birthdays, holidays, etc)
7) Visually identifying if you actually do have enough time to begin a specific task
8) Structuring activities to eliminate wasted time or travel
9) Having a written record of where you were, and when
10) Having contact information, dates, events and locations all easily accessible
11) Most importantly, taking advantage of all the little chunks of wasted time!
The benefits of a planner are virtually endless. The more you use one, the more you will use one! They become extremely easy to rely on, which is great – as long as you don’t lose it (I can tell you first hand, it really sucks if you do). At several times in the past my planner has definitely saved me.
I remember vividly at a point in high school; several unexpected circumstances robbed me of several key “ways and means” necessary to carry out my day-to-day activities. Left with a general sense of instability and immobility at one of the busiest times in my high school experience, my planner was one of the few solid things to tell me what I had planned - where and when I needed to be, and how I could adapt to pull it all off. With my planner, I felt grounded. It was stable, unchanging, and still had everything in it which I needed to do.
In light of the importance my planner has played in my own life, I would like to share with you the ways in which I utilize my planner on a typical day-to-day basis…
This excerpt is taken from Ways and Means of Time Management.
Continue to read the entire book for yourself!
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