Plan Your Day Like a Pro With These 5 Daily Planning Techniques and Tools
“Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” -: Dwight D. Eisenhower
Time management has become one of the most significant challenges in modern society since people must balance their working hours with personal hours.
Having a good work schedule gives you a better work-life balance. It can help you balance your personal life while increasing productivity at the workplace. If you want to know how successful people manage to work so effectively, the key lies in the way that they organize their time.
According to Cornerstone Dynamics, we spend 20% of the time on crucial things. Whereas 80% of our time is spent on non-value things.
Hence, it proves that there is a need for daily planning techniques.
Let me present you with my guide on mastering a daily planning technique. Within this blog, I will share efficient techniques and tools that will help with daily time management.
The following tips, which include time management techniques such as identifying priorities and setting achievable goals, will assist you in optimizing your results.
Now, without taking more time, let’s get started exploring:
The importance of daily planning
Time Scheduling and daily work planning are vital to the managers. It gives an overview of your responsibilities and your team’s role-play for the day. Let’s discuss some important that you need to know:
Prioritization and focus
Managers have to attend a variety of meetings, including team meetings, individual staff meetings, project management tasks, and administrative roles. This enables them to schedule the tasks and allocate time towards their implementation, minimizing the chances of issues of omission on important tasks arising.
Team management
Managers can build their daily plans in a manner that they can give time to group meetings and one-on-one meetings and attend to any emergent issues that employees may have. This approach serves to ensure that positive communication is made throughout and the group stays on course.
Delegation and collaboration
Planning with the practical approach ensures that managers find areas where they can delegate some duties to other members of the team. It also helps in coordination by creating meeting schedules and deadlines for every project associated with others to let everyone know the next steps to take.
Streamline project management
Depending on the structure and hierarchy of the organization, the managers are in charge of various projects with distinct phases and timelines. On a daily basis organizational to-do lists support them in monitoring the work completion rate, potential obstacles, as well as necessary changes. This ensures that projects are properly timed and cost-limited or pegged as required.
Enhanced decision-making
Daily plans let you know what should be the workflow of the day. By having priorities and tasks, they can reason out properly throughout the day, especially during off-track situations.
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5 helpful daily planning techniques & tools
You don’t have to sit for hours to plan your day. Go through these five techniques for your day planning and witness the changes yourself:
1. Time blocking method
It is the method to divide your team into different parts. You can start by assigning each task a timestamp for its completion. This helps manage your working hours, increases focus, and reduces procrastination.
Here’s the brief of how time blocking technique works:
Identify tasks: You can start by listing all the tasks, including yours and your team.
Highlight: Identify the high-priority tasks that need to be done earlier.
Time estimation: Record the timing for each task. Note the actual timing of each task to avoid overloading.
Frame time blocks: Start dividing your day into time blocks and assign each block its particular task.
Add breaks: Continuously doing a task causes a burden. Try adding short (5–10) minute breaks for easy balance.
Using time block methods can enhance your productivity by increasing your team’s efficiency. This method helps you manage all your daily work and decrease your burden and stress.
2. Priority matrix technique
The priority matrix technique helps you to define your daily tasks in 4 categories based on their urgency and priority. Priority matrix stands as a professional daily planning technique that many organizations use. Here are the ways to do that:
List all tasks
You can start by writing everything you are planning to do during your workday. It should consist of everything from your working hours to fun activities, even break time.
1. Break them into sections
It gives you a complete overview of high-priority and urgent tasks. It will also help you determine which task you need to complete before and after the lunch break.
Here is the method to derive the sections:
Sections: Task Type
Section 1: Urgent task
Section 2: Not urgent, but important
Section 3: Urgent but not important
Section 4: Not urgent, but it is not important
2. Plan accordingly
Now that you have four sections, you can start planning your day. For instance, you can do section 3 and section 1 in the first half of the day. Sections 4 and 2 can be combined with each other to save time.
3. Pomodoro technique
The Pomodoro technique is an effective daily planning technique that was invented by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980s. The technique is named Pomodoro because of a tomato-shaped kitchen timer which was used by Francesco Cirillo when he was a university student.
The work of the Pomodoro technique is very simple but effective. Here’s the step-by-step guide to implement it:
- First, choose a task you want to complete. Decide its difficult level, arrange tools, and establish a focused environment.
- Now, set a time for 25 minutes on your computer. This interval is known as the Pomodoro.
- Now, focus for exactly 25 minutes on that single task without any interruptions. You can switch off your mobile phone, turn off PC notifications, and use noise-canceling earphones without music to get the work done.
- After exceeding the 25 minutes, leave the work area. Go outside and stretch for 5 minutes only.
- Lastly, repeat this entire process to see the result.
The Pomodoro technique is a very effective way to reduce burnout and increase productivity. You can train your team to apply this technique for better performance.
4. Bullet journaling for daily planning
It is a customizable and versatile method of daily planning technique for managers. It consists of a notebook and some symbol signs to write and plan the entire day. Let’s understand this method deeply:
Core components to include
- Index
- Future log
- Monthly log
- Daily log
Symbols and Signifiers
Tasks: Indicated by a dot (•) with a completed check mark (X), migration arrow (→), or schedule symbol (<).
Events: It is an open circle (∙) sign.
Notes: Symbolized by a hyphen (-).
Priorities: Such values are represented in the document by an asterisk (*).
Ideas/Inspiration: Mark with an exclamation mark (!) to express its possessive properties symbolically.
Set up the Journal
It mainly consists of the index, future log, monthly log, and daily log sections first.
Suggested format: Use the monthly log to record important dates such as foreseeable deadlines, project phases, appointments, and objectives.
Plan Daily: Every day, make an entry in the daily log record. This allows the listing of tasks, meetings, appointments, and notes. Organize each of these items under a relevant symbol.
7:30 am. : Staff Meeting (✓)
9:00 AM: It also entails a review of the Project Proposal (•)
11:00 AM: Client Call (✓)
2:00 PM: Time for all the team to grab lunch (○)
3:00 PM — Submit Report (•)
Next, link with Marketing (→)
Invest and implement new CRM software (–)
Track progress
As the day comes to a close, go through tasks and responsibilities for the day. To indicate a task’s completion, use ‘X’ marks. To demarcate an incomplete but shifted task, consider arrow (→). and to schedule future tasks, you can use less-than sign (<).
Use collections
Use subdirectories for processes or tasks that are underway, meetings, overall discussions about projects, and other related topics.
Project Name: Website Redesign
Goals, milestones, deadlines
Responsibilities that are to be shouldered by various members of the teams
Notes from project meetings
Reflect and adjust
It is important to review your journal on a routine basis in order to evaluate the progress, overall success, and settings. After reading this review, log entries should be more precise in the future, and more thought should be given to monthly planning.
Also read: What Are The Best Ways To Manage Time As A Busy Entrepreneur?
5. Digital tools for daily planning
There are numerous digital tools that can help you plan your day more effectively. These tools often come under a price, but it is all worth it in the end. Let’s explore some tools:
ProofHub
ProofHub is a next-generation project management and team collaboration tool. Built with cutting-edge technology, it comes with various features that can help you manage your team even in a remote environment.
ProofHub allows its firstcomers to try for 14 days free to get an outlook of their modern offerings. It has been recognized by High Performer Spring 2023, Software Advice 2023, shortlisted by Capterra 2024, GetApp Category Leaders 2024, and many others.
At last, ProofHub stands as your best partner for the daily planning tool. It is also being used by NASA, Boeing, Netflix, Disney, and many other mighty organizations.
Asana
Asana is a modern daily planning tool that gives you a choice to plan your day with the power of AI. It acquires a symmetric in-app structure to keep the work going. Its simple but understandable interfaces help your team collaborate and update their task’s status easily.
Asana commits to giving more clarity and accountability. It has been trusted by top companies like Overstock, HubSpot, Figma, Zoom, and others. For all of your needs for daily planning and team management, Asana can be a good option.
ClickUp
ClickUp organizes everything on a single platform, which assists you in planning your day beneficially. It comes with every necessary feature like dashboard, task management, docs, sprints, whiteboard, document management, and all others.
This tool can help you enhance visibility, automate work marketing, and manage your team and time simultaneously.
Jira
Jira is a project management tool that lets managers plan their day, schedule time, arrange meetings, and delegate tasks easily. It was launched in 2002, and it has been adopted by 300,000+ companies worldwide.
Jira provides the latest features to managers and team leaders. It helps managers to view progress and team performance in the form of boards, timelines, and charts. Like other tools, it also gets integrated with other apps like Google Drive, Dropbox, and Grammarly to provide quick support. To manage all of your time & projects, Jira can be a reliable tool for your daily planning needs.
Zoho
Zoho is a popular platform in the genre of daily planning tools. The UI/UX of Zoho is eye-catching and anyone can easily work with it. Zoho monitors every activity on a project, like login/logout, project status, task delegation, deadline management, and so forth.
With Zoho, managers can automate tasks and customize projects anytime they need. There are 4.5M + active projects on Zoho, and it is a 27001 ISO-certified tool.
Ready to boost your team’s efficiency? Implement these daily planning techniques and leverage the project management power of ProofHub. Try for 14 days free now.
Conclusion
When you apply these techniques and implement tools that help you in daily planning, your day will become much more efficient and productive. You can work with techniques like the Priority Matrix, Pomodoro technique, and bullet journaling to get your desired results at the workplace.
FAQs
What technique should I use for daily planning?
You can use time blocking, priority matrix, and the Pomodoro technique which are the most successful ways to plan your daily working hours.
What are some best daily planning tools?
Daily planning tools help schedule your work. While there are various tools in the market, I recommend you use the ProofHub project management tool to manage daily working hours.
What do I do If I have a hard time staying on schedule each day?
I will suggest setting realistic time frames, taking a break as needed, and being prepared for other challenges that one may encounter with work.
What things to consider while planning for the day?
You should consider flexibility, break time, goals of the day, availability of tools & resources, and mainly well-being while applying daily planning techniques.
