How to Plan Your Day so You Reach Goals and Feel Satisfied at the End

How to plan your day...

9/19/2017

...so you reach your goals and feel satisfied at the end of the day

(+ A Meditation Recommendation)

It's easy to fall in a rut where your days get mundane and goals feel unaccomplished and further out of reach.

I am working on planning better because I want to develop the habit of going to bed at 9:30pm, fully satisfied and ready to sleep 8 hours. Why? Because it helps me be my best the next day.

I know that you have some tools that makes you feel your best in your day too. It's just, for whatever reason, these good tools never became habit...obviously because you'd be using them right now wouldn't you?

I also know that you may benefit, as I am, getting some health, mindset and best-practices- habit-change tips from a few key experts in my Healthy Habits & Productivity Summit. Click here to save your spot.

What I know - day and goal planning is the secret that gets around your mental blocks (those covertly designed by your critter brain). You want to get around the critter brain's shenanigan's because it is the part of your brain that has you procrastinating and never reaching goals.

How do you plan a day when you can choose to do anything but don't want to do anything?

Book-end it! That is, book end your day by planning with the end in mind, first and working backwards from there.

For example, my new habit plan to reach my goals will be to get to bed at 9:30pm. To do this, I plan when I want to go to bed and then work backwards from there to do the things that will have me feeling completely satisfied at the end of my day.

Book-end Planning Your Day

Here it goes:

Bed time at 9:30pm
Note: What you'll do the 30 min to hour right before to be ready for bed
Note: What you'll do before that- to look over your day and review what went well and didn’t and plan for tomorrow
Action: What you’ll do before that to gather all the items and look over all you have done
Action: What you’ll do before that to get things accomplished
Action: What you’ll do before that to get things accomplished
Decide what you'd like to get accomplished to feel today was a solid step forward.
Review your goals and your "why" (as in why they are important)

You see it’s all backwards, but you don’t start at the bottom if you’d like to bookend it. Well you can if you need to remember your goals and your why but then you keep it in the framework of the peace you’re seeking in your entire day…so you go back to the top with when you’d like to go to bed.

Of course you don’t have to choose 9:30pm and you can always see how it goes and modify the time to 10 or 10:30 later but having some plan will help you feel satisfied that you did everything you could to have a great day.

Be sure to ask yourself, "After doing these few actions, will I feel more close to my goals?"

Also add, a meditation on how to start your morning and how to be prepared for everything pushing you off your plan.This morning and evening meditation is great! I use it.

Another helpful thing to do, start with the hardest task first if you are able to control the timing of that.

How do you effectively plan your day? Do you have any other tips?

Author

Dr. Julie Wilkening, DC, CSCS is a Natural Medicine Doctor and a Habit Change Specialist who helps people stuck in health conditions, weight-loss resistance and many other bad habits so they can stop wasting time and energy and start making drastic transformations they can flaunt.

Health & Weight Loss