How to Design Your Ideal Workday Part 1

Getting Big Stuff Done When Life Get Hectic: Your Ideal Work Day

Can I get a few more hours in the day? Ever caught yourself asking that question?

One of the most important skills I've learned was time management by designing your ideal work day. That’s what we’re going to talk about today.

You might ask, “Well, what’s my ideal work day? How do I even know what my ideal work day looks like?”

CREATE SMART GOALS

I’ve spoken before about setting smart goals. The first thing you want to do is create your SMART goal in order to figure out how to design your ideal work day. When creating smart goals it has to be specific; Measurable, Attainable; Realistic; and Timed. {Link to that blog post is here.}

My foundation to help you be as productive as, possible is based on principles outlined in Steven R.Covey’s book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Your life has all kinds of responsibilities and task that need to get done each day. Some of them are critical, others are important; many are time consuming and most are other people’s agenda.

Order of Activities Is Important

I want you to visualize a jar or a vase with a stack of big rocks next to it. To the right of the rocks are a stack of pebbles, and a cup of sand. The big rocks, pebbles and sand all need to fit into that container and it must happen on a regular basis. If you fill up your jar with the sand first and then the pebbles, once you try to fit in the big rocks, you'll find that not all of your big rocks fit.

You might ask, “Well, how do I know exactly what my rocks are?” The rock and sand analogy are about what is priority and important. Find out exactly what it is you want out of life or your business. What goal are you trying to reach? If you don't know what your goal is you're not going to be able to figure out what comes first, we oftentimes get it confused.

Identify  Key Priorities

It is mandatory to fill the cup with your big rocks first. Secondly, you fill your day with pebbles and then follow it up with the sand. Make sure that, when you’re designing your day, you're doing it in that order.

Critical and Urgent is First

What is the big rock, and what does it represent? It represents the critical items that are extremely important for you to reach your goals in business or life.  They are usually ongoing projects that are key to your success. These things have serious consequences if they aren’t done.

3 Big Rock Examples are:

1.     Nurturing a relationship with your spouse if you want a lasting relationship and children one day.  
2.     Growing your business if you want to own your own profitable business.
3.     Eating nourishing foods will help keep your health from deteriorating.

Pro Tip:

Oftentimes the big rocks are boring. It's not the sexy thing that makes your sigh, “Oh, this is just so much fun, I love doing this.” No, it's not sexy the part, but it is the most critical part.

Important but not Critical is Second

The important things that have to happen are the pebbles. These activities need to happen, but the consequences are manageable. These are typically time consuming day-to-day task like, filling out expense reports or doing laundry.

Other People’s Agendas is last

Now, what is the sand? The sand in the business world are things like email notifications that sound, distracting your from bigrock to see who sent you a message or the latest news update. It could also look like the phone ringing and it’s somebody that you're already doing business with that you can call at a different time when you're not focused on big rock activities.

Now you know what priority is, if your priority is to develop your spiritual life then you might focus on creating a relationship with God. The first thing you might do in the morning is to spend time reading your Bible or spend time praying because that’s a priority for you, which represents a big rock.

If you are creating a funnel for a project that you're going to launch, a big rock could be for you to create the copy to go into the sales page of the product.

If you're in real estate, a big rock is prospecting or marketing.

My dollar producing activities and the things that are most important for me need to be done first thing in the morning before the phone begins to ring, or I receive requests from my family or emails.

That might be different for you; therefore, you should do what works for you based on whether you are a morning person or an evening person. Take care of your big rocks during the time you do your best work.

So what will it look like if it’s out of order, if you are putting your rocks and pebbles and sand into the jar in the wrong order? You’re not going to be able to accomplish your goal; it’s not going to happen because the most critical items, will not get done.

Your turn: I’d love to hear from you!  What’s the one goal you tightened up because of this process? Let me know in the comments below.  Or is it you have a successful tip or way of approaching goal setting, tell us about it.

Important: share your thought and ideas directly in the comments. Links to other posts, videos, etc. will be deleted as they come across suspect.

Let’s Make It Happen,