Time Management
Four Main Benefits of Having Daily Schedule and How to Start
Maintaining a routine or daily habits can be challenging, but this can be achieved much easier by making a schedule of your activities each day
We are naturally creatures of habit, and having a routine can promote health and wellness through a well-structured schedule. Many research shows that routine can improve your health because it can lessen stress, improve sleep, and mental well-being.
But not many of us realise these benefits and skip the importance of making a daily schedule to help us stick with the routine. So here are four main benefits of having a daily schedule:
Build a routine
By having a routine, we can adjust and stick with our resting and active time which will help us maintain our energy on the daily basis. Routine also promotes improved mental health and better physical health.
Help to achieve your goal
Sometimes having an ambitious goal without a plan can only leave us with a failure on completing it. This is why scheduling our day may come in handy to help us set up a daily task that leads to a mini day to day goal which eventually can gradually help us to achieve our big goal.
Put mind at ease
By not knowing what to do in a day we often miss some important things to be done; this can cause our mind to be overthinking and anxious about what we have missed. With the help of a daily schedule, we can picture what our day will look like, what task to be done, and whenever we forget about something, we can always refer to our schedule.
Better time management
As a person who used to be very spontaneous and unorganised, I find daily schedule has helped me a lot in managing my time. This makes me more productive and always being able to finish all the tasks on schedule. I no longer worry about missing or failing a task with a help of a daily schedule or even wasting my time in a day.
Now how to start?
Now we have learned the main four benefits of the daily schedule, then “How can we start?” Or some of us may have worries like “I don’t even know if I can schedule my day because the activity may vary” or “I don’t have time for that, this must be very tedious”. I promise you it won’t be that hard if you follow these tips:
- Start setting up the weekly schedule on the weekend when we are in a more relaxed condition, which can help us to think more clearly. Write down the prioritised tasks or goals we want to do/achieve in a week, make it around 4–6 items, then break it down to each day.
- Make a schedule template that we can always access easily to see our fixed routine such as: waking up, other morning rituals, exercising, sleeping time, etc. Some of you maybe want to be super detailed, but in my case, I just put all of my main routines. Here is an example based on my routine:
After you set up the fixed routine, you can see the empty box that indicates your vacant schedule. You can do it in two ways:
- Using the same template above, make 7 copies (for 7 days) with the fixed routine already placed in it (put the name of the day on each copy), insert your prioritised activities in each time label, then followed with secondary activities if you still have enough time.
- Leave the template with the fixed routine as a schedule guide; there you can see the time label that has no activity. Write down on your daily notebook or to-do list on your smartphone, then put a time label on the prioritised activities and secondary activities based on the available time you have. Here is the example:
- Don’t forget to allocate 15–20 minutes before bed to write down the activity we want to do the next day based on the available time slots that we have, either in the template copy or in our to-do list.
- Despite having a schedule, allow ourselves to be flexible as well since unexpected tasks/activities may occur. Try out the schedule for a week or two and adjust as needed. We might need to take a few weeks to establish the right schedule that meets our needs.
Don’t waste more time! Let’s get started and be more organised ;)
