5 Ways to Use a Personal Planner to Maximize Success

Why are there so many planners in the world? You’ve probably seen them piled on shelves at your local office store or even at Walmart and Target. Go online, and you will find hundreds for sale on Amazon plus a wide variety of specialized planners with unique tracking systems.

There are planners for writers, planners for students, planners for mothers, and planners for business executives. Name a category of the population, and there’s probably at least one planner dedicated to their organizational needs.

If you usually walk right past the planners because you don’t see the point in tracking every detail of your life, it’s time to stop and take a longer glance. Not all planners are used for obsessive tracking and detailing. You can use one to reach your goals faster while reducing stress and overwhelm. There are five ways to do just that.

1. Implement time management strategies with a simple daily planner.

You’ve heard about time blocking. You know that some people create daily, weekly, monthly, or even quarterly and yearly schedules that they follow religiously. There are so many other time management systems from simple to-do lists to eating the frog.

Did that last one grab your attention? It’s a strategy that requires you to tackle your most important tasks first thing in the morning, starting with the biggest, hardest, or most intimidating one. It’s a concept that started in a book, but has gained considerable popularity around the world.

The problem with many time management strategies is the lack of consistency. You need a planner to fully commit and make them work.

Here’s how a planner might work for a couple of the most popular strategies:

• Time Blocking — Take everything you need to do in a day and assign it to a specific block of time. Commit to doing that and only that in each block. By the end of the day, you will have accomplished all of your daily goals or at least given them all some effort. Choose a planner that has daily calendar sheets with the times of the day listed out. Use those sheets to put boxes around your blocks for each day.
• Batching — Group similar tasks from all areas of your life together and do them at once. For example, read and respond to email at select times of the day or do all reading for school assignments and your professional life in one block of time. Your planner will help you look at everything you need to do and find creative ways to batch them together...

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