Printable Blank Schedules Are An Efficient Aid For Achievement

Published April 7th, 2009

Effective Task Management With To-Do Workbook

Efficient Scheduling For Big Goals

Delay, is without a doubt, the main problem that affects efficiency. Here are two common reasons why people delay getting on with a job and how Printable Blank Schedules can be used to motivate people to act.

A distractable attention span. Workers who most often find themselves suffering from work avoidance are those who appear to have their thoughts wandering often.

They’re working on a chore with their word processors, for example, and because they enjoy video games, they’ll go and visit websites like GameSpot.com or Kotaku.com, which will essentially use up hours of the time they should concentrate on chores. The method to deal with this is to consider undesirable disruptions as incentives. Rather than giving in to the temptation of wasting time on any interests and the like, tell yourself that you will gain adequate time for this once you finish the whole - or at least a specific part - of your work. This way, your non-productive passions will reward you rather than working against you. They will refresh you instead of distracting you.

Devastating fear. Sometimes, the enormity of the work before us can get us so down we arrive at a fundamental stop. We become conscious of disappointment, and we begin to suffer from dread attacks with each task that we have to end. As a consequence, our improvement slows down to a slow amble, not because we are distracted by things we are fervent about, but because we are frightened of failing .

How can we deal with procrastination when we have a large project or even a boring chore we have just endlessly put off doing ? When big jobs overwhelm us, we need to split them up into bite sized chunks and start making a strategy for achieving them using first a to-do list and then a blank schedule.

The to-do list is created at the start by entering every step you can imagine on a xls template . If you are more at ease with paper and pen, that’s not a problem, but you will still need to put this information into a spreadsheet, so why not just do it right away there ? When the initial steps are entered , use the ABC (or 123) method and start to prioritize the to-do list. You can use two or more ratings if you need to by using two or more columns in the spreadsheet.

Examples of how you may need to prioritize your tasks
1 By Size - A for steps that need no more division, B for a middle sized chore which may need looking at in more detail, C for a big task which definitely needs dividing further.
2. By Stage - A for those tasks which need doing first, B for those steps which need to be done in the middle and C those chores to be done when nearing completion of the big job.
3. By Priority - A for steps that must be done no matter what, B for steps that should be done as soon as can be expected, C for chores it would be nice to complete but are less important.

If these priorities are in different columns you can re-sort the preliminary to-do list as often as you choose and copy and paste the tasks into more specific spreadsheets and thereby gradually work through and complete steps according to their priority.

To-do list templates are a great first step but you need to be motivated to act on tasks. The blank schedule is your next aid . When you have an actionable A listing, start scheduling these A activities into a daily blank schedule or a weekly blank schedule by keywording them with a start day, a deadline and with all the stages in between.

For example you have a segment of the task outlined and its steps prioritized. Give the segment a short code name such as T1 and then use abbreviated words for the steps. T1-get quotes, T1-start , T1-payday , T1 deadline. I’m not being too specific, as I don’t know your goal, but you get the idea.

On your blank weekly schedule lay out the steps so you can see them a week ahead, or if it is easier for a longer job, enter the chores in a monthly blank schedule. When you write up your daily blank schedule each day, you will check this “big picture” schedule and copy and paste into it your daily schedule. If you do this every day it takes only a few minutes and you can check your progress and update your big-picture schedule, according to your progress. No plan can be followed exactly: jobs get rained off, workers encounters unavoidable delays, what looked like a good idea turned out to be unworkable, all these things will mean starting deadlines may have to be moved and steps taken to counter their effects.

When jobs or segments of jobs are completed, shunt them off the to-do list and onto a finished jobs list. Why not just delete them? You can, but when you need encouragement, or if you need to show a client a progress report, you have a record, with dates, already typed that you can use to copy and paste from into any other document. It’s worth the few seconds you spend to transfer this information to another spreadsheet and save it, rather than delete it, to have this information available if you need it. You can also maintain a reward system on this sheet and use it to give out bonuses or rewards when jobs are completed in time or with good feedback.

Breaking up a intimidating workload into little steps and using a blank schedule is the first and best way to handle any chore whose scale creates such fearfulness. But how else can we manage postponement? In one word - Attitude! As a well-known byline from a sporting shoe brand would like us to practice: “Just Do It.” Don’t stop to think, just act. A plain outlook such as this will go a long, long way in expanding our production.

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