There have been days in which I had a lot to do, but as the day came to an end, I scratched my head and wondered why nothing got done and a lot of things only got partially done.
Even though I had a list of things I had wanted to get accomplished, for some reason, it took me longer to complete each task.
There is nothing worse than that feeling you get when you wanted to get so much done during the day and nothing gets accomplished.
This demonstrates the importance of defining my time.
In today's world, we are so easily and often interrupted and there is so much information overload that sometimes it can be difficult to completely focus on the things you need to get done.
If I have a loose idea of what I want to get accomplished on any given day, it all just sort of floats around in my mind. If I have only an idea of what I'd like to get accomplished on any given day, I'll often find that other things easily occupy my time and I wind up without any time left to do what I need to do.
Here is what typically happens when I don't define my time and I have a list of 4 things I want to get done:
When I start working on the first task I want to get done, I often find myself suddenly wanting to check my email or quickly check up on other blogs to see what they've posted. Sometimes I'll quickly check some stats from my site and then I'd quickly check some of my other accounts to see if there has been any other activity.
When I finally get back to what I was originally doing, an hour has passed.
So I again, start to work on the first task I set out to do but then I'll remember that I wanted to add something to the website template. Then I'd get stuck on a formatting problem on the template and I'd have to surf the web to find the solution.
When that's all done, I find that 3 hours have passed and I have yet to make a dent in my first task. Then I'd realize that time is ticking away and there are 3 other things I wanted to do before the days end, so I'd switch and start working on another task.
So you can see that when I haven't properly defined my time, the things I do are simply a mishmash of other tasks that are relatively unimportant and the end result is a lot of wasted time.
What works for me is to actually set a schedule and to make sure that you do nothing other than what you have scheduled for that block of time. If you happen to complete everything you wanted early, then great - you can now waste your time doing those other frivolous things like checking your email and surfing the web.
An important element to this is that I actually set a concrete time to start each task. Even if I tell myself I'll dedicate an hour to do this and two hours to do that, if I don't set a specific time to doing it, I'll find that I'll either lose track of time or that I'll start doing my tasks too late and end up with not enough time.
As an example, here's how a typical schedule would look like:
6:15PM-7:00PM - marketing this site (Entrecard, post submissions, directory submissions)
7:00PM-7:30PM - catch up on other blogs and bookmark/stumble accordingly
7:30PM-8:30PM - write post for this site
8:30PM-9:30PM - catch up on market news, stocks to trade, review trades
9:30PM-10:00PM - frivolous time (email, surf & stumble)!
10:00PM-10:15PM - prep lunch and dinner for the next day
If I didn't keep to this schedule, I'd find that my frivolous time would be sprinkled and inter-dispersed throughout my other tasks, making it difficult to concentrate on doing any of those tasks well and I would probably end up with several things being incomplete!
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