Last October 23rd, I just gave a seminar on the productivity of life to all students at Pakuan University, Bogor. Quite amazed, because you rarely know students who ask to be brought a seminar on the productivity of life. Most students don’t want to bother learning about productivity, the important thing is to just enjoy your life, hehe
Bringing this seminar back to recall the activities I did when I was a student. Apart from studying at the UI engineering faculty, I was also active in various organizations. I am also a class leader who has to more or less help my classmates when they are having problems. I was also an entrepreneur who at that time was establishing and running the CerdasMulia Institute .
I then asked the students about what I also experienced at the time, “Who here is often overwhelmed ( overwhelmed ) in daily activities – day? Being overwhelmed is like feeling that we have a lot of work, never ending, and it makes us stressful. There is?”
Suddenly the students answered enthusiastically, “I … .. !!”, because they might feel the same fate too, hehehe ..
I also felt that when I was a student first. I have what is called overwhelmed, or overwhelmed. It feels like the work has been done day by day, but it’s getting pile up here. Life seems very busy, but how come it’s getting depressed by the many activities that need to be done. Not infrequently, because I was overwhelmed, I was stressed and often fell ill.
Then, how can we overcome this ‘overwhelming’ situation, live a more productive life and be healthier than before?
I then looked for information regarding this matter. Until I finally discovered that one of the keys to productive people is that they have a daily ‘ritual’ . Wow, this ritual looks scary, huh, hehe. But calm down, this ritual is a positive ritual. I take the example of Joel Gascoigne, Founder & CEO of Buffer, who has a habit of getting up at 4 am. After waking up, he ate a little breakfast, then immediately paid off his work in the morning.
Everyone must have a different daily ritual. However, from the results of research I discovered that there was a daily ritual that can help us to overcome the long overwhelmed ( overwhelmed ), that is: to plan what we want to do the next day the night before.
The key is Plan Your Day the Night Before
How can that daily plan help us deal with being overwhelmed and increase productivity? It’s really simple. Having a daily plan helps us to organize a tidier schedule to get our work done. With a tidier schedule, our chances of being more focused on completing work will be even greater. The more focused we are, the more work we can complete.
The opposite is true. Without daily planning for the next day, it is likely that we will not know what priorities we should work on. So, it will make us slow in growing, causing stress, because we don’t know which one to finish first. A study conducted in 2011 showed that writing down what things we want to do the next day can reduce anxiety, stress levels, and can make someone more enjoy running their days [ 1 ].
Another experiment also showed that individuals or families who have a plan, have better achieving goals than those who don’t. This research was conducted by dividing 2 groups: 1 group was asked to write down clearly what their plans were, while the other group did not.
The researcher then asked each person in each group to report what they did that day. The result is, as much as 71% of the sample from group 1 collected their reports and from group 2 only 32% only. In addition, the reports from group 1 show that more things were accomplished or accomplished than the second group [ 2 ].
Because various studies have shown that this plan your day the night before is very useful, I have begun to implement it. This turned out to be quite fun and was able to make my achievements and life more structured or neat.
Live More Effectively Using the Degrees of Priority
After about 3 years of using daily planning, I tried to develop my own way to reduce the overwhelming burden in my life. The trick is to list all the plans I want to work on the next day, then divide them by priority .
Priority degree is a technique that I developed to determine which activities I should work on first. Once in a few days, I found that I had a lot of activities to do. In order not to get confused doing it, I apply this priority degree in my life. My priority degrees are divided into 5, namely:
- Must Do: The most important degree of priority, namely the activities that we have to complete on that very day or day. For example, making a presentation slide that will be presented at noon on that day.
- Life Project: Project or life target that we want to achieve, but the deadline is not on that day, for example: we want to finish a book script in the next month. If the must-do is finished, then we can repay the manuscript for this day.
- Helping People: Helping others who need our help. For example, there are friends who want to borrow notes, or there are friends who want to ‘confide in’ us to solve their problems.
- Learning Something: New things that we want to learn on that day. For example, want to learn about the productivity of life (read books, watch videos, and so on).
- Free Activity: Free activity , when all activities from 1 – 4 have been completed to do.
I used to complete my daily plan based on these 5 degrees of priority. I started working on it from number 1, when I finished moving to number 2, and so on until I got to number 5.
I learned from my mistakes as a student, this priority is often reversed. For example, number 4 becomes number 1, number 1 becomes number 5, and number 5 becomes number 2. Well, things like this end up making us look busy but we rarely produce anything. The following is a simple picture of how I can complete my daily activities
Simple Drawing of Degrees of Priority
Seeing the picture above, some of my seminar participants have asked: can the order be reversed? The answer is OK. Yes, once again, people’s priorities sometimes vary, right? However, I suggest that the order is alternated between numbers 2, 3, and 4. Meanwhile, numbers 1 and 5 remain at the ends. So suppose your second priority is learning something, that’s okay too. These priority degrees can be adjusted to the context of your life or profession now.
Hopefully what I share can be useful to make your days more productive. I have tried it and the above techniques really help me to complete various daily tasks in a better and more enjoyable way.
