Planning your day: the key to stop sacrificing your life to one thing
Most people plan their day the same morning, or not at all. I made the opposite choice: I fill in my plan in the evening, as the last activity before stopping screens, to fall asleep better afterward. But you can just as well do it in the morning, blocking half an hour or more to prepare your day. It really depends on you and what you're most comfortable with.
If I choose the evening, it's because it's optimal to start the day already organized, without wasting time in the morning deciding what to do. Normally, the evening before, you already know everything you're going to do the next day. You might as well put it in writing then.
Why the evening works so well
There are two good reasons for this. The first is the time and energy you save in the morning. Deciding what to do is an effort in itself, and in the morning that effort falls at the worst moment: either you're in a rush, or your fresh willpower should be used to act, not to think about your organization. By planning the night before, you wake up with a plan all ready, you just have to execute it.
The second reason is more subtle. In the evening, you plan cold, with distance. In the morning, in the heat of the moment, you tend to be too optimistic and underestimate how long things take. A plan made the night before, calmer, is often more realistic, and a realistic plan follows itself.
The main advantage, at bottom, is starting the day without a void. When you wake up, you feel stronger, with hope and motivation. With a day already planned, you no longer need extra motivation to do things well, because it's all already wrapped up. You start, you launch your timer, and boom, you're more effective than ever.
My beginnings: imperfect, but improving
There may be a short adjustment period, but you must never get discouraged. That's the most important thing.
For me too, the first times weren't perfect. I'd forget to plan my days in time. But since I'd decided to leave social media, I started noticing the empty gaps I had, and I began filling them as creatively as possible.
That's what made me far more productive and focused, just by applying the first step of time blocking: quitting social media, and filling the gaps with activities decided in advance. And I became more and more organized, even on days I hadn't planned: I'd spot in advance the moments I'd have nothing to do, and I'd tell myself "here, I'll do this in the meantime," instead of looking at Instagram, or "I'll busy myself this way," instead of scrolling on TikTok.
Organizing your life when the unexpected is part of daily life
I know well the difficulty of organizing when you don't really know what your day will be made of. Because of my cultural heritage, I lived with family for a long time: in our family structure, children leave the home very late and support their relatives during their studies. Even though I'd prepared my day, an unexpected call from my father for help in one area or another could take me several hours, and, as you can imagine, blow my organization to pieces.
Before, faced with that, I only planned a single activity in my day: the most important one. I reserved my morning for the priority task, and that was all. The other tasks had a fate already written: waiting for the day they would become, in their turn, the most important in the hierarchy. Concretely, that meant sacrificing my physical fitness, my social life, an athletic career that never existed, and my spiritual practices, all just for studies. While I watched people succeed in their academic path without giving up all the rest.
Balance, not just productivity
Planning my days helped me live my life fully, feeling good both physically and mentally. Because a good plan isn't there to make you work more: it's there to leave nothing aside. When you place your blocks in advance, you immediately see whether you've reserved room for sport, for rest, for others, for what matters to you, instead of sacrificing everything to one thing.
To have balance in your life, it's therefore essential to organize your day well. That's what lets you strengthen your self-confidence and improve the quality of your life. And the best moment to start is tonight, ten minutes, before turning off the screen, to decide what tomorrow will be made of.
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