Some people may go on and on about how schedules or routines don’t allow for creativity or spontaneity – and that may certainly be true in some circumstances. However in overall situations, people who don’t follow a schedule are prone to miss appointments, procrastinate, live or work in an disorganized environment, and haphazardly complete assignments. It’s a complete formula for disaster. If you want to succeed however, you must understand the value of following a schedule – one that dictates dates and times that will enable you arrive on time, complete tasks at hand, and be prepared for additional accomplishments.
So how do you begin to follow a schedule? The first thing that you can do is ask pertinent questions to make sure that you understand the schedule that you’ve been given. For some people, following a schedule is a simple matter of doing the things listed on an itemized task list. For others however, additional details may enable them to streamline a schedule or fully incorporate a schedule into other areas of life. For example, you might want to ask which items on the schedule are the highest priority or what items on the schedule can be postponed or substituted with other things.
Once you’ve obtained all the information you need, you may need to adjust some activities in your life that aren’t even related to your schedule. Not all of these activities are time-wasters, as you might suspect – they simply need to be rearranged. For example, if you’ve been accustomed to taking a two-hour lunch break, you may need to shorten that activity to only one hour or half an hour so that you can accomplish other things that are on your schedule. If you’ve been accustomed to shopping on Saturday mornings, you might need to move that activity to Sunday evenings so that you can fill the early Saturday morning hour with research at the library.
You should also remember that not all schedules are set in stone – they can be adjusted to make room for additional tasks or tasks that take a longer or shorter amount of time to accomplish than what was originally. With experience, asking the right questions, and a little rearrangement, you will have a schedule that you can confidently follow knowing that it leads you to easily accomplish the things that are important to you.
Nicole Miller is a developer and member of the Association of Shareware Professionals.
Sorry to see you’ve been getting hit by the new spam. I was getting them on my site, too.
At first I thought that your article needed more detail, but now that I think of it, it’s really just meant to inspire the reader to come up with _their own_ schedule strategy.
Altogether, this is a nice, short, commonsense article.
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I agree that schedules are great. They don’t need to confine you, they just tell you what you are giving up or what needs to be rescheduled to do something else.
[...] Improve Your Life by Following a Schedule: Read this post to learn why a schedule can have a good effect on your life. [...]
a life without a schedule is like a building without a plan ,, that’s how i relate to it
I think of life as a tree and it grows on its own and all it needs is some sunlight to guide it. But it does not need every second of it to be listed on a paper or tablet. Things that have a time limit should be put on a list. Groceries are to be put on a list. Quite frankly i do not have time for anything since i live 24/7 doing all kinds of stuff. I just make sure time limited stuff are taken care of first before anything else.