Have you experienced this?
Have you ever tried working at the end of the day on an important task for hours, but can’t seem to get any productive work out of you.
You’re not the only one. The reason you struggle to efficiently get work done at the end of the day is because you’ve already depleted most of, if not all your mental energy and will power.
Let me paint the picture for you so you can understand and even teach your friends. At the start of every day we have 100 points of mental energy. Everything that we do uses up some of that energy. For example:
8:00 AM – Deciding on what to eat for breakfast (5 points)
8:30 AM – Deciding on what outfit you will wear for the day (10 points)
10:00 AM – Lending an ear to your friend and giving them advice (25 points)
3:30 PM – Picking up the kids from soccer (15 points)
And the list goes on…
By the end of the day when you want to work on something that needs your focus, EVEN if you’re awake, you only have a few points of mental energy left.
You’ll find yourself struggling to focus, getting distracted easily, and getting frustrated that nothing useful is getting done.
So how do we preserve our mental energy through the day and make sure the important tasks that need to get done, we are able to give them as much focus and will power as possible?
There are two things we can do.
1. Repeatable Routines
First, we have to create repeatable routines for our days. When you have a repeatable routine, you’re not using up your mental energy points. You know exactly what you’re going to be doing at that time.
You can even start with creating one at time. The easiest to start with is creating a morning routine. Write down exactly what the first hour of your morning looks like. So you don’t have to spend mental energy thinking about every step.
Mark Zuckerberg wears the same outfit every single day – a black t-shirt and jeans in order to preserve his mental energy.
2. A, B, C Tasks
Secondly, we will organize the tasks that we need to do for the next day into A, B, and C tasks.
A tasks – are the most important (things that should already have been done or need to get done ASAP)
B tasks – are the second most important (these are tasks that should be done within the next few days or so, after all A tasks are completed
C tasks – are the “could” be dones (you save these for after A and B’s are done) and you might not even necessarily have to get these done today. They really go into the “nice to have finished early” category
The best way to schedule your day is to set a time slot early in the day to focus ONLY on your A tasks.
This way you have the most amount of mental energy and will power to crush your important and urgent tasks.
Completing tasks when you have most mental energy will help you produce quality work.
It also helps to have a time slot for these tasks because you set urgency for yourself that you HAVE to get these A tasks done within the 2-4 hours you set in the morning.
Then set a time in the afternoon to for your B tasks. If you did not finish your A tasks for some reason, use the beginning of this time to crush those and then move onto B tasks.
Then, set a time later in the afternoon or in the evening for your C tasks.
We recommend that you also include in your schedule at the end of the day to organize your A, B, and C tasks for the next day so that you can go into each time slot knowing exactly what needs to get done.
We created a free a printable here that you can use to organize your days.
What will you achieve now?
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