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How to Schedule Your Day Without Getting Overwhelmed

By Emma Carey

I need to feed the cat, drop off the kids, find a new job, call the gas man, and reply to emails. What about exercise? When the f*ck am I going to do that? Your head is spinning, and you end up sitting on the couch, watching TV to avoid a looming panic attack. An endless list of tasks quickly turns into:

Life is intense, so planning your day is a way to make you feel calm and in control. You can clearly see what needs doing, where you have free time and where you don’t. But how do you start?

You might be thinking, ‘Everything is essential. Everything needs doing. Everything’s a mess!’

Stop. Take a breath.

I’m going to show you how to plan your day so you can focus, make progress and head in the right direction toward your big dreams. You’ve got this, and I will walk you through it. Ready? Let’s start.

One of the main things that make planning your day difficult is feeling overwhelmed. So get a piece of paper, journal, whatever it is and write out EVERYTHING.

Everything you need to do and want to do. Long-term goals, short-term goals, and daily tasks are all going on there. Another word for this is brain dumping. You’re getting everything out of your head to see it on paper. For example, my list may look like the following:

Chances are your eyes start to skim that list. There are too many things, and you don’t know where to focus. What are my priorities? What’s going to get me where I want to go? How do I start? These are all questions I’m going to answer.

Discovering themes in your brain dump is crucial because it clearly maps out what your brain is thinking. When I talk about themes, I mean life categories. For example, physical health, mental health, career, relationships, or finances.

There may be some things on your to-do list that overlap in themes. Finishing college can come under education and career. That’s okay.

Choose which category it falls under for YOU. If you’re getting hung up on creating themes, remember there are no rules. You are making them up. If you think saving $2000 comes under career, not finances, you’re right. Why are you right? Because your to-do list is YOURS.

Identifying themes is easier if you colour code or put a letter next to each task. If one of my themes is ‘career’, it might look like this:

Go through your entire list and find themes to get a clearer picture of what’s in your brain. I’ve written out some colour and letter-coded themes below:

Career, Travel, Education, Daily Chores, Physical Health, Mental Health, Family, Other.

Yikes. A fair few themes are going on there. If it looks like that on paper, no wonder my brain is all tangled and confused. Let’s sort it out.

The next stage is deciding your long-term priorities.

What I mean is, what area of your life do you want to focus on the most? Write out three primary long-term goals you want to achieve in life. For example,

You’re being general here. There’s no need to be super-specific. Chances are there are things you want in life, so write them down. Next, you need to decide which of those long-term goals is your main focus.

But how do you decide? They’re all equally important. How do you know which order they need to go in?

A quick guide is looking at your brain dump list and noticing what theme comes up the most. It seems like that’s ‘career’ for me. If the theme ‘career’ appears most in my brain dump to-do list, then the goal I want to focus on is ‘earn a six-figure salary.’

Sometimes doing these steps don’t match up. If your to-do list is mainly daily tasks, but a goal in life is to buy a house, then you know you’re not spending time on what’s most important. You’re going to fix that. Add all the things you want to do to buy a house to your to-do list. Maybe ask your parents if you can move back in, save money, cut down on fast food, etc. Your to-do list has shifted to reflect your long-term goal. Now get all the tasks you’ve jotted down that relate to that goal and put them in one place:

Long-term goal: Earn a six-figure salary

Relevant tasks:

But which tasks out of the above are the most important?

Here’s what my tasks might look like:

Long-term goal: Earn a six-figure salary

You may look at your matrix and think, ‘Shit. I’ve got ten urgent tasks and zero time.’ So you start to panic, close your notebook and eat an entire family-sized Cadbury bar. It still feels too daunting.

That’s when you need to pick out the top three things from your urgent category. You can even use the matrix AGAIN to sort out the super urgent stuff from the slightly less urgent stuff. Once you identify your top three tasks, write them down in one place.

DO NOT write down more than three. Once you’ve done the first three tasks, you can add one more. Roll any tasks left over to the next day if you don’t get all three done in one day.

You’ve come a long way from your original to-do list, and you’ve got your three tasks. But these are still a little vague and overwhelming.

Start a blog?! What does that even mean? What job am I applying for, which clients am I pitching to, and what do I write? No sweat, these are your final short-term goals.

You need to break your short-term goals down to create something achievable. For example, applying for jobs could look like this:

Apply for jobs

Sign up to 3 job platforms → apply for the [fill in the blank] position at [fill in the blank] company.

Start blog

Decide on a name for the blog, → choose a web hosting platform

Notice that you have to do the first task before moving onto the next one. You need to sign up to a job site before applying for any jobs. You need to decide on a name for your blog before choosing where you want to host it. Therefore, today’s task might look like this:

Long-term goal: Earn a six-figure salary

Today’s to-do list:

After a bit of thought and planning, you’ve identified three high-priority tasks that will move you toward your highest priority long-term goal.

The main thing people get wrong when they reach this point is diving straight into today’s tasks. I don’t blame you. Finally, after months of confusion, seeing an action plan can feel motivating and exciting. There’s one problem.

Pretty soon, you’re going to trip up between the amount of time you think it will take and the time it actually takes to finish a task. For instance, you might plan to sign up to a job platform at 10 am. You’ll be done by 10:30 am, right?

If you think signing up to a job platform would only take half an hour, you’ll get frustrated when it asks you to upload a profile picture, add your CV and then your internet crashes. Maybe you don’t have an appropriate photo or an updated CV yet.

That’s okay. You’ve got one of two options. Only spend the 30 minutes you’ve allocated to the task, then roll it over to tomorrow before continuing with task number two.

Or, continue with task number one until you finish, even if it takes all day. However, if you are a perfectionist or a procrastinator (usually both!), then allocating 30 minutes and 30 minutes only is a great idea.

If you’ve read all this and thought, great! You might enthusiastically pull out a pen to sort your life out, only to feel overwhelmed by the number of steps you need to take.

Don’t rush.

If you read this in the morning and want to implement it today, spend the morning planning or just do the first step.

If you don’t think your brain has got the energy to plan everything, bookmark this post and schedule a day when you can come back to it. You don’t have to do everything at once.

You’ve already made a start by reading this post. You can also pick and choose the parts that you like the most. It’s up to you. It’s YOUR to-do list, not mine.

However, that is a lot of info, so let’s recap:

1. Braindump your entire to-do list on the page.

2. Find common themes in your to-do list, e.g. career, relationships, etc. Use colour codes to identify them more easily.

3. Prioritise according to your long-term goals. E.g. Buy a house

4. Identify urgent tasks using the prioritising matrix.

5. Write down your top three most urgent tasks.

6. Break short-term goals into daily tasks.

7. Plot your tasks by the hour, but don’t get hung up if you go over.

I hope you can reduce an overwhelming life into simple tasks using these steps. I thought I’d leave you with some top tips and important reminders to help you get started:

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