Placement: Making Time for What Matters

“Every minute you spend in planning saves 10 minutes in execution; this gives you a 1,000 percent return on energy!” ― Brian Tracy

In today’s experience, many of us spend way too much time on things that are pressing and not enough time on things that are important. If you are one of us who tend to behave this way, then I enjoin you to read on.

For starters, what we need to get out of the busyness trap is clarity about what is truly important and designing a concrete plan to making it happen. That plan is what I call placement, which is, another word I choose to represent creating a schedule to ensure that we get essential things done. 

Dictionary defines placement as ‘the act of placing or arranging something in a position or location, or the fact of being placed or arranged in this way.’ For our purpose in this article, that something is not a physical object, but a mental one, like something we want to do or a skill we want to learn.

In essence, placement is about creating a space for our intentions to live in the world. And the peak performance expert, Anthony Robbins explained the concept this way. He said: “If you talk about it, it is a dream, if you envision it, it’s possible, but if you schedule it, it’s real.”

Gretchen Rubin, the author of the book, ‘Better Than Before, Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives,’ agrees to the power of this strategy in that it forces us to prioritize our lives beforehand instead of living on autopilot as usual. 

She explains that by ‘scheduling’ an activity, we instantly turn something we may do into something we ‘must do.’ And as you may attest, there are many things we want to do, but we never do because we don’t have a concrete plan for doing them. Placement is the strategy for creating such a plan to accomplish those things. 

For example:

If I schedule studying for an hour tonight, the schedule gives studying precedence over everything else I can choose to do with the time.

Placement ensures that we are spending our time with purpose, instead of spending it whimsically.

Putting the Lesson into Practice

Again, the main thing about placement strategy is that it brings absolute clarity on what we want to do, when we want to do it, and the time we decide to spend on the activity. 

So we have to first decide what our highest priority is at each moment in our day and then make a clear plan to getting it done.  Basically, this is called schedule, and the dictionary defines it as “a plan of work to be done, showing the order in which tasks are to be carried out and the amounts of time allocated to them.”

By this approach, not only are we going to ensure we are doing the right thing with the very limited time that we have, we will also ensure we are spending the right amount of time on the activity in mind; neither too much time nor too little time, just the predetermined measure allotted.

Say, for example, I make the following plan: 

Every morning, by 6:00am (specific time), I will study for 20 minutes (precise length) in my library (designated place).

With this level of clarity, it is far more difficult for me to give in to distractions and procrastination when my alarm rings.  Furthermore, the firmly fixed schedule protects me from being sidetracked by random 'emergencies' of life.

Now, if you are serious about making any of your good intentions real, stop thinking about it, stop talking about it; just create a simple schedule that you can sustain and follow it religiously.