“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.
