How I Plan My Days For Success

hey guys so I am back to talk a little bit about how I plan my days inside my HP 90 planner and this would work for any planner basically that you're using or even just a notebook or anything like that but I just want to give you guys kind of an inside look at how I plan and prepare my day so that I get a lot done this kind of system has really been helping me a lot lately so if you're interested in seeing more stay tuned okay so I'm obviously working specifically in my HP 90 planner today which is the planner that I have actually designed myself for writers because I found that none of the planners that I was using exactly we're structured in a way that I needed them to be because I need a daily page but I also need a weekly overview and a lot of the planners out there that have weekly overviews don't have daily pages or vice versa so like the day designer or whatever they have a monthly overview and then a daily page for every day but there's no overview of the entire week and I found that just the way that I like to plan and what works best for me efficiency wise is to have a monthly a weekly and a daily view and if you've been watching this channel for a while you know that that's why I loved the Hopa Nietzsche but the problem with the Hoba Nietzsche is because it's a bound book you don't necessarily have the ability to add things to it so then I would find I had all these other notebooks that I was keeping track of other types of things like my social media stats and like blog notes and other things like that so I ended up last year going back into my 6 ringbinder system and I switch out my actual binder every month so this month I'm in my purple patent leather original Filofax but every month I switch it out and it allows me to switch out the color of the binder and the way that the planner looks with colors and different things like that but to keep the insides the same and this system has been working for me now really really well for about a year and or a little bit less than a year actually and I'm just absolutely loving it so I wanted to give you a little bit of a peek into what I do to plan my days because I've talked a little bit and done some plan with meson planning my weeks or months but I've never really done the days so here we go so basically just kind of going back to the weeks at the beginning of every week in this planner and this is what I was kind of doing the Hoban Ichi as well I have three goals every quarter I plan 90 day segments 90 days at a time in the beginning of every quarter I will set three main goals for myself usually one has to do with my writing one has to do with like promotions and community building with my fans and then the third goal usually has to do with this channel with heart breathing's and the courses and the videos that I put out and stuff like that so I take those goals and then I look at my time realistically I figure out what projects I have time for and then I break those projects down into little bitty tasks and I have lists of all those tasks I also have a Kanban board that has sticky notes that have all my tasks on it for the quarter so that way I know exactly what I need to work on like every single thing I need to do throughout the next 90 days and then I just sort of chip away at it every day so here's my process at the beginning of every week I will go into these three columns with the three goals and I will take a look at my sticky notes and the things that haven't gotten done yet and I will write down four goal number one here's the tasks that I want to do so like I'm working on my book called fates surrender I kind of hit a wall so I've been reading some of it to try to get you know past the wall that I'm at I'm getting close to getting done with it but I've just hit a wall so I need to go back and do some plot then I'm gonna be working on deaths awakening which is the first book in that series and I'm gonna be rewriting the blurb and redoing some things on that like the key words new taglines and things like that I also have some other plants that I'm sort of working on mapping out for a new project then goal number two which is more of my community building and like fans and stuff like that I've gotten big newsletter project I've been working on this quarter and then I also wanted to record a bullet journal set up this week for my author YouTube channel and then I always try to plan out social media for the week at the beginning of the week now this week with goal number three I actually came in to the second tab here cuz where I've drawn this line this is all goal number three because this is a pretty heavy big busy week for my heartbeat Channel so I'm putting out several videos my q2 planner actually just came out today so if you've been waiting for the second quarter HP 90 print planner principle to go up on etsy it is up now so you can go ahead and grab that there's also an undated version that you can print over and over again and so I'm also got my course the HP 90 course is launching this weekend it starts on Thursday night so I just have a lot of things going on for that so I've got tons and tons of little things plus I hit 15,000 subscribers and I'm running a giveaway so I've got lots of tasks going for that so at the beginning of the week I figure out on Sunday night's like exactly what tasks I'm going to be working on write down any other extra little things I write down where my social media is for both heart breathing's and for my Sarah cannon stuff I have a note here of what how many words I want to write what blog I want to write and any of the top priority things that I want to do so this is kind of my like weekly dashboard and that comes into play pretty heavily when you start talking about how I play in my day it's because I wouldn't know what needed to get done on a daily basis if I hadn't already gone through this process on Sunday night figuring out what I'm gonna tackle for the week because what I used to do was I didn't really have a plan for the court or a plan for the week I just woke up every day and whatever pulled at my attention like this email this emergency this thing over here oh I really need to do the laundry I need to go get this somebody's messaging me over here and whatever would pull at my attention that seemed urgent was what I would get done and then I would end up at the end of a month or the end of a week and go gosh I pretty much don't even know where I spent my time how come I didn't get my newsletter done how come I didn't finish writing as many words as I wanted and I felt like I had no control over my time so when I started doing this I started getting really deliberate about exactly what I was going to do now every once in a while there will be things that come up that don't fit into this list that I have to get done there are emergencies that come up people email me and need help with something that I haven't you know put on my list for the most part I try to push things off for next week or not let those things take priority I try to make the things that are on this list that are my tasks that need to get done for the quarter my priority because I've specifically laid these tasks out to help me hit my major goals and those goals are what's most important to me so this is where I have learned to really focus my time so this is super important when it comes to planning my days and everything on this list eventually gets moved to what's going on in my daily life so this is the weekly overview that I was talking about now this typically looks like looks like this where you've got the dates at the top work in progress here a little section for notes with a habit tracker you can write any promotions you have and I there's like checklists at the bottom I like to use those for social media so it's blank like this but I like to get planner printables from Etsy where I can print out I have a Cricut and I like to print out my own stickers and sort of design the way I want and because it's a printable kit I can resize it so the ones that are made for Erin Condren I can resize them for my heart breathing planner because Erin Condren is like one and a half inches for every box and so all I have to do is go in and resize them in the cricut to be one and a quarter inch and then they fit perfectly in my planner so a little bit of extra work on Sundays but it's kind of meditative for me and I listen to podcasts while I do it takes me about 30 minutes a week to print and cut all these stickers so anyway I will go through the week and I will take each day and I will figure out from this list what's going to try to get done on this day like this day I might be recording this day I'm going to work on you know my newsletter project this what day I'm going to be mostly writing and I just sort of plan out my days along with anything that's time-sensitive like I have a closing call for my boot camp or on Thursday night I have a kickoff call at 8:00 p.m. so that kind of stuff goes on my weekly plan here and I just plan it out so that's my like weekly overview and my weekly dashboard then we get into my daily plan so as you can see every single day has its own page and I print out an a5 but this planner also comes in letter size if you wanted to use a binder or like a big happy planner you could do that as well the a5 is a little bit more of a pain to you print and cut yourself unless you've got experience doing that but it's worth the pain for me because I just like this size but basically this is the daily page and you can see the blank one over here I've got basically a time schedule over here from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. or really 11:00 p.m. you can write out your schedule then there's a blank space here a blank box and a blank space here with three lines at the top and that's all the structure there is but what I like the way I like to use it is at the beginning of the day I will write out what are my top three things that have to get done and yesterday I actually got all three of these things done so I usually like to put a checkmark there or cross through them so these are my like must do even if I don't get to everything then I will go over to this time bar and I will figure out what is my time schedule look like for the day and I don't fill this stuff out ahead of time because it changes so like if I had woken up this morning and my son had a sore throat and couldn't go to school then it would really have messed up my whole day and I would had this like would have been a useless page so that's why I love the weekly overview cuz I can go ahead and kind of plan what I want to get done on this day but having the daily page gives me the flexibility to go back and say well it's not going to work out like I thought because I've got this other thing that needs to happen so now I'm going to start with a fresh slate and plan the day so I plan the weekly stuff on Sundays but then every day a plan in the morning so today is Tuesday the 19th so I would plan my top three things for the day up here at the top and so my top three things for the day are to get the q2 planner up so get it listed which it was being proof read last night by a few different people so the planner gets listed today the second thing that needs to get done today is I need to mail out a giveaway I'm late getting it out so that has to get done today it's priority and then my third priority is this video so I will say just I'm just going to put video and then beside it I'll put days because I know that's what I'm talking about so I will sit down first like usually when we're at breakfast and I'll just I doubt okay I know these are my top three things to do now I don't need to add stickers and stuff to it but because I like to make things prettier I like to add stickers I also will show you how much I like washi tape so you can see this bottom little section down here I've pretty much designed this planner specifically with enough space at the bottom for a basic roll of washi tape because I like to put a strip of washi tape down at the bottom so if you ever wondered why there's a little space at the bottom of the planner it's because I like to take a coordinating color and put washi tape on it I also usually have like a set of stickers that I'm using for the week so this is those printables that I was talking about that I cut myself and I will use some of these extra little things throughout my planning and then I also have some other little printable icons like Mayo laptops little clocks and different things like that that I will use and I will link down below which at-sea shops I got these from I think all of these actually came from the planner Shack so I will link those for you down below if you have your own like cutting machine or you don't mind cutting your own stickers it's really inexpensive way to get cute stickers without having to pay and have them shipped and everything to put them yourself so alright so then I would go through and I basically plan my time that's the second thing that I do every day so I'm just going to go ahead and do that I like to block these off like little blocks here so I know I'm going to do a little bit of admin work in the morning which is usually email stuff my morning block of time usually from 9:00 to noon is to work on my books so whether I'm editing or plotting I'm almost always in this block of time working on my books so here I'm gonna be writing then we're getting lunch out today so that's gonna take a little bit of extra time then I'm just not recording this video so obviously I didn't actually do this this morning because I knew I wanted to record it so I'm recording it in the afternoon and filling this out in the afternoon but I would normally do this first thing in the morning so this stretch of time this two-hour stretch is going to be to record this video and to go ahead and get my planner listed on Etsy so that it will be up before this video goes live and then I've got to get to the mailbox or post office today and then that's pretty much going to be my working day because I worked pretty late last night and I just don't want to work super late tonight so I'm gonna spend time like family time will go here and I'm not even going to mark that then we'll have dinner around 6:00 and then this time in the evening we'll be with my son and my husband and I have just started playing Final Fantasy online we were playing Wow but we were kind of getting bored with it so we have started characters on Final Fantasy so I'm gonna be gaming some tonight but this way I'm kind of planning out exactly what I'm gonna get done throughout the day so once I know those are my time blocks those are my blocks of time that I've got stuff that's going to get done then I will sit down and I will pick out like the colors that I want to use for the day and sometimes I will use these little ones that use headers for what I'm going to do and sometimes I just use icons like I'm going to do today so I grabbed this little laptop that kind of matches the colors and I'm going to write down the admin work that I need to do so I usually will put a little header here that says admin and then I need to write down all the little things that I need to talk about and I just will make myself little notes like I know that this is like email so I need to get back to so I've got three basically like three big email things that I need to deal with this morning then my writing time I'm going to use a little desk here for this so I've got this little disc so I'm going to use this little icon with the desk here and I'm gonna put writing and this you can't really see it probably from in the camera but this has little dock right here if you wanted to use this kind of more like a bullet journal and sometimes I do that like you can see over here that I have we use the little boxes sometimes I do that sometimes I just use like little bullet points so with my writing today I would like to get my goal was to get 3,000 words and I did that then so I'm going to take this little planner icon here and I'm going to put HP 90 planner so that's basically all the things that I'm getting done today and this way I've got my times blocked off and now I have the actual like bullet points tasks that I'm going to do and those are all things that are also listed on this monthly or this weekly task list so like the q2 planner the recording of how I plan my days so as soon as this stuff is done I also will go over here and I will check it off that I got it completed so then what do I do with the rest of this space so this little box you know I leave it in the planner to do whatever you want to use with it but I like to use this little box over here for writing sprints so I ended up getting for writing sprints done oops today and I don't have those numbers with me because I wrote them on a spare sheet of paper but what I'll do is I'll usually write out like 200 words 600 words here 300 words or whatever and then I'll write my total down at the bottom so I do know that my total words today was three thousand one hundred and twenty three words so I did hit my goal so then I would come over here and I would put a checkmark and sometimes I would also just like slash that out then this bottom segment is a lot more like open of you know what I can do with it like yesterday I hit 15 thousand subscribers so I made a little note to like remember that I that was the day I did it and I wrote a little bit of journaling sometimes I use this for like quotes that I want to remember and actually another thing that I need to put on here that I will go to the post office and do in just a minute is that I need to mail out that giveaway so that should go up here and my tasks so then this bottom thing what do I want to write out well I've just gotten back from lunch with my husband and I felt the baby kick for the first time so even though this is not something that is related to my work I definitely want to mark that in my planner because I just want to remember so I'm going to grab this little bow and I'm going to write a little bit about that so that's just a little thing to always remember and when I'm flipping back through my planner later I can kind of have it as a little bit of memories you could use this for - you could also use this for like continuing your task list you could use it for things like you know you want to do tomorrow so you could have your tasks up here and then as things come up throughout the day somebody says oh I need remember I need to get this remember I need to get this you could use this as kind of like a little holding spot for the things you want to get done tomorrow but this is basically how I plan my days is I sit down every Sunday and I figure out which tasks I'm going to get done for the week and these tasks all come from my quarterly plan so I'm not like spending a ton of time trying to figure out every day or every week gosh what should i do what should I do that's a huge time waster for me I sit down for a couple of days every quarter so I'm about to do that since we're about to start quarter two of the year and I'm gonna plan out everything I'm doing for April May and June so then I don't really have to put much thought into it other than at the beginning of the week which ones of those things do I have to do it takes so much stress off my plate it takes so much like confusion what am I gonna work on I don't have to sit around wondering I don't waste time I don't come into my office every day going I don't know what to do what should I spend my time on and then allowing my attention to get fractured between what other people are demanding of me or what seems like it needs to get done or what I feel like doing today I can I have so much peace I can't even tell you guys I have so much peace now knowing exactly what I'm gonna get done and like I said I spend a couple of days at the end of every quarter preparing for the following quarter I figure out everything I'm gonna work on everything that's gonna move me forward towards my dreams and then I every week will sit down pick out which tasks go for this week and then every day I pick tasks off those lists and I you know add them to the day and say this is what's gonna get done and I'm telling you I'm getting so much more done in a quarter than I even was getting in a year before you know before this so it's just like hugely not only like tripled probably my productivity but it also has given me so much peace of mind of being like I know exactly what I'm going to do and that alone like I'm a natural procrastinator so that alone like motivates me to start getting stuff done because I don't have to like have any excuses of why I'm not getting it done this is what's on the plan for today this is what I'm going to get done and if I had woken up today and things had been different than I expected like my son was sick or I wasn't feeling well which has been happening a lot with this pregnancy then I would take on only the things I really felt like doing but I would still know that I've got a few days to catch up and by the time Friday or Saturday rolls around I need to be making sure I'm clicking everything off that list that I can so it's been just an amazing program for me and I hope that seeing this laid out gives you some ideas of how you can use your own planner or adopt your own planner or if you'd like to pick up the HP 90 planner which is more than just a planner itself it actually walks you through my whole process in terms of goal-setting so if you're interested in the q2 planner that has actually gone up on etsy today there's also an undated planner that doesn't have dates so you can print it out over and over again every time without having to worry about the date so you just fill in the dates yourself so either one of those they're both available on etsy right now and also if you want more guidance on how to set your goals you want a little bit more personal attention from me and to see an entire set of videos where I walk you through my entire process and this is not just like hey how to plan stuff it's also like really how to take a look at what it is you want for your life and how to really start making progress toward that so it's a real goal-setting course that's going to help you learn to figure out what it is you really want and how you're going to get there so it's a three day bootcamp it actually begins this Thursday so registration is only open for a couple more days Thursday night is a live kickoff call with me on video and then Friday starts day 1 day 2 day 3 with Sunday is another kickoff call or a closing call where you get to get a little bit more inspiration from me but you also with this course will get for the rest of the year and even into next year and so on you get a Facebook group with me where I have weekly support and accountability for you as well so if you'd like to join that registration is only open for a couple more days I would super love to have you in the course I would also love to have you of course using the planner if you would like to use that but if not hope that just showing you kind of how I've gone through this system gives you some ideas to how to adapt your own planner or your own plans to help you get more done alright guys thank you so much for watching all the links for all the courses and for the planner and everything are down below if you'd like to see more about those and I will see you guys in a couple days with my next video bye [Music]

Channel: Heart Breathings

Views: 22,978

Rating: 4.9439907 out of 5

Keywords: how to plan your day, plan with me, how to organize your life, how to organize your day, time management, habits of successful people, morning routine, structure your day, to do list, how to plan your day effectively, how to plan your day to be productive, how i plan my day, how i plan my week, how to organize your life for success, daily planning, how to schedule your day, time block, HB90, Heart Breathings Planner

Id: 3xP0volQgYE

Length: 23min 24sec (1404 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 19 2019