6 Steps to Plan Your Day Confidently, Not Chaotically

We’ve all been that person who hopelessly declares, “I just have to make it through this week,” every week for two months.

When the weight of upcoming tasks and looming due dates threatens to send us spiraling into overwhelm, it’s tempting to keep pushing harder in the hopes that we’ll find relief after the next project wraps. This is the instinct for many, yet somehow burnout still manages to find us.

What if we proposed that it's precisely in our busiest moments when we need to, perhaps counterintuitively, move more slowly?

Spacetime is built on the philosophy of monotasking — doing one thing at a time. Monotasking is the cooler, wiser cousin of Multitasking.

Over the last few years of building this company, this philosophy has unconsciously spilled over into many areas of our lives, especially how we think about our days.

When you’re overwhelmed, it’s easy to stress about all the tasks on your list, all the projects coming up, and how little time you have to do it all. The instinct is to go faster, try to juggle it all at once, and think 2 week in advance.

But when you’re in this place, it can be helpful to zoom in on your 24 hours, rather than ruminating on how busy you’ve been and planning for how busy you’ll be.

Zooming in feels a lot like slowing down, and it actually helps us get more done.

Focusing only on what’s important for today can help take the pressure off, and curb the feeling that every little thing is a big deal. It also helps us gain perspective on what’s possible and realistic — and reminds us that as much as we want to think about next week’s hypotheticals, all we can ever handle is what’s right in front of us.

Imagine how much more mental space you’d have for today’s tasks if you stopped worrying about tomorrow’s tasks.

When we started putting this philosophy into action, we kept coming back to the same six strategies that help us get clear on what needs to happen, make a realistic game plan, and feel confident that we can handle what’s in front of us without needing to rush.

Once we understood which component of daily panning were essential, we turned it into a simple framework to lean on when the chaos gremlins are running rampant in your brain.

Our Daily Focus Pages are a combination of our favorite strategies, designed to help you:

• Prioritize urgent to-do's (you only get three — force rank)

• Focus only on what matters most today (zoom alllll the way in)

• Block off time by the hour (instead of free falling and hoping for the best)

• Reduce productivity guilt (is that helping anyway??)

Here’s a breakdown of each simple strategy that we used:

This product is a digital download that can be used interactively on tablets or printed for a tactile experience (formatted for 8.5 x 11" paper).

Stop winging it — try out our Daily Focus Pages and feel better today.