How I plan my day/week/month (realistic and flexible)

Have you experienced this before? You have so many things in your calendar, and also you want to do something, but you don't know where to start. Because you don't know where to start, you tend to procrastinate until the end of the day. At the end of the day, when you look into your calendar, you see so many things that haven't gotten done, and you feel really overwhelmed. You go to bed maybe, or you cram, or you pull an all-nighter in order to finish those tasks. But running away from your responsibilities or pulling an all-nighter—neither of them are great options in the long term.

So today, I want to introduce you guys to the system and the methods that I use to plan my day, week, and also month. So let's get started! When it comes to scheduling my day, there are so many different ways to do it. I have watched so many videos, read so many books about them, and tried so many apps about it, but I have one conclusion: the simpler it is, the more likely you are to schedule your day. Basically, if you have a system that requires a lot of energy, a lot of activation energy to do that thing, you're more likely to procrastinate on that thing.

For that, I use pen and paper. This is the Molly Skin Pro Project Planner — it’s too expensive, I don't think you need it. I just wanted to try it. I also use Google Calendar. Today, in order to make editing and filming easy, I'm going to use my iPad Mini to draw things and write things. But you know, you don’t necessarily need an iPad to do so. Google Calendar is free, and you can use it on your mobile phones as well as on your PC. But to be honest, it's not necessary; if you have pen and paper, that should work.

When it comes to my scheduling system, the first step will be doing a brain dump. So basically, the brain dump is writing down all the tasks. This system requires you to sit down every single week, let's say on Sunday, and then plan your week, month, and days according to that. You might think, “Why am I going to plan my month every Sunday?” because things can change, so you might need to update them. I think picking a Sunday, or any day to be honest, and sticking to it while checking in every week is a great tactic to arrange your schedule and keep it updated. So I picked Sunday, but you can pick whatever day you want.

Every Sunday, what I do first is a brain dump. Basically, you write down every task you need to do for that week, month, or day—whatever. Write down every task you have in your mind. Let’s do it together because I need to plan my week, day, and month as well. For that, I usually go to Google. You can, of course, use pen and paper for doing a brain dump, but I usually do this on my Google Notes. You basically open a blank page and start to write down the things that you have to do.

Okay, so let's time for brain dumping. You start to write all the things that you need to do. I've written down everything I need to do for that week or in that month. Now, after doing my brain dump, we need to categorize them into four different categories in order to decide which one to start with. We're going to use the Eisenhower Decision Matrix.

When it comes to the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, we're going to divide all of the things according to their urgency and according to their importance. To differentiate urgency and importance, let me explain the difference: anything that requires your immediate action and anything that is time-sensitive might have an exam or a project it has a due date. So these things are considered urgent. Your long-term goals are not urgent.

We usually tend to focus on only urgent things because they have this time deadline and due date. If you only do urgent things, you probably miss important things for you. Therefore, you always need to make time for urgent and also important tasks so that you will achieve your long-term goals but not miss these deadlines. Important tasks require initiative and proactiveness, and they also need dedicated focused hours to do quality work, which has a large impact on success.

Let’s say you are a medical student or any college student; you want to maybe start a YouTube channel, but you have your medical school exam. You really want to be a YouTuber, right? So your exams will be urgent, but having a YouTube channel—filming videos for it, publishing your own videos—might be important for you in the long run since you want to become a YouTuber. It’s important to create videos because if you want published videos, you can't become a YouTuber only focusing on your med school. But at the same time, if you only focus on YouTube, then you'll probably fail in med school.

In order to keep these balances, you need to understand what's urgent for you and what's important for you, and then apply the Eisenhower Decision Metrics that I'm going to introduce right now. Basically, our guy Eisenhower divides everything into four groups. He says: do the urgent and important things right now because they have a due date, and also they're important for you in the long run. So you should do them right now.

When it comes to not urgent but also important things for you, like making a YouTube channel, schedule a time to do it. For urgent but not important things, delegate who can do it for you. Let's say cleaning your room—it's not really important for your success in the long run, but it's urgent. Who can do it for you? Maybe hiring someone, maybe calling a cleaning lady is a great option. Think about your hourly rate. If your hourly rate is higher than $30 or maybe, I don’t know, depending on the country, $50, you might be able to hire someone to clean your room.

When it comes to not important and also not urgent things, delete them, eliminate them. Don’t spend time doing them. So let’s go back to our brain dump page and try to categorize everything according to this Eisenhower's Decision Matrix. Filming how I plan my day/week/month is important and also urgent, so let me color code it with green. Responding to emails—it's not urgent but it's important.

After doing your brain dump and categorizing them according to the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, now let’s move on to Google Calendar, and I’ll show you how I plan them out. But before moving to the actual planning, I want to introduce today’s sponsor, NordVPN. With NordVPN, you can connect to 5400 servers in 60 countries. Find a server near you for better speed or in a faraway location for more content. It’s super easy to use; you can connect with one click, and it also has amazing speeds. You can use it on six devices on every major platform, so it doesn’t matter if you have Android, Linux, Apple products, or PC. You can access it from anywhere.

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Now, since we've categorized all of the tasks into four different groups, all we need to do is place them into our Google Calendar. I created a new Google Calendar account so that I can show you how I use Google Calendar. Basically, when you open Google Calendar, we have this different type of views, and now we are clicking to the monthly view so that we can see all the events we need to do this month. I want you to add all the important events or anything you have to do that you cannot change the date for. If you have a date night, any flights, weddings, meetings with people—anything that involves other people, even if it’s far ahead from today—don’t forget to add them because you might forget them over time.

It’s great to see when you open this monthly view which things you need to do. After filling everything in your monthly calendar, now let’s move to the weekly view. When placing the events in your calendar, I want you to use the time-blocking method. What is time blocking? Time blocking is the practice of planning out every moment of your day in advance, dedicating specific time blocks for certain tasks and responsibilities. We’re not going to go that strict and plan every single minute of our day, but we’re going to do basic time blocking.

The first step will be adding your routines, maybe your work, your uni, and time blocking it. Usually, I have from 8 a.m. to around 2 or 3 p.m. uni, but I'm going to time block every day for that. Some people like to add their sleeping time too, so they can see when to go to bed and when to prepare for the next day and how much time they have to do the things they need to do. But I personally don’t add my sleep schedule.

Now, it’s time to add the things that are urgent and also important. I’ve time blocked two hours for filming a video, responding to emails, and sending documents to my tax accountant. It will actually take me around one hour and thirty minutes, but I overestimated and gave myself two hours. When scheduling, overestimating and giving yourself a bit more time than you expect is important so you won’t rush into doing something.

After adding urgent and important things, it’s now time to add important but not so urgent stuff in our calendar. Also, a great thing about Google Calendar is that you can color code them. So by looking at a color you can understand how important or how urgent the task is. Replying to emails and also replying on WhatsApp are somewhat similar, so I’m going to batch them together and do them on the same day.

After putting the important but not urgent things, now move on to the urgent but not important things. These are the things that we want to delegate, so I will hire an editor to edit my videos, and I need to plan time for that. When it comes to not urgent and not important things, we’ve already deleted them from our calendar, so you don’t need to add them.

Now you can move to planning your day. According to this, while looking at your calendar, you can decide what you want to do. Let’s say I want to wake up at six so that I will have time for myself in the morning, and I can color code this to green. I’ll write "morning routine," and for my morning routine, let’s say I want to add skincare, meditation, and then also add breakfast. So here is my morning routine; I have a bit of free time. During this time, I will add study and the subject before I work. This study time also includes the time that I’m going to take a break.

From 9 p.m. to 10 p.m., I’m going to do my nighttime routine, and then I'll go to bed. You can see my day and how I planned my day.

Okay, so that was how I plan my month, week, and day. Now let’s talk about some tips that I can give when it comes to planning your life. The first tip will be to always overestimate the tasks. Even if it’s going to take you 20 minutes, overestimate it to 30, because things can happen, and things can pop up in our lives and we need to change our schedules a bit. And it happens.

The second tip I’ll give is to always give yourself a 20 to 30-minute break between these different time blocks. It takes a bit of time to shift your mind from one task to another, and since we use the time-blocking method, it allows you to focus on the project that is in front of you deeply. You need a bit of a break. Taking effective breaks is super important for your brain. I’m planning to make a video about how to take effective breaks, but before even filming that video, just take breaks before you do something.

The third tip will be "eat the frog." If you’ve read the very famous productivity self-management book called "Eat the Frog," you probably know that you should always do the most demanding task at the beginning of the day. Let’s say you have a huge project that you’ve been procrastinating on starting. The "eat the frog" tactic or advice or tip, whatever says, do the most tempting activity at the beginning of your day so that the rest will be much easier for you.

For example, for me, writing a script for my videos is really tempting, so I always schedule 15 to 20 minutes at the beginning of the day to do it. Then the rest of the day is pretty easy compared to that most tempting activity. The fourth tip will be: overestimate things, yes, but don’t overestimate them too much. Let’s say if it takes you 20 minutes, overestimate it to 30, but don’t overestimate it to an hour.

If you don’t know, Parkinson’s Law says that the more time you give to a task, the more time it takes. When it comes to summer break, I don’t know if you guys had summer break homework, but if they give you three months, you’ll probably chill the whole summer and do it the last week or last day, like I did when I was a kid. Even if you can finish the project much earlier because you give yourself more time, you start to procrastinate, and you do things more slowly. The less time you have, the more efficient you are.

So yes, overestimate things—not to stress over them—but don’t overestimate them too much so that you won’t procrastinate. The tip number five, I guess, will be: things will change. Arrange them during the day. Things can happen, and your schedule might change with time, so you need to adapt to it. Don't just stare at your calendar and say, “Oh my God, today is such a fail; I can’t do anything right now.” No, just go to your Google Calendar and reschedule everything.

It’s not that hard; all you have to do is click a couple of things and change the times of them. So always adapt to your new schedule. Tip number six will be to give yourself daily, weekly, and monthly feedback. So at the end of the day, look at your calendar and compare what you expected from yourself to achieve versus how much you got done, and give yourself daily feedback.

Now, be careful with lunch breaks. You tend to take them longer. Also, look at your weekly calendar and give yourself feedback on what you could do better and the things you did well this week. Also, do them monthly too; look at your schedule, what you have been spending time on, and maybe you could study more efficiently or maybe hit the gym more often.

By giving yourself feedback and analyzing those feedbacks over time, you will allow yourself to improve time management and how you schedule your day. These were my tips for scheduling your day, week, and month. I hope this video was helpful for you guys. Let me know in the comments down below how you schedule your day, week, and month, or if you have any tips that you want to share with the audience, please let me know in the comments section. And don’t forget to check out NordVPN. Bye, guys!