Setting SMART goals for daily planning is an important skill to learn when creating time blocks with the help of time-bound goals. You can achieve a snowball effect from simple small steps to great achievements. This time management worksheet is a helpful tool to plan your day effectively. It will help you detect issues that hinder your daily productivity and cause procrastination.
1. Benefits of Using the Worksheet
Using the Time Management Worksheet designed by EEssays will benefit you in the following ways:
- You will detect where you use your time ineffectively: There is no right time for your planned tasks. All you need is to start acting and living your life fully and step-by-step. Use the worksheet to allocate time to daily small steps.
- As a result, you will benefit from the snowball effect of small steps. It produces a compound impact and helping you realize greater plans in any sphere.
- You will learn how to prioritize your tasks. Discard unimportant low-value activities and focus on those small steps that can bring you closer to the goal.
- SMART goals can help you monitor your progress based on specific criteria. They can help you measure performance within the set time-frame, whether a day, hours (time limits for time blocks), weekly, etc.
- The use of this Worksheet will reduce your stress. Having a well-planned day will ensure that you can cope with planned tasks. You can feel that you can control your life. It is especially important to plan the day with focus on burnout reduction. Try to make time serve for your growth instead for others taking this resource from you. Such an attitude is similar to a perspective on other resources like money, which should work for a person, but not vice versa. Become an investor of your resources, money and time, to get maximum benefits.
- Setting realistic deadlines will help you improve productivity, delegate tasks that cannot be done within expected time limits, and learn when to take breaks for better focus.
2. Elements of the Time Management Worksheet
Find the fillable PDF in the file below:
SMART Goals
Start planning your day with setting SMART goals:
Create an overarching long-term SMART goal for a specific period (week or month). For example, write 100 articles for your blog within 3 months.
This goal is:
- SPECIFIC: it has narrow focus on writing articles for a blog instead of simply writing something,
- MEASURABLE: you can measure goal completion by means of the output of 100 articles,
- ACHIEVABLE: you can really achieve this goal considering your skills and available resources,
- RELEVANT: the goal is relevant to your life purpose and priorities; it supports your values and project vision;
- TIME-BOUND: the goal has specific realistic time limits.
Write down 2-3 SMART goals for the day that you can achieve based on completing several tasks. These tasks can serve as criteria to measure goal achievement.
Tasks and Their Prioritization
Next, you can fill in the tasks that you plan to do during the day. Use the worksheet for writing down your work tasks:
- Responding to business emails
- Meeting with people
- Writing content
- Taking notes for ideas
After determining tasks, add estimated time for the completion of each of them. It is important when you just start planning your time for new projects. Later, you will already know how much time is needed for each task based on evaluating the estimated time against the actual time.
Change the status of tasks during the day by marking whether they are to do, in progress, or done.
Use the Eisenhower matrix for task prioritization to determine their importance and urgency.
| Important | Unimportant | |
| Urgent | ||
| Not Urgent |
Determine task priority:
- High
- Medium
- Low
Time Blocks and Habits
Write down tasks based on time blocks (time limits). Add notes, for example whether to delegate the task, do it in group, or complete it individually.
It is important to work on developing your positive habits. So put a tick whether you have done each task in the category of habits.
Self-Assessment
Finish your daily tasks with self-assessment. It is a must for self-improvement. You can detect what happened out of the plan, what can be improved, and what opportunities you can take. Sometimes, unexpected events present new opportunities. So add them to your next day planning.
Evaluate your focus because it is directly proportional to productivity. The lack of focus equals procrastination. Praise your daily progress and highlight areas where you made great achievements. Consider areas for improvement as positive opportunities for future movement and growth. However, always be flexible. This worksheet can guide you throughout the day, but approach each task with flexibility.
Evaluate your productivity with a score from 1 to 10, considering the following criteria:
- Focus
- Task completion within the deadlines
- Habits
- Feelings of energy or burnout
- SMART goal achievement
- Whether you are 1 day closer to long-term SMART goal achievement
- Completion of high-priority tasks
- Urgent tasks
- Room for schedule flexibility
Takeaways
Use the Worksheet above to:
- Learn how to set SMART goals for short-term and long-term planning
- Plan your day and take control of your time
- Prevent burnout and save your energy resources
- Value your time and perceive it as a valuable resource that should work for you
- Learn how to develop flexibility
- Appraise small steps daily and each achievement
- Organize your day based on task prioritization and urgency
- Cultivate positive habits and healthy daily routine
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