How to Get Out of a Bad Planning & Organizational Rut

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Most people would agree that in order to live life well, you need to manage your energies. This is because many responsibilities and influences weigh heavily on us, and all require our time. Managing a full-time job and raising a family can be more than enough, but those are hardly the only two duties many people have to contend with on a daily basis.

For the most part, we know how to balance this energy. Getting to sleep on time, planning out your day, and making certain to prioritize what matters most is essential. That being said, while life requires predictable planning to live well, life is anything but predictable. Issues can make themselves known, circumstances can change, and people can come and go.

In this case, it’s not hard to see our daily planning efforts thwarted, putting us into a rut of playing continual catch-up. If you’ve noticed yourself falling into this kind of rut, it’s important to reassert yourself and your schedule. But what might that look like? Let’s consider this, below:

Identify Chaotic Influences

When our schedule is thrown out of focus, there’s usually a reason for it. Perhaps your child has been ill as of late, and that’s led you to get much less sleep than you usually do. It’s situations like this you can’t simply “motivate yourself” out of, there are absolutely responsibilities and care you need to give, and that goes for yourself too. 

In this case, you might simply be kinder to yourself and wait until the issue has been resolved before you reassert your plans, perhaps asking your workplace to let you work from home a few days a week. 

Other chaotic influences, however, could be worked on. Perhaps you could invest in a home office to help you work from home with more focus as opposed to feeling distracted continually. When you identify a chaotic influence, you can take steps to either change it, treat its effects, or tolerate the problem for a little while as you address it.

Set a Strict, Renewed Schedule

It’s good to be disciplined in returning to your usual state of productivity, but it’s hard to enact that with a simple click of the fingers. That’s why it’s smart to reassess how you work, not only if you do. 

To begin with, refocusing your planning priorities by using the best daily planner apps in 2024 can be a great start. This way, you get to reassert your schedule and become excited about your daily work output, instead of feeling it as a chore. On top of this, having clear time blocks and plans for each day helps break up large responsibilities into smaller, achievable increments.

Sometimes, reasserting your productivity is about breaking down the vague duties we all have into manageable steps. Over time, that can be nothing if not rewarding and fruitful, if only on a perceptual level.

SEE ALSO: How to Simplify Managing Your Team

Schedule a “Preparation Hour”

Balancing productive time can become something of another full-time job if you’re not careful. That’s why it’s good to bake in certain planning measures so that you don’t spend all your time organizing your organization. 

A “preparation hour” can be a great method of making accommodations for planning without it eating too much of your time. This might take place on a Sunday evening, or perhaps after your final workday of the week before the weekend begins. Put simply, this will be time spent replying to emails, setting up your schedule for the week, organizing your notes, and making certain all tasks have been attended to or scheduled for another time.

This way, you never feel as though your workload is a heavy wave ready to smother you, but rather an opportunity for the coolest surfing tricks of all time.

Simplify, Streamline, Sustain

It’s entirely possible to have given yourself too much to do. This is where simplifying, streamlining, and sustaining yourself is so important to get right.

In other words, try to focus on three main priorities. If you have many small tasks to focus on, set days in which you have less of a workload to attend to them. Balance your priorities as needed. Learn the value of saying “no” to certain tasks that might not fit well into your schedule, or renegotiating with an employer if your current workload is completely unsustainable. Make sure to appreciate you only have so many hours in the day. These perspectives, attitudes, and renewed efforts can be nothing if not rewarding, and give you the breathing room you deserve.

With this advice, you’re certain to get out of that bad planning and organizational rut.