Five Simple Steps to Creating a Productive Daily Work Schedule

These days, it is hard to focus on your daily tasks and stay productive, as a lot of things happen around us. With endless social media notifications, loads of emails, and the latest content and streaming services, staying focused isn't easy, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to find a productive daily work schedule.

You might be surprised to learn that there are some simple tricks you can use to take back control of your day and get things done. It all starts with organization, and if you organize your days properly, taking distractions into account beforehand, you can eliminate some unexpected distractions that affect your productivity.

Of course, you must commit to following a daily work program, and if you are not ready or able to do so, you can stop reading this article.

But if you are ready to learn what it takes to create a productive daily work schedule, then you are reading the right post, where we present to you five simple steps you can use to increase your productivity, eliminate wasted time, and work more efficiently every day. 

Five Simple Steps to Creating a Productive Daily Work Schedule:

1. Discover the perfect work schedule:

Before you decide how to get the most out of your day, you need to understand how your body and your personal work style play a role in your productivity.

For example, if you are a person who prefers to work in the morning, it may be best for you to put your most important tasks at the forefront of your daily work schedule. Conversely, leaving these things to get done at the end of your day would be disastrous.

To discover your ideal work schedule, you should start by collecting some data, tracking your work habits for two to three weeks, then writing down the times of the day when you get most done, and recording any external distractions that may be affecting your work. The idea is to identify the times when your natural energy is at its best and eliminate the external factors that are working against you.

This will help you focus on your most productive hours and identify distractions. Once you know these two things, you will be in a much better position to create a work schedule that increases your productivity.

2. Protect your productive times:

After knowing the times of the day that are most productive for you, the next step in creating your new work schedule is to allocate those hours to accomplish your most important work. That is, organizing your time to be free of distractions and committing to work.

This might require you to turn off the internet during business hours, activate an auto-reply feature in your email to let everyone know they have to wait for a response at a later time, or use a timekeeping app that prevents you from using your smartphone for extended periods.

In short, you need to create an environment where you can focus on the tasks at hand, make sure you have the tools you need to complete your tasks, and then schedule your most important work each day during those times and make sure you get it done.

To further illustrate, consider the repeated studies indicating that the average employee is only productive for about three hours a day.

In any case, you should understand why it is so important to take care of your most productive time, and by increasing what you get done in those hours, you increase your total productive work.

3. Determine appropriate rest times:

There is one thing you should allow to interrupt your most productive time, and that is regular breaks. As strange as this may sound, we tend to be more productive when we work during short, fixed periods. Stranger still, statistical analysis shows that 52 minutes, followed by a 17-minute break, is the ideal amount of time to finish any task.

This means that you have to set aside about an hour each day of your usual 8 hours to do tasks that are completely outside your work. This will allow you to focus better while getting your work done and will help you get more done.

Best of all, this hour can be divided into periods of low productivity, which means you won't waste your time before and after your peak productivity hours, and while your efficiency won't be at its peak, you'll still get more done.

You might be wondering: Isn't this something like the Pomodoro Technique? The answer is: somewhat, it is.

This technique requires working in 25-minute blocks and taking short breaks in between. Although this may enhance productivity, it is very difficult to develop a schedule that matches it. The reason for this is obvious: most people's work days include things like mandatory meetings and check-ins that take longer than 25 minutes, which means that you will try to divide your time in a way that is bound to be inefficient.

When the break is about an hour long, your options increase. You can group your 15-minute or longer meetings together to get them out of your way during one of your least productive hours, and you can group your busy times together into your most productive ones. and once you know how long a task takes on average, you'll see why this works compared to the Pomodoro approach.

4. Try to keep your availability to a minimum:

The problem with what we've talked about so far is that you won't be able to function in isolation from the outside world around you. This means that co-workers, family members, and even some people on the phone will do everything they can to interrupt you and affect your productivity. They may not intend to do so, but the effect is the same either way.

To deal with this, you need to set aside time in your day to deal with things like phone calls, face-to-face discussions, and email correspondence, but there are a couple of tricks that can help you identify all the tasks that drain your time and affect your day and your productivity.

The first is to set aside specific times to deal with this type of task and to let everyone around you know that you will not be available at any other time. When you do this, you avoid many distractions that you might have to deal with otherwise. There’s no need to feel guilty if you ignore calls and emails when they come in if you have previously told others about your availability; forward them directly to voicemail or auto-answer.

That won't stop people from taking your time, and after all, you can't cross out a meeting from your schedule, although there is strong evidence that you should try. All you can do is change the default terms for that meeting.

If you have a specific work schedule where people can request meetings with you, try to reduce the duration of the meeting within your schedule. You can rely on several applications, such as Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook, and it is also possible to use other scheduling applications. So dedicate as little time as possible to these tasks, as appropriate to your own needs.

This works because it forces people who need your time to request it in advance rather than use it in an impulsive manner. You'll probably find that most people won't bother to inquire about it or notice if you didn't meet your availability openings, which saves you time.

5. Avoid multitasking:

Although you may believe in your ability to multitask, you are not; no one can multitask together, and multiple studies have proven this. The more you try to do this, the less your efficiency will decrease and the number of mistakes you will likely make in your work, thus wasting more time to get rid of your clutter.

The concept behind creating a daily work plan is simple: you must allot time within your work schedule for each task that you are aware of as being necessary, and you should attempt to avoid completing things that are not on your work schedule.

If you research why we're so bad at multitasking, you'll find that our brains find it difficult to switch between different types of tasks. As a result, consumers experience what experts refer to as "switching cost," which includes the disadvantage or expense of switching from one option to another as well as the financial and psychological expenses. This means that we unconsciously waste time adjusting to each new task. In other words, trying to complete two tasks at the same time will take longer than if they were done in succession.

You can take advantage of these ideas by putting similar tasks after each other on your schedule. When you do, you will get more done and waste less time. Research indicates that switching costs deprive us of up to 40% of our productivity. That's why reorganizing your to-do list in this way may double your productivity.

In conclusion:

If you have made it this far, you must now know how to set yourself a daily work schedule that increases your productivity, and if you can stick to it, even when people around you try to hinder your productivity, you will stand out from your peers.

Just try not to brag when you finish your work early and get back to your life while others are struggling to keep up their progress; instead, you should offer to help them adjust their schedules, so they will appreciate some advice you give them if you are a good expert.