A daily planner is essential for increasing productivity, smashing goals & creating balance in your life. The more organised, structured and planned your days can be, the more you can get out of them. In actual fact, the more disciplined you are with your day – the less disciplined you will need to be over time. While it seems like hard work at first (printing, planning & preparing your day), over time a daily planner will actually make your life easier as you build great habits. However, you have to know how to use a daily planner effectively in order to get these results. Here are our 5 tips to using our Jungle Body Planner:
Fill in your daily planner in the first part of the morning/mid-morning, rather than the night before etc. This is because life changes! You may wake up and have a sick child, you may need to open up your emails to know how your day will look or maybe you just feel like eating something else. However, once, you have it confirmed – do your very best to stick to it.
Finding balance is the key reason for using a planner, so you must make sure you schedule in everything you ideally would like to achieve & then stick to it – this is where the discipline comes into play. People that struggle with balance usually don’t plan their days and they may end up spending 5 hours working on something that causing them to not eat a proper lunch and then maybe they miss working out because they spent 1 hour scrolling through Instagram which made them late to leave the office. However, if we plan our day and allocate in 3 hours for clearing an inbox, 45 minutes for lunch, 15 minutes for Instagram, a phone call to our family on the drive home, 90 minutes to get to a workout. The key is making sure once the time allocation is up, we move onto the next task/activity. This ensure we get to achieve all that we want with balance. It may not be perfect, you may need to work an extra hour on something, but what we want to try and do is build healthy habits where we allocate our day to include time for everything – even if its limited in some spaces.
Look at things in your life that aren’t working & use the planner to heal that area. A good example is someone who struggles with keeping their house clean or bedroom tidy. If this is a problem, we can allocate 30 minutes per day to 100% cleaning. Or maybe you are struggling in your relationships, so you decide to allocate 1 hour per evening with no technology with your partner. A good example is every weekend you spend 5 hours cleaning because of the mess that occurs during the week as you have no time. When we change this to 1 hour per week day suddenly our weekend becomes more balanced. When we spend days and days arguing with our partner - we lose a lot of energy. When we allocate 1 hour per night purely focused on our partner, we remove the days and days of lost time. A last example may be people who have no time to exercise. The person may then feel a sense of low self-esteem, they may isolate themselves as they don’t feel as confident, they may spend more on junk food & comfort food due to increased stress levels. If we allocate just 1 hour of exercise just 3 times a week, the benefits become so huge that they outweigh the original struggle of not having enough time. By starting work 30 minutes earlier, staying up 1 hour later at night or getting a family member to babysit so you can get the workout in – you create a life you LOVE. Small actions in the this planner can create unbelievable opportunities.
Split your day into 4 areas. The first is your “Schedule” – this is the Urgent to Do list area & the middle area which is basically your work, or what your day Is made up of. The second is your “Food + Water” which is essential to ensuring we nourish our body. The third is “Mindset” which is the area where we talk about what we are grateful and the daily me challenge. These things are what ground us each day. The last section is small but very important. It’s the “Notes” section. This is goals, ideas & your own feedback. If we leave our notes in our head we can feel overwhelmed, stressed or as though we have a lot on our shoulders. Put in on paper & you will instantly feel lighter.