Organiser Routines

Our lives are made up of routines or workflows, I never know which is the right phrase, but I will use routines.

Our daily routines are either by design, you have worked them out, or they are just natural from early in our lives.

Think for a moment about the instant you wake up in the morning to the point you leave for work or school. A lot happens in that first hour or ninety minutes of the day. You wake up, get up, open the curtains/shutters, shower, get dressed, have breakfast and say goodbye to your partner before leaving etc.

So even your early morning routine can be different, some mornings you might have breakfast before you get showered and dressed. So nothing is fixed but somethings have to be done before other things.

Within your early morning routine there are other nested routines. Think for a moment about just getting dressed. Now obviously there are some things you have to do in a certain order! But I'm sure a lot of us dress in a similar order every day, right sock before left sock, when you put in your shirt or blouse your put your right arm in to the sleeve before the left arm in to the other sleeve?

So now turning to how you use your organiser to plan or organise your day or week. Do you have a routine that you work through so you don't miss out anything?

Again I've been subconsciously doing the same routine every week for at least the last year, possibly longer.

Each week might start empty and blank like this

But they quickly start to fill up with things to do each day.

At the beginning of the week, either late on a Sunday night or first thing on Monday morning. I set out my week and empty my thoughts on to the pages in my organiser.

I make sure I have all the appointments set out on the right days and at the right times. Some of these will have been entered before the start of the week, may be even weeks or months before when a particular trip was planned. But I have repeating appointments each week for Skype calls with friends that I don't enter in my organiser until the actual week, just in case one of my friends is away so we skip a week.

I do have to enter some of my appointments on to my electronic calendar, so that the rest of the family know what I'm doing. At the same time, I might add notes in my organiser to specific days if Alison is going to be away or has an appointment on a particular day, just in case she needs reminding.

Once I have got through the appointments for the week, I then focus on tasks for the week. I check the previous week for things that didn't get finished and transfer those to this week, if I still need to do them. I add any new tasks for the week to the appropriate section of my task list. If any of these tasks has a deadline on a specific day, I add a note to that day as well.

Now I could do my planning and organising in a different order, but I've got used to doing it in this order so I don't have to think about 'What do I do next?' and that to me is the key thing to all our daily routines. Working out the most efficient order to do things in for you will help you get more things done every day.

How do you organise your daily/weekly workflows or routines?