How do you schedule your plans? Do you set timelines, milestones, mini-goals? Do you set a start and end date? Do you use tools, charts, calendars?

Whatever tool or procedure you follow will always depend on you own habits and preferences. Certain tools just suit certain people. My current personal preference is to schedule loose plans with specific very-short-term milestones to work for. I’ve gone through various methods over the years with varying results but, regardless of the system, what always helped me the most in sticking to the plans and making them happen is to always start the timeline from the present.

Most people’s plans start from a future place. It’s just easier to schedule something you don’t need to attend to at the moment. I’ve often made charts that start Monday next week or 1st of next month. This setup is an easy prey to various problems including:

• Procrastination. When something starts next week, it’s so easy to push it the week after or “when things are less hectic.”
• Lack of motivation. We often make plans and schedules in moments when we are motivated towards something. Since motivation is an emotional state, it can easily come and go. Come the start date, you can actually be in a low motivational point and it’s twice as hard to start from that point than when you are at a higher feeling place.
• Loss of genuine desire. Things can happen during the period leading up to the start of the timeline. One of these things can cause a radical shift in what you want. While this is not necessarily bad, you end up with an old desire you haven’t even started working towards. With this, your radical shift in desire becomes partly uninformed.

When you schedule with the present included, you easily avoid all the above problems. When exigencies occur that affect your execution, you then create the changes within the timeline rather than postpone it. At the least, you’re already committed so any decisions you make will be made filtered from that reality rather than from a place where you haven’t even begun. It’s harder to lose motivation for something you are already working towards. If nothing else, the easy, preliminary stages will often be stronger motivating points (because they’re based around small, easily-achievable outcomes.) And if you ever find yourself losing desire and wanting to give up the plan entirely, you will have a clearer, soundly-reasoned idea for doing so. You have been on the path and started and have a better idea of what you will give up and gain from doing so.

What things should you include today? What if today is not relevant to the objective and the real work begins next week?

If this is the situation, you can use the present as a start of preparation. Make the present a point in the timeline where you work on the preliminaries and other related stuff. You can do any of the following:

• Research deeper
• Rehearse for scheduled events in the timeline
• Include the objectives in your visualization or similar manifestation practices
• Discuss with friends
• Study the objective from auxilliary angles
• Read or watch about other people accomplishing similar objectives
• Motivate yourself regularly

Technorati Tags: planning, goals, motivation

1. Buy small, non-perishable household items in bulk, preferably enough to last 6 months. This includes soap, toothpaste, tissues, and other small items that you use everyday anyway and will be using long after today.

2. Use no-iron shirts and pants when you can. Ironing is hell!

3. Schedule tv viewing. TV is the most retarded time-waster ever concocted. This includes all television-based entertainment like DVDs, videogames, and online surfing.

4. Reduce the time necessary to clean your home by not littering it in the first place. If your shoes are dirty, take it off and wash it. Don’t smoke inside the house (cigarette dust is a headache.) Clean up the first mess you see, never let it accumulate. As a corollary, make your bed the moment you wake up in the morning.

5. Pre-cook meat dishes, put them in the ref and just re-heat for the next (or next-next) meal. Meat still tastes good after several days. At least to me. Especially considering that after heating a couple of times, they tend to absorb more of the flavor.

6. Washing dishes is sucky. Use disposables when you can (like, if you don’t have old, uptight guests over, tee hee). If you can find a bulk supplier, disposable cups and sporks are retardedly cheap.

7. Pay bills as soon as you get them. I used to think it saved more time to pay all my bills all at once at a payment center that accepts all of them. As it turns out, you end up losing some bills, forgetting others, missing deadlines, getting confused with all the papers, or just plain running out of cash. If you can automate it, all the better, although I never liked it because my bank statements always end up shocking me when I get them.

8. Listen to audio versions of books. Or if it’s an ebook, put it through one of those Text 2Speech apps and enjoy the wonderful monotone.

9. Always use delivery if it’s an option. If it’s not, ask your girlfriend to come over and buy a stereo system on the way.

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