One of the best ways for state-oriented people to get things done is to structure their time. A schedule or plan can help us stay focused on what we need to accomplish on a daily basis. After watching the video, take the quiz below. A transcript of the video is at the bottom of the page.
Quiz
Video Transcript
One of the real challenges for staying focused and getting work done is to make the best use of your time, and this can require careful planning. The strategic approach to success means that you plan out your activities so that you make good progress toward your goal. This requires having a good plan, and a plan is only as good as its execution. So one of the real challenges for many people is not that they don’t have goals or they don’t have a plan, but they don’t have a good strategy for execution. Structure is a way to eliminate chaos and get your goals accomplished. A good way to do this is to start with a list–make a list of tasks. When I was a student, at the beginning of the semester, I used to make a list of all the deliverables for the semester, all the exams, all the papers, all the other assignments. I broke them down into more bite-sized mini-goals. I put a date on them of when I needed to get a particular particular chapter read, a particular paper written. I would schedule them and schedule study sessions. So for example, you could decide that every afternoon, between two and five are going to be your study times. And during those times, you already know what your mini-goals are, you already know what your schedule is, and then you can execute. One other tip is to try to work on one thing at a time. Nothing is more distracting than trying to multi-task and doing multiple things at once. So you spend 10 minutes on one thing and then you get distracted and jump to another and jump to another. It’s best to set mini-goals and work on one at a time. It doesn’t mean you can’t have multiple mini-goals for the same session. But the best approach is to do one thing at a time. Finish one mini-goal and then go on to the next.