A to do list is not a plan

today I want to talk about something that happens a lot with some of my clients. They confuse a plan with a to do list. And so I want to talk about how these things are completely different. A to do list is basically a list of tasks that you want to do during the day, the week, the month, the year, etc.. Plan is what's the plan? OK, so this is what a plan could look like.

 

10 a.m. wake up 10 a.m. to 10, 30, some sort of loose morning routine, 10, 30 till one deep work, one o'clock. There's going to be breakfast probably in there somewhere, but it might be part of your morning routine, one o'clock till to go to the gym or sort of meditate or do something that is a self development wise, two to five more deep work. All right. So what I'm trying to show that is that a plan doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the tasks that you'll do during the day.

 

And I have a rough idea, but not necessarily. So you set the intention during the time frame, your work on your business or your career or your job or whatever it might be. The point is to include in your plan or the kind of activities that you want to do throughout the day, but not necessarily exact specific things. Because here's the thing. As an introvert, your time is precious. As a human, your time is precious for making sure that you have enough time to do the things that you want to do and get recharged in the way that works for you is really important.

 

So you must guard your time wisely. And a plan, of course, can include non-work activities, i.e. recharge time. That's why it's called a plan. Doing something for yourself, doing something for yourself, like I said, meditating or anything of that nature. That is OK, because it's something that you need to do for yourself. And it shouldn't cause guilt. It should be intentional and not just sort of like, oh, fit that in somewhere.

 

Right. If you don't have a plan and you will let yourself become sort of susceptible to wasting time and being distracted and procrastinating or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you need to set out like a carved out time. Some people call this time blocking. Some people call this planning whatever wording you want to use, but your time must be guarded and protected. The way you use your time should be aligned with your values. So some of the things to consider are sort of what are your values?

 

Who do you want to be? What do you want to do, where you want to get to? And it's really interesting that you just need to take ten minutes per day, probably before you go to sleep or at the end of your workday to map out a plan for the next day. But it is not a list of to do items. You can block out time. That's deep work. And then you go and look in your list of things that I need to work on and then work on those things.

 

During your deep work time, the plan is to do deep work. The to do list is to do deep work on marketing and then deep work on client work. I'm in deep work on something else. You see the difference between the plan and the to do list. The plan is all about you and protecting what you need to do and making sure that your life and day works for you. The to do list is more along the lines of stuff you do for others or the individual tasks that you do to complete your overall plan.

 

So don't be confused with the two. So many people are like, yeah, I have a plan, I have this like to do list of stuff to do. No, you have a to do list, which is great. It's great to have to do it, but it is not a plan. So that's something for you to think about. And again, God, your time, how you God, your time is really important moving forward, because a lot of the time we let other influences and outside influences push us into doing different things with our time.

 

But as an introvert, we need our time to recharge. We need our time to regroup, to help us be better humans. And so, God, your time wisely by creating plans with time blocks, with what you're going to do moving forward and then go from there, take some time to make a plan, a plan in order to do list. Thanks for listening. This is janice@thecareerintrovert.com helping you build your brand and get hired. If you have any questions or topics that you want me to cover during the podcast, please email me at janice@thecareerintrovert.com.

 

The Confort speaking to you next week and have a great rest of your day.