There's a little thing I realized last week about having a weekly-based schedule and carefully following it in an attempt to improve your performance and productivity, and I'd like to share it with you.
As you might now, if you've read the post I published on Monday, last week I followed a schedule that I planned before the week even started, after reading about the idea in a book. It was an experiment to see whether a weekly-based schedule would work better than a daily one, and it did.
I had every day planned, from Monday to Sunday, and I was determined to strictly follow my schedule and finish all the tasks I had to do.
However, on the weekend, things have changed a bit.
First, on Saturday I became busy with a few other things, and while I did finish pretty much all the tasks I had, I can't say I enjoyed it as much as I did in the previous days. On Sunday, I had to do other things, one of them being getting my Covid-19 Vaccine, meaning I had to drive for around an hour, wait to get the vaccine, then drive back home, which took some time, and that kind of ruined my plan for the day (I expected the trip to not last that much). Plus, I had to do other things, and so I forgot about the tasks that I wanted to finish.
To my surprise however, towards the end of that Sunday, once I was done with everything except my tasks, and I was relaxing a bit, watching a movie and playing some games, I realized that I felt way better than I felt the day before, on Saturday, when I forced myself to work in order to keep my productivity high.
I felt relaxed, I didn't have any worries, and I could just enjoy myself and have some fun.
The lesson is quite simple - allow some chaos into your order. Don't plan everything, and don't be strict to the point where you hate what you're doing. Allow yourself to have some free time that you spend however you want, without planning any "fun" activities and just doing things you feel like doing.
Even when it comes to your daily activities, you can have a schedule that allows you to focus on the most important things, and then allow yourself to spend the majority of the day however you want. You can still work if you feel like it, or you can relax, the choice is yours.
Doing too much of one thing can become tiring and unpleasant. If you're too strict with yourself and you don't allow any unplanned segments in your schedule, you will get burned out and probably hate having to start working. Maybe you'll even give up at some point.
Having too much chaos however, is also a bad idea. You will never know what you want to do, you'll never know what your priorities are, especially if you have multiple things that you normally do, and you might forget to do a few things during the week, things you might've wanted to do. Chaos can ultimately lead to boredom, and quite a lot of stress.
As with everything, you should balance it out. Plan your days from Monday through Friday, and get a good idea of what you want to get done in each day, and what's the big goal for the week. But also, allow yourself some free time both during the working days, and during the weekend, time that you can spend doing whatever you feel like.
Obviously this is very subjective and every person will have a preference. Some will love the free time, while others will really want to work as much as they can. Others, who have daily 9 to 5 jobs will want to relax during the work week when they get home from work, and would like to work on their hobbies and other personal projects on weekends.
As long as you make sure that the scheduling method that you use fits you, and doesn't make you miserable, everything's great. If your current method makes you unhappy, maybe it's time to consider either changing it completely, and adopting a new one, or trying to balance it with a bit of extra chaos or order.