Scheduling your day is an important part of being productive. You can (and should) timebox your way to a jam-packed, detailed schedule, but there’s more to time management than that. You should consider dividing up not only your day, but your week overall, to maximize productivity: The trick here is to theme your workdays.
Instead of jumping from task to task on any given day, try grouping all the similar ones together and parking them on a specific day. By putting similar tasks together on the same day, you’ll stay in that “zone” longer, focusing only on what needs to be done in it. If all the things you have to do have something in common, you’ll stay focused on the central theme of the day’s work as you move from task to task.
How to divvy up themed days for productivity
First, start by thinking about why you want to do what you’re doing. I don’t mean you need to get all philosophical, but adding a “why” to your to-do list is valuable. You don’t just want to clean your house because you have to, but because you want a safe, comfortable space. You don’t just want to finish your big project at work because it was assigned to you, but because you want to grow in your career, stay employed, or get a promotion. Set these intentions so you feel like you have something to work toward, and that’s where the daily themes come in. If you complete similar tasks over the course of one day, you are striving for an intention—meeting whatever goal you’ve set for that day’s theme—and staying focused on it from task to task.
Say you have a big project at work. Here’s how your first three days could look: Consider getting all administrative-type work done on Mondays. Designate Mondays for responding to emails, sending out new ones, taking calls, or scheduling meetings. Creative activities, like brainstorming or designing, could be handled Tuesday, while Wednesday could be for research.
You could also theme your days by project, according to Leonard Alexandru, an engineering director at Deloitte who has written about the value of themed days. Instead of dedicating time every day to multiple projects, consider assigning each project its own specific day of the week for work, so a project that requires a big focus on management should take up a whole day while one that requires you to focus on marketing, communications, sales, or whatever else should be on another.
Try setting each day’s theme as an all-day event on whatever calendar software you use, so you’ll have a reminder at the top of the page about what to focus on each day. Just knowing your Thursdays are for client meetings, for instance, relieves you of the anxiety of deciding what to prioritize that day or when to schedule those meetings. It eliminates decision fatigue and keeps you on-task without you having to think too hard about what activity should go in what slot during your busy week.
Calendar options for theming productive days
Your digital scheduler, like Google Calendar, is going to be helpful here for your timeboxing and daily-theme setting, but consider picking up a physical calendar, too, since writing things down can help you remember what you need to do even more. Try these:
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A desktop weekly planner ($16.15) has big enough boxes for each workday that you can write the theme visibly in each, but it only covers seven days, so if you need to overhaul the themes for the next week, just turn the page.
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A notebook planner with pages for individual days and full months ($13.69) can help you visualize the macro and micro levels of your projects and their timelines.
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A daily planner ($17.99) helps you visualize every single day down to the minute because each page is just one day. There’s even room to set your top priorities on this one, so stick your themes there.