Why you should plan your day the night before

Reviewing and timeblocking your day the evening before helps you avoid surprises and hit the ground running each day.

Have you ever had one of those days where nothing goes right? Maybe you struggled to get started in the morning. Or you completely forgot about an important deadline or to prep for a critical meeting.

These things can derail your day, killing your momentum and leading to a lack of productivity.

You can avoid surprises and hit the ground running every morning with one little trick. That is plan your day and timeblock the evening before.

Learn more about timeblocking

Why plan your day in the first place?

Planning is the best way to improve your productivity for a variety of reasons which we’ve covered previously. To recap, planning reduces decision fatigue, allowing you to make all decisions about your day in one go. Planning also helps you avoid letting your inbox dictate your day, and instead focus on top priorities, not what’s newest. When you plan, you have greater control over what you can get done.

Why planning the evening before works

A hack to improve the power of your daily planning is to do it the evening before, including reviewing your calls/meetings for the next day and timeblocking out all your tasks in your calendar.

There are several ways evening planning helps you boost productivity and reduce stress.

Eliminate surprises and mentally prepare

Have you ever woken up and realized you had a critical call or project deadline and weren’t prepared? That’s a huge stress inducer.

However, if you’ve reviewed your tasks and meetings for the next day the evening before, you skip those surprises. You wake up each day mentally prepared for what’s ahead.

Reduce decision fatigue and hit the ground running

We only have the brain space for so many decisions each day. And the stress of making those decisions is much higher when you imminently have to do them.

By deciding your priorities for the next day, you reduce the number of decisions you have to make tomorrow. Plus, you have the added benefit of having plenty of time before actually tackling those tasks.

Getting started each morning is hard. Eliminating the decisions about what you are going to work on and in what order, the night before lets you sit down in the morning, probably when you are at your least motivated, and just get going. Just start at the top of the list and work your way down.

Communicate your priorities easily with your team

Do you ever get to standup and not yet actually know what you’re working on that day? Planning the prior evening means always having a plan to share with your team.

Evening planning in Taskable

Taskable makes managing evening planning a breeze. Create a daily recurring task for evening planning, and timeblock it for the end of your workday. When it comes time to do evening planning, reschedule all the tasks you haven’t completed for the next day. Then navigate to tomorrow, and start timeblocking tasks between your meetings. Anything that doesn’t fit into your calendar, can drop back to your To Do list or schedule for another day.