1. Plan your day the night before.
Before going to sleep, make sure that you’re going to start your day with a purpose. Whip up a journal or a planner and put your action plans for the next day in there.
To give you a guideline, you should have at least four plans for everyday: one should be work-related, one should be for a personal activity like an errand, and two should be for accomplishing your life dreams.
2. Schedule for interruptions.
Get frustration out of the picture by setting up time allowances in your plan. If you say that you’re going to write an article from 08:00 to 08:45 and then you’re going to write a blog post from 08:46 to 09:30, you’re just setting yourself up for trouble!
Expect that not everything will go as planned. You will only be able to organize your day successfully if you plan for interruptions.
3. Start your day with accomplishing something big.
When eating a meal, you start eating the food that you don’t like first so that you can focus on enjoying the rest of the meal, right? The same goes for your day. If you have a big thing that you need to accomplish, do it first.
This way, even if you don’t accomplish anything else, you can still say that you did something productive at least.
4. Use a time-tracking application to help you stay on track.
Of course you can still check on Facebook and Twitter — you just need to plan for it and track your time doing these activities so that you won’t get distracted.
Toggl, SlimTimer, and RescueTime are nice tools to help you get started.
5. Accept the fact that you’re not going to be able to do it all in one day.
You’re not Superman (or are you…?) so you can’t do everything in one day. Instead of working on a big project in one day and cramming it, arrange milestones instead. Don’t get frustrated if you weren’t able to finish everything you’ve planned.