Can I tell you something?

I took the day off to home school my kids and I'm about ready to pull my friggin’ hair out.

Not because of my kids.

They're troopers. They're working hard. They're dealing with this $#%@ #covid19 hand better than many adults.

No, I was frustrated because I didn't know how long each assignment would take, didn't know when they'd get tired, and had no idea how to move them through their planned education. As such, we failed a math test, spent twice as long as we should have on history, and I missed feeding them all lunch.

Tonight, I'm recommending my wife to sainthood.

"It's a lack of clarity that creates chaos and frustration." — Steve Maraboli

Now, with a bit of perspective, I see exactly what went wrong.

I had a plan, but I didn't have a schedule.

Planning vs. Scheduling

(Taken from my upcoming book, Home Early: Destroy Distraction, Become Powerfully Productive, and Finish Work Before Dinner)

Remember Franklin Planners? My Dad used to tote one everywhere.

Bound in leather and stuffed thick with assorted papers, it was the executive professionals’ badge of the 1990s.

I remember spying it on the kitchen counter, wondering at its contents, imagining it packed full of world-changing business deals, c-level contacts at publicly traded companies, and strategic plans for supreme corporate domination. Alas, when I grew old enough to afford my own, Franklin Planners were no longer in vogue, replaced instead by their digital equivalent, the Palm Pilot.

I bought this digital copycat, learned how to write its semi-cryptic letters, and didn’t look back for 15 years. Now, I see there was always something missing.

The Palm Pilot was not the digital equivalent of a paper planner. Neither are its successors: the BlackBerrys, the Surface Books, or the iPhones of the world. Something was lost in the translation from paper to silicon. The most important part of a planner. The ability to plan.

There’s a difference between planning and scheduling.

Planning is thinking about what you want your life to look like in one, three, five, ten, or twenty years. Where do you want to be? What do you want to have? What do you want to be doing?

Scheduling, on the other hand, is what you do today, tomorrow, or this week. Plans are your mission, your vision, your goals. Schedules are your meetings and other calendar events. They are the blocked off times where you do the work necessary to achieve your goals.

For example, your plan for tomorrow might be to refurnish your dining room. Your schedule will be to go to Costco at 9 am, spend an hour shopping for and buying a dining room table, drive home at 10 am, unload and put the thing together at 10:30 am, then spending the next two hours painting the dining room, have a 12:30 pm lunch for 30 minutes, hang a new light fixture at 1 pm for one hour, then play video games until bed.

If you have a plan without a schedule, you’ll have good intentions without action. This leaves you vulnerable to getting lost in a sea of urgent tasks that distract you from your goals. You’ll want to buy a dining room table, but may wake up late and get to Costco when it’s an effing zoo, taking two hours instead of one. You’ll have to interrupt your painting with lunch and then might lose yourself to the mental pit of Instagram for a bit. Before you know it, it’ll be 5 pm and you’ll have wet walls, a half-hung light fixture, and nowhere to eat.

On the other hand, if you have a schedule without a plan, you’ll work hard toward an unknown goal and make progress toward someone else’s vision. You’ll drive to Costco to just shop… for anything. You might buy a book, you might buy one of their thick and meaty hot dogs. You won’t get your dining room started, instead leaving to spend the next hour with stomach pain in the bathroom reading your new book.

Build your plan first, then schedule daily. Create a direction for yourself, then block time to execute. Design your life, then live it.

“If it’s not on your calendar, it’s not a priority. If you don’t have goals for it, you’re probably not thinking about it. If you’re not thinking about it, then it’s probably falling apart.” —Benjamin Hardy

The Beauty of Scheduling

The beauty of scheduling what needs to get done is this: Your time is blocked, making it far less likely that distractions, meetings, or other people will take it. When you schedule a task, you’re more inclined to work on it. When you schedule a task, others can’t capitalize on your time without your permission.

Imagine two scenarios.

In scenario one, you have a free and open calendar. You’ve got goals, and you’ve even broken those goals down. You know what you should be working on today, but are giving yourself all day to do it.

What happens when the phone rings, when someone comes to the door, or when a new email comes in?

When the phone rings, it’s easy to think, I wonder what the caller needs? I can probably help them. I’ll just answer it. When someone comes to your door, you have no reason to turn them away. After all, your calendar is clear; you’ll just get to your important work later. When an email comes in, it’s far too enticing to triage it immediately. You get bonus points for being responsive, and now your inbox has one less todo to deal with.

The problem with this approach is that you’re not doing your important work. You’re not even doing your work. You’re doing other peoples’ work. You’re replacing your goals with whatever urgent matter someone else has brought to your attention.

In scenario two, you get a knock at the door, a phone call, an email, but you have something on your calendar. You only have so much time to finish before your next meeting. If you don’t work on it now, there’ll be no time to squeeze it in since the rest of your day is scheduled.

These interruptions are far easier to control. You can simply ignore that call and set a reminder to call them back later. You can tell the person at your door that you really need to get something done, but you’ll stop by later to see what’s up (or ask them to send you an email so you can work on their request later). You can set a time later to answer all your emails at once, removing the start/stop overhead of going to your email app, checking to see what’s new, then trying to context-switch back to whatever it was you were doing (and risking getting sucked into the rabbit hole of email while you’re in there).

Sure, some things will have to get addressed instantly.

Your boss may come to your door with a time-sensitive matter. Your spouse may call and say the pipes exploded in your house and the basement is flooding with toilet water. An email may come in with a late bill notice, saying they’re going to shut down your electricity if you don’t pay immediately.

Those are worthy distractions. But they’ll be few and far between. The multitude of interruptions you face on a daily, even hourly basis are usually never emergencies. They can almost always wait.

They can wait until you schedule them.

When you get to the end of the year, will you remember if you answered that email immediately? Will you remember that phone call? Will you remember what task you did for someone who came to your door unannounced?

Likely not.

But you will remember that you hit your goal. You will realize that you achieved all that you set out to achieve. You will have a new sense of direction and hope for the future—a future where you are in control of your schedule, your calendar, your goals, your focus, your vision.

Schedule Your Day

Years ago, while visiting San Francisco on a business trip, I arrived at my hotel just before midnight. I had an early morning so needed to get to bed, but was too spun up from the natural hustle and bustle of travel to sleep. Not wanting to get involved with a Netflix show, I dug through a care basket left by the hotel staff and found what I now call a daily planning card.

This card was quite simple. It was the size of an index card with times printed along the left from 7 am to 9 pm in 30-minute increments. I filled it out, went to bed, and awoke to the most productive day I’d ever had.

Ever.

Benjamin Franklin is well known for his daily plan, which he laid out in advance. Every morning, he'd rise at 5 am to the same daily ritual: work, read, work some more, rest, examine his day, and sleep. He is also well known for saying, "by failing to plan, you are planning to fail." Good advice from a legend. But he's not the only one. Alexander Graham Bell once said, “Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.” Clearly these two gents held planning and preparation in high esteem.

Now, before you say that those two historical figures are out of touch with modern life, take note. Former American Express CEO, Kenneth Chenault, lists three important things to finish the following day so he can wake up and immediately start working on what matters. In fact, in a survey of 163 corporate leaders from Fortune 500 companies, the average leader spent 25 minutes on strategy and planning every day.

If this anecdotal evidence isn't enough, researchers Bruce Britton and Abraham Tesser studied the effect of time management practices on college students' GPAs. Shockingly, they showed that time management skills were a bigger influence on GPA than high-school SAT scores.

In my upcoming book, Home Early: Destroy Distraction, Become Powerfully Productive, and Finish Work Before Dinner, I talk about planning vs. scheduling and the importance of each. I also give three methods you can use to schedule your day, depending on your appetite for details. Grab the first chapter here and get notified when it's published.

In the meanwhile, take note: Planning your day and scheduling it in advance is the single most effective thing you can do to produce consistency measurable results.

And so, with that in mind, I'm off to finish my wine and build a schedule for my kids tomorrow. At the very best, we'll get caught up on all the work we missed today. At the very least, I'll be sure to feed them lunch so they don't get hangry and fire their teacher before I have a chance to prove myself.

About the Author

Michael J. Mehlberg

Michael Mehlberg is a husband, father, entrepreneur, business professional, author, fitness nut, organization freak, and productivity junkie. He helps high-achievers consistently save time, get productive, and become more organized so they can live their passion and achieve their dreams.

Grab his new book Home Early: Destroy Distraction, Become Powerfully Productive, and Finish Work Before Dinner.