Everyone hears about the benefits of planning out a week's tasks and chalking out daily schedules. Here's the reason this works to the best of my understanding:
When you sit down to plan out your week / day, you do so *consciously*. You are mindful of your goals, summon relevant memories, and concentrate your mind. This activates your intelligence, brings clarity of thought, and you will be able to put down plans that will take you towards accomplishing your objectives.
On the other hand, if we go through our life without this kind of planning, it's possible to just drift from day to day, week to week, month to month, in an aimless way, without really accomplishing anything. Life can just get wasted lounging around, being lazy, having meaningless conversations. I call this *unconscious* living and we need to avoid it.
Chalk out the coming week as best as you can every Sunday night. And spend about fifteen minutes every morning to sketch out your day. Then *stick* to these plans. Don't procrastinate! That's the biggest stupidity you can indulge in. Don't say "Let me watch a movie today, I'll do this tomorrow, I'll do that next week". No. Watch a movie when it's time to watch a movie. Schedule that in as well :)! For me, the movie slot is Saturday evenings :)!
Of course, sometimes inspiration strikes! For example, I have a certain amount of daily music practice time slotted in. But sometimes a composition starts forming in the mind and I stretch my music time to make sure I get it down. On the other hand, sometimes I'm working on a research problem and things start clicking. At such times, of course I continue with research beyond the slotted time. Or an emergency situation may arise that requires you to deviate from your plans. Then of course you need to do what you need to do.
The general principle though is discipline. And the idea behind it is to avoid unconscious, meaningless, wastage of time and ensuring that we keep steadily moving towards accomplishing our goals.
Remember always: Your biggest enemy is your own laziness. And this laziness can arise at the physical as well as mental levels. We are most used to physical laziness. But have you noticed that there also times when your body is fully active but you come across a difficult problem and tend to postpone it instead of solving it right then. Or you may be required to do something that you don't enjoy - say cleaning the house when the domestic help doesn't come - but you resist it mentally. This is mental laziness. Start winning over laziness at the physical as well as mental levels and sticking to your plans - you will start accomplishing goals that you thought were beyond your reach. Guaranteed :).
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