Handbook of Habits
Table of Contents
- Preface
- Wake up when you wake up
- Don't check your phone when you wake up
- Make your bed after waking up
- Do a proper oral cleansing
- When deficating, squat instead of sitting
- Post defecation, wash your anal area instead of wiping
- Give your body some exercise
- Start your day with a bath
- Use morning hours for self improvement
- Plan your day
- What next?
Plan your day
If you have the habit of using calendar, you would have had your day planned already. If not, plan it without the nuances.
The Eisenhower method is an excellent system to plan your day at a high level without the nuances. It is built on the idea of urgent and important tasks, classifying each task as—
- Urgent and important tasks that must be executed now.
- Not urgent but important tasks that must be scheduled for later execution.
- Urgent but not important tasks that can be delegated to someone else for execution.
- Neither urgent nor important task that must be deleted.
However, for you, the delegation and the deletion of tasks (3 and 4) may not be practical since you may not have anyone working under you to delegate, or few not important and not urgent tasks simply cannot be ignored. You can modify them to still do with less priority.
Here is the Eisenhower matrix modified for an average person in any domain.
| Urgent | Not Urgent | |
|---|---|---|
| Important | Do them now (Quadrant 1) |
Schedule them (Quadrant 2) |
| Not Important | Prioritise below Quadrant 1 (Quadrant 3) |
Do them on free time (Quadrant 4) |
In the beginning, you will make mistakes in putting your tasks into the right quadrant. Don't be frustrated. Gradually you will excel in this act. And you will experience how easy this method will help you run your day. If you can spare sometime, here is an excellent article on identifying what tasks belong to what quadrant.
Once you have planned your day, it's time to get on with it.
Corrections?
We base our writings on science and reasoning, but we could be victims of cognitive biases whilst doing our research. If there are any inaccuracies in our writings, please do let us know.