The last blog entry was about dedicating a timeframe to work and leaving the rest to other activities. The intention to restrict myself is to establish a better life/work balance.

Thinking about this for some more hours has led me to create a daily plan that I want to follow.

The two main parts of the plan are:
1. spend fixed amount of time in the office
2. spend fixed amount of time in the studio

By having only a limited time to finish things, my performance is much better. My goal has turned into maximizing the usage of the office/studio time instead of just being there and waiting for something to happen.

Other important points in my daily plan are fixed times for getting up, going to sleep, doing sports (actually running), spending time with family/friends, home/garden thingies and so on.

I think the only thing that can make this plan succeed is to leave up with whatever I do when the time comes, forget about it until next time and move on to my next period of the day.

I've created a spreadsheet with the days of August on the top and the tasks that I need to do on the left. To each cell, I either put an X or an O sign to log whether I've succeeded or not.

Take daily action on a long term and results will be unbelievable. I wonder where I'll be one month later.

The key point is getting down to the tasks. I noticed that thinking like "I need to start the next task" actually leads to finishing while "I need to finish this project today" does not. Steve Pavlina writes about this in his Overcoming Procrastination article and I do agree with him.

Blogging every morning is also part of my daily plan as I promised yesterday in Steve's blog entry about Overcoming Negative Emotions and Boosting Motivation.

Have a great Sunday afternoon!