Why you fail to complete tasks in your calendar and how to finish them.

You have organized your calendar to complete tasks in time, set an alert and happily forgotten about it.

Excellent, because that is what calendars are for; reminding you when you need to complete tasks.

The alert sounds at the right time, you open the calendar entry and set about completing it.

But at the end of the allocated 90 minutes you realise you haven’t been able to complete the task. In fact, progress was too small to be even counted towards finishing the task.

So what happened here?

That’s what we are unpacking today.

Because if you want to see your superlist of tasks getting shorter by the day, you need to understand why you routinely fail to complete tasks in your calendar and how to finish them.

There can be two things that might have gone wrong:

1. Lack of energy
2. Lack of focus

Let’s look at what you can do to have enough energy levels to work through the day and focus completely on the task at hand.

Lack of energy

If you don’t have the energy to sit (or stand, whatever your choice!!) and work for 90 minutes, no amount of prioritising or scheduling or time management tricks will help you. Here are some small things you can do to keep your energy levels high at all times:

• Exercise every day. Okay, 4 to 5 days a week.
• Get 6 to 8 hours of sleep every night. There is no shortcut here, like getting 10 hours one day and then 5 the next.
• Eat balanced and healthy food.
• Don’t take stress; remove factors that create stress from your periphery.
• Pursue a hobby or do something creative every day. Nothing keeps your mind and body energised (both physically and mentally) like these.

Lack of focus

If you’re not focused on the task at hand it’s natural that your mind will wander to:

• Tasks you will be doing after this one.
• Argument you had with your partner in the morning.
• Premium payment reminder that popped up an hour ago.
• Awful presentation you gave during the last all hands meeting.

and so on…

Bhagwad Gita says our mind travels faster than everything else in the world. If you give your imagination an opening to your mind, it will take you everywhere except where you intended it to be.

Here are some ways to ensure focus on task at hand:

• Practice meditation to improve overall focus.
• Keep a gap of 10 minutes between tasks to collect your thoughts and get prepared.
• Remove distractions from your surroundings; put your mobile phone on silent and mute notifications on the device you are working on.
• Wear noise cancelling headphones to filter out noise around you.
• Play some meditative music while working.

Next steps

Analyze your past week and see when you were the most productive and the least productive. Try to remember your eating and sleeping patterns 24 hours prior to that, and you will see what I mean. To ensure high levels of focus and energy for your next tasks, create time in your calendar to exercise at least four days in a week. And, if you do not already have noise cancelling headphones, buy it. If it is too expensive for you, start saving for it from today.

Take small steps towards your final aim – to conquer your superlist – and you are bound to succeed.