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Learning how to schedule so that your time spent reflects your goals and values requires focused and thoughtful planning. Before you optimize your time to navigate a list of obligations and priorities, start with the big picture and define your happy life by determining which goals you should prioritize at certain parts of your life. Macro-priorities, or life goals, should guide the micro-priorities in day-to-day life.
But having a thoughtful and time-bucketed list of goals is just the first step. Executing those goals requires micro-prioritization at a near-term level relative to your time buckets. In other words, if you set goals for the next five years, what does the next year look like to achieve those goals? How about the next week? These are the questions answered by micro-prioritization of short-term obligations to meet long-term happiness goals.
Why Micro-Prioritization Works: Scheduling Misconceptions
Macro-prioritization can be fun because it is a brainstorm of your greatest dreams—the goals that will put a smile on your face instantly. For many folks, micro-prioritization seems a lot less fun because it revolves around how to make a schedule and manage a calendar.
But macro-prioritization is useless without micro-prioritization. The goals you dream up and time-bucket during macro-prioritization will never happen without micro-prioritization.
Is my message simply to deal with the unfun micro-prioritization because your life goals are worth it? No. Micro-prioritization can be fun too. That leads me to the first misconception about scheduling for micro-prioritization:
1. Micro-prioritization is not fun.
If living your values on a daily basis is not fun, then sure. If identifying more time, often every week or even every day, to dedicate to the most important priorities in your life sounds appealing, then micro-prioritization may be more fun than you think. Dedicating an hour each week to focusing on your scheduling priorities can often result in finding an extra ten hours to work on that book you are writing, go on that hike with your partner, or even go to happy hour with your friends. Additionally, the feeling of adjusting your schedule to accommodate your most important priorities will provide instant gratification.
2. Micro-prioritization takes time away from my macro goals.
Some folks think of micro-prioritization as being obsessed with scheduling your errands, phone calls, and workouts. While it certainly includes those items, micro-prioritization still prioritizes the goals you had in your macro-prioritization. If you want to spend more time with your kids while they are growing up, micro-prioritization is your path to figure out how to attend all their soccer games. If you want to write a book in your 50s, micro-prioritization is finding an hour each day to write. If you want to run a marathon on all seven continents next year, micro-prioritization is picking the races and organizing the training.
Your daily schedule should reflect your life’s ambitions. Every day.
How to Micro-Prioritize
Assuming macro-prioritization refers to your life goals—time-bucketed into generally large amounts of time given your projected life span—micro-prioritization is how you break down those time-buckets further to develop a more tangible path to achieving your life goals. If you are under age 50, you probably chose five-year or ten-year time buckets, so a year is a good place to start your micro-prioritization. If you are already above regular retirement age, you may choose shorter intervals. Either way, choose a level that does not seem too intimidating for planning purposes.
If you are 36 years old and decided you wanted to learn to scuba dive, travel to all seven continents, become a published author, and spend time with older family members by the time you reach 40, then start by figuring out how to work towards those priorities this year. Your annual objectives, to achieve those larger goals, may look something like this:
Age 36 Goals:
Travel to the Philippines, your first time visiting Asia.
Take a beginner scuba diving course in the Philippines.
Spend at least three weeks visiting your relatives, divided into two trips to each of the two different locations they live.
Start writing at least 20 minutes a day, and get an article published by the end of the year.
This is how you live your macro-prioritization in a specific year. Micro-prioritization is just setting small goals to reach big goals. Similar to macro-prioritization, you start with the biggest building block (in this example, a year) and work down.
Annual Planning: Map out the Year
This is the most important part:
Add those annual goals into your annual calendar before anything else.
That means before any other obligations. Including work. If you have a general idea about your work schedule or know the date of a big work event, you can certainly plan to take the trip to the Philippines during a different month of the year. However, if you want to run the Boston Marathon and this conflicts with an important work event, the Boston Marathon comes first because it is your priority. Alternatively, you can choose to run the Boston Marathon another year in the same time-bucket if you anticipate that this work conflict is a one-off, as long as you are working towards other life goals.
As for the specifics, mapping out the year for events means picking out specific dates for those events or blocking off the date for immovable events. Contact your family in Ohio and ask them if they are available for a visit the first week in August, then block off your calendar for the visit. If you are attending the World Series, block off the dates for the games you want to go to in your calendar, even if you cannot buy the tickets until you learn which teams will be competing.
For goals like writing 20 minutes a day to get published, this requires two parts. First, set a goal date for submitting an article for consideration at a publication so you have a hard deadline for yourself. Next, commit to prioritizing those 20 minutes each day when you drill down to the weekly level of micro-prioritization.
Weekly Planning: Map out Your Time
Whether you prefer to use a planner or an online tool like Google Calendar, the best way to prioritize what you love is to actually block off your time in one-hour (or even 30-minute) intervals. In my opinion, there is no better explanation for how to map out your time than Cal Newport’s suggestion; when I read his methodology, I realized it was exactly how I had been time-blocking my calendar since college.*
The first item that goes into your weekly calendar are any prioritized time-blocks. This means the 20 minutes each day for writing in the example above. Twenty minutes dedicated to writing goes in the schedule before everything else. Before sleeping, eating, dropping the kids off at school, work, and grocery shopping. Those things will definitely need to happen, but dropping that 20 minutes into the calendar first prioritizes it so it cannot get pushed back.
Then, add in all your other obligations in life, including work, groceries, and school drop-offs. As you get better at scheduling and micro-prioritizing your life, you can also figure out a pattern of prioritizing different events beyond just the most important goals. For example, you may prioritize an hour of studying each day, then an hour to spend one-on-one time with your child each day, then three 5K runs and three gym workouts, then your work priorities, then errands, and so on until you have covered your priorities. For malleable events like workouts, I drop the number and hours I want to dedicate to each workout into my calendar—for example, four one-hour lifts at the gym—to prioritize them (making them required, not optional!) but then move them around according to other less-malleable but less-important events (like my day job). It is possible to prioritize events that can happen at any time over events that can only happen at specific times, with a bit of planning.
Daily Planning: Retaining Focus
While your weekly schedule is the most detailed time-planner you need, it is often helpful to add a bit of extra focus by setting one or more daily goals. I like to set three daily goals for myself: These are the most important tasks I need to accomplish on any given day. If you are newer to goal-setting, set one to start. Just one. Make sure that one gets done.
Set guidelines to yourself regarding these goals as well. For example, my goals are not allowed to be tasks related to my 9–5 job because my targeted passions are outside of my daily work tasks, and one goal is always fitness or wellness-related. So how do I find the time to accomplish three tasks in addition to completing my day job? I have a little wiggle room: Anything that I personally want to learn can count as one of my goals. If I want to learn how to write macros in Excel, and this would also be helpful to my day job, learning how to write macros in Excel can count as one of my three goals and be accomplished during my work day. (Since the macros I wrote for my team’s daily reports save us hours each week, I doubt my supervisors are upset that I took some learning time out of the day.) These learning goals simultaneously relate to my personal growth and help my job, making them a win-win.
Your guidelines may (and probably should) vary from mine because we are all different. If you have career goals that are also life goals, like if you run your own business in an area you love and want to grow it, then your daily goals will probably relate to it. My daily goals often relate to Phippen Tax & Financial Services, so I get it! Just set criteria that reinforce your daily goals aligning with your life goals so your micro-prioritization reflects your macro-prioritization every day.
* This method of organizing my time is probably a big part of why I secured my first job with Teach For America: I actually pulled out my calendar and showed my interviewer how I scheduled priorities during my final interview. This superpower also prompted some friends to request that I make finals study schedules for them and allowed me to never pull an all-nighter in college. Since scheduling is not natural for everyone, Cal Newport’s explanation can give you the tools to become an expert scheduler regardless of your natural disposition towards scheduling.
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