Cleverly group activities with your theme day

This way you can handle similar and recurring tasks efficiently and save your nerves. Even if you like to be flexible.

If you feel overwhelmed by the daily choice of tasks and like to put off important things, you can try this completely different approach to keep them under control and become productive: Theme day!

Why you need theme day

If you not only have current project work, but also regularly recurring tasks. Or lots of 5-minute tasks that are never really useful: why not group them together to save time and efficiency and complete them in one go?

Then do it with the themed day. Theme days are quick activity packs!

How does it work? Dedicate each day of the week to a specific goal, long-term passion project, or topic. All things that you simply need or that are really important to you and need to be addressed regularly.

Theme day: how does it work?

For each day of the week, define a topic to work on regularly. In fact, you don’t need a whole day for this, just a protected amount of time per day. For example a 2 hour Pomodoro cycle plus a 20 minute break thereafter. If you’re self-employed like me, you should be able to set this up too.

You could group these topics:

• Prepare social media posts
• Arrange scheduled phone calls and Zoom conferences
• Do research for new products or blog posts
• Record videos for online courses
• Update the website and write texts
• Simplify filing and sorting documents
• …

Everything you do regularly is better in one go. To avoid getting bogged down and always be up to date.

Group tasks: This will help you move forward

Whether you combine your small tasks every day (10 am is a phone hour. If your job involves daily phone calls) or, better yet, set aside a period of time for them each week for theme day: you automatically benefit. Why:

• All you have to do is gather your motivation once a day and find the starting point for these tasks. And you have enough time on your hands to get everything done and/or make progress on important projects.
• You develop a habit with the theme day. And habits are the first step to automating your tasks. Because you don’t have to make a decision to get started, you just do it because that’s how you always do it. If Tuesday is your phone day, the decision is clear. Select the first recipient in the list and get started.
• Automatically make progress on your side projects. One day a week dedicated to new products, marketing and business development will bring you closer to your goal. Every week. Step by step.
• You will also benefit from a regular weekly appointment to learn new skills. Whether it’s the language course on the VHS or the improvement with an online course: do it quickly, then you’ll succeed too.
• Another good thing: by grouping small tasks together, you only have setup time once. Once you’ve searched for documents, once you’ve started Zoom and turned on your headset, once you’ve prepared the next step of the project.
• Regardless of whether you dedicate your thematic day to an ongoing project or a series of small tasks: switching from one topic to the next costs energy and prevents you from working efficiently. So it’s better to work on a project or a series of similar small tasks for 2 hours rather than jumping back and forth between many to-dos.

When are theme days for you?

Do you always feel like the emails that pop up are taking you away from the focus of your most important project? Don’t understand why you’re not making any progress with your most important long-term plans (aka goals)? Are you wondering why you are so easily distracted by current events from important things? Then theme days are for you. Why:

• You have set aside a period of time for each day in which you can work on the little things in a targeted and time-saving way. And you have the assurance that nothing will be forgotten, no one will be forgotten.
• You know that your most important goals receive their time each week to be further developed.
• And you have the security of knowing that you will continue your training program every week.
• And all this without stressing you out. Because stress arises first and foremost when you have to decide again and again what you should do next. To achieve your goals and fulfill your tasks in daily activity.

If you prefer not to take advantage of the themed days

You usually benefit from having set guidelines that you follow when planning your workday. Because you don’t have to think about it every day. And decisions cost energy that cannot be used indefinitely.

And switching between tasks is actually unproductive because each different task represents an interruption from the previous one. And that means a pause in focus. You need to reorient yourself and you need some time to get started.

But if you see a task as a break from the previous one and plan it this way (program a plugin and then search for a web text to relax; talk to the client on the phone and then read the specialist article), you will be in a better position. As long as your small tasks are completed reliably. And the alternation between two things to do occurs. Because Netflix and filling the washing machine are not alternative tasks, but rather distractions that are not good for you.

How are theme days organised?

• Check what little things you encounter every day that interrupt you from important tasks: calls, emails, mailing lists, Feedly, sales tax documents.
• What takes 2 minutes or less to complete? Then it’s better to get rid of it and implement it right away.
• Which of these takes a little longer, but can easily be done once a week because it’s not urgent on a daily basis?
• What projects and learning processes that are close to your heart do you keep losing sight of? They are also worth a themed day.
• Then choose a day of the week and set aside a period of time for it. This is your daily topic “Phone Calls”, “Sales Tax”, “Research”

Write down a time period for this day that is sufficient for your project (please don’t leave too much buffer so that you can benefit from limiting the time period and do everything efficiently). If you have chosen the themed days system, you can record your blocks as weekly repeating appointments in Thunderbird or Outlook. The advantage: on these themed days you know exactly how much time you have left for further appointments.