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Certainly the alluring benefits of managing time wisely and productively are the biggest advantages of beginning a life of planning daily. These two aspects of planning are the most talked about and sought after. However, there are three other huge benefits that most people forget about or don’t take advantage of, and they should! Let's take a look at these three hidden perks and learn how to implement them.

Good Health

Health benefits of daily planning come in two parts: physical health and mental health.

There are a number of ways your physical health can be improved by actively using your daily planner and with practice you’ll find some individualized ways yourself. To start with are two main techniques, which are keeping track of the meals you will eat and the exercise you will get. This works proactively and retroactively both.

When you’re planning out your week you’ll want to plan your meals and exercise according to what is going on each day—or vice versa depending on your goals. Having this look ahead of what each day may look like can assist you in achieving your goals. If you notice a day being particularly busy around dinnertime but you have a goal to eat out less, you’ll need to arrange a crock-pot meal or freezer meal for that day to assure your success. Perhaps your Tuesday morning is packed and there just is no feasible way to get your run in that morning. You may be able to rearrange your evening to insure you have some time for that jog in the p.m. hours or you’ll need to plan on Tuesday being a rest day.

It’s nice also to be able to look back at the previous week to see what worked well for you and what didn’t so you can learn as you go.

With this approach you’ll be well on your way to better health!

Emotional health in daily planning may seem like a stretch but it is proven that the simple task of laying pen to paper has the ability to calm a troubled mind. When we have so many things that we are trying to remember to do and dates we need to remember to make, it leaves a lot of little pieces of information flying around in our heads, vying for attention. This will make us stressed and give us that nagging feeling that we’re forgetting something, and usually that’s because we ARE forgetting something.

A brain like this benefits from writing things down. If you get it out of your head and onto your paper it’s no longer something you have to worry about remembering.Plus, you’re more likely to actually remember it!

Records

There is a deeply kept secret about planning that most people don’t know…even daily planners themselves don’t take advantage of this perk very often. This perk is the inadvertent keeping of records. While you’re planning out your tasks and chores and reminding yourself to call the plumber and schedule the carpet cleaners you don’t realize that you’re doing your future self a favor.

This habit of writing things down and planning will help you in the future when you’re trying to remember when you did some certain thing last and who you called. When spring rolls around and you can’t remember the name or number of the guy who aerated the lawn all you need to do is flip through last year’s planner and you’ll find it written there in the month of May. Perhaps last summer you determined the very best day and time of the week to go to the water park because the crowd was the quietest, but you just can’t remember when that was. A quick look back at last year’s summer weeks will solve that mystery in a minute.

Keeping tabs on even the little things in your day will surprise you with how much they’ll help your future self, because she could use a little help now and then. This perk only works however if you write things down, and pairs well with keeping an index of useful information somewhere in your planner. More on indexing another time.

Multiplying Time

If you’re a mathematically inclined brain go ahead and suspend your disbelief for a minute here. Yes, feeling as though you have more time IS possible when you plan ahead and execute your plan to the best of your daily abilities. The phenomenon of feeling as though you have more unfettered time for the things and people you love happens when your productivity gets things finished on time and in time so that you can do things you really enjoy doing. That means doing the things you really love without the nagging feeling of those things you were supposed to do before.

Have you ever heard the phrase, “If you need something to get done, ask a busy person to do it”? The word productive should be added to the ‘busy’ describer and then this phrase is absolutely true since not all busy people are productive. However, people who have mastered the ability to do both, truly do get more done in a day than most because they know how to multiply their time by strategically planning and doing.

You can do this too, and the more you work at it, the better you’ll become and the more time you’ll seem to have. One trick to it is determining beforehand what you’d like to do with any and all extra time you might find. If you don’t have a plan or a list of things to do when you don’t have things to do, you’ll find yourself in the wasting time category. Moms don’t have time to waste. Now if your initiative is to in fact “waste time” because that is what you need, you’ll remember from my last post that that is ok. You just need to own that decision.

These are just some of the in-numerous benefits of daily planning but the true perks of planning in your life will make themselves manifest to only you as you try your hand at it.