How scheduling tasks can improve your mental health

As many aspects of our life shifted to take place at home, we were suddenly tasked with organising our days ourselves. Previously, our jobs gave structure to our days. Now, there’s no commute or office hours, and we have to figure out how to make each day count with little external influence.

This responsibility proved to be pretty challenging. If you feel like the past year is a blur of identical days, then know you’re not alone.

However, at Sorted, we love a good challenge. Our mission has always been to make it as straightforward as possible to hyper-schedule your day and increase your focus. Whether or not you use Sorted, we found that hyper-scheduling can improve your mental health and give structure to a blurry day. Here are five ways it can increase your clarity.

Something to look forward to

‍

Scheduling something into the future gives us something to look forward to. So whether you’re allocating a task for later today or a few weeks in advance, research shows that there’s joy in anticipation.

I find that scheduling tasks at night makes me excited for the next day. It makes me eager to wake up energised the following morning.  

Reflection of previous days

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking every day is identical to the previous one. As a result, we naturally forget the little wins and challenges that make each day unique. Scheduling helps tackle this dissatisfaction by creating a log of our previous tasks and events, highlighting the subtle and significant differences that make each day extraordinary.

Control over your day

‍

When scheduling tasks, we make a conscious decision as to how we will spend our time. Without a schedule, we delegate this process to our subconscious mind, forcing it to make decisions when we’re not necessarily in the right mindset to do so. As a result, we may find ourselves scrolling mindlessly through social media as we give up control over our day.

Having a schedule captures our attention, encouraging us to snap back into focus and work on whatever tasks we set out to accomplish. Even if we let go of some control between tasks, we’re reminded to start working again when it’s time for the next one.

Build a habit

‍

One of the benefits of taking back control of our days is building habits using recurring tasks. Sorted provides advanced rules for routine tasks, making it easy to set up a custom workflow that suits your needs.

It’s undoubtedly hard to build a habit, and there’s no secret formula to ensure you stick to your habits. It’s your job to show up and do it! From our end, we’ll do our best to assist you along the way.

Understand where your time goes

Two questions keep people up at night: “where on earth does my time go?” and “what came first, the chicken or the egg?”.

While we can’t answer the latter yet, we do have a solution for the first question. Scheduling gives you a clearer picture of how you spend your time. While reflecting on previous tasks highlights the uniqueness of each day, analysing those tasks gives us clarity as to how those days are spent.

————————

These are five ways that scheduling can help you stay focused, reduce your stress, and make you more aware of the awesome things you do!

For more productivity tips and product updates, check us out on Twitter. We’d love to stay in touch.