Warrior Notes: Why You Need a Schedule

Chris Albert 00:00:00 (link to this point)

You know, your greatest asset in this world is time. Right? It's the one thing that you can't ever win back. When you are wasting time, you know, the seconds are going by, the minutes are going by, and and you literally can't get those back. And you start to realize this as you get older.

When you're young, you feel like you have all the time in the world. And then one day you wake up and you're middle aged, and you look in the mirror and you wonder what the hell you did with your life, and you realize that you can't go back and you can't change the things that you wanna change. You can't do a lot of things you used to be able to do, and you don't have as many options on the table. Today, I'm gonna talk to you about governing yourself in this most important realm of life. First, I wanna tell you this.

We recently began a relationship with The Citadel. Actually, the relationship hasn't started yet, but I wanted to put this announcement out there. We are going to be working with The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, to bring information to you about programs for active duty and military veterans. And you might if you've heard a lot about the Citadel, you might have heard of the corps cadets. You might have heard of their illustrious history.

You might have heard of some of their athletic teams, but they have some of the best programs in the country for active duty military members and military veterans. They've got programs where active duty military members can come and go to school there during the day. They can participate in some of the ROTC activities to help them to become officers, and they can get bachelor's or master's degrees. Same thing with military veterans. They've got some outstanding programs for military veterans to come on board and to gain either their bachelor's degrees or their master's degrees.

And they've also got some really, really great specialty programs, like a specialty program for tactical readiness. It's a fantastic campus. I I went down there and visited a long time ago, and it was so impressive what they were able to do, what they're able to do for young men and women. And now I'm even more impressed with them for what they're able to do with our military and with our veterans. So you wanna check these programs out.

You could head over to www.citadel.edu. Like I said, outstanding institution, outstanding programs, and we are going to be having some alumni and some students on the show to talk about the what the Citadel has done for them. So definitely check that out, and you'll be hearing more and more about this when the relationship actually starts and when we get rolling a little bit further with the show. But today, I want to talk to you, like I said, about managing yourself, setting that schedule. I can tell you this.

When I first got out the military, I didn't want a schedule.

I wanted to wake up when I wanted to wake up. I wanted to eat when I wanted to eat. I wanted to, you know, working out, running. I I told myself I was never gonna go running again after the military. I I was so sick of it.

You know? But one of the things that I discovered was that I feel so much better, so much better about myself, so much better about where I am in life, and so much calmer when I've actually taken the time to schedule out my day. And, you know, it's it's one of those things that I think people don't realize. You know, Jocko has that saying, discipline equals freedom, and it's become kind of a of a platitude, but, it's so true. When you actually sit down and you take the time to schedule your day out the night before, and you go into the day knowing exactly what you wanna do, that saves you so much time.

It saves you that that nervous feeling you get when you don't know what to do. Alright? Because I'll tell you right now, that's the feeling that's gonna kill you. Right? That nervous feeling when you don't know what to do, when you feel like you're overwhelmed.

Overwhelm doesn't come from having too much to do. It comes from not knowing what to do next. And you need the ability to sit down and orient yourself. So what are the steps to doing this? The first is this.

Every Sunday, right, before your week begins, you need to sit down and you need to think about what your week looks like. When do you have meetings? What what things do you need to do that you absolutely cannot miss? What things could you implement in your schedule that would move you forward? Right?

Maybe a workout, maybe a reading session. Alright? And you wanna take a look at your week and think about where you can schedule those things. Right? Because if you're trying to do it day to day, you're not getting that that, you know, mile high view of your week, and and you might be scheduling into things that that, you know, might create conflicts and things like that.

So actually take the time on Sunday. It could be twenty minutes. Sit down, think about what your schedule looks like for the week. The next thing is on that Sunday, you think about your schedule. Right?

But before you do that, you should actually do this before, you need to sit down and you think about what your goals are gonna be for the week. What what do you wanna get done? And not pie pie in the sky goals. You wanna think about what are the things that you gonna be able to do, the actual actions that you're gonna be able to do to get to those goals. What do you need to do this week that is gonna get you closer to that goal you have?

Right? What actual action can you take? Alright? So you do that, then schedule yourself out. Then what you need to do is the night before, you actually need to create a task list.

Right? So you grab a piece of paper, you write out the things that you you need to get done, things you wanna get done. Right? So there's a difference there. There's the things you need to get done every day.

Those are things that you have to get done in order to just, you know, tread water. Right? Keep your head above water. Then you may want at least one or two things that you're gonna do that are gonna push you ahead. Right?

Like I said, that could be reading, that could be a workout, it could be, you know, filling out an application for that that new position you want or or for creating a business plan for that new business you wanna start. Whatever it is, you wanna create a little bit of time there to to to to work on those. And then once you have that task list written out, what you wanna do is you wanna go into your calendar. Now I use Google Calendar because it's got great alerts. It shows up on my phone.

And you wanna schedule out every hour of your day. Right? You wanna schedule out those tasks that you put in there. Right? Really important here is that you shouldn't have more than five tasks because if you're doing more than five, you're you're you're going to be a bit overwhelmed.

Right? You're you're you're not gonna be able to get everything done that you wanna get done. And when you're making that schedule out, what you want is you want times when you're doing stuff, and then you wanna create buffers between those times. Right? Buffers between those times because you're only human.

You're not gonna be able to go from one thing straight into the other with a perfect focus. Right? And you have to understand that about yourself. Remember we talked about Andrew Marr, humility? You need to be humble in understanding that you're not gonna go from one thing to the other with perfect focus, so you need to create buffers for yourself. So what I like to do is I like to schedule out an hour for a task and then maybe a fifteen to thirty minute buffer in between those tasks. Right?

Gives me a chance to get up, grab some water, think a little bit, then come right back. Right? Schedule out those buffers. Schedule out time for you to eat lunch, to have a meal. Schedule out time for you to get a workout in.

Alright? Schedule out your breaks, you know, once you've got all the stuff that you need to have up there on your schedule. Alright? And the third thing you need to do at the end of every day and at the end of every week is you need to evaluate yourself. Right?

Did were you able to get everything in? Why weren't you able to get everything in? And if you weren't able to get everything in and you figured out why, what's your plan to fix it? Right? You do that at the end of every day, and then over the weekend, after the week's over, you you keep doing that evaluation and you figure out ways of getting better.

Right? And I know a lot of this stuff might sound simple to some of you, but it's something that we consistently don't implement in our lives, and I see that over and over again in this community. There's a lot of us who just lack structure, who have allowed ourselves to kind of fall into disarray. And that's why a lot of you feel like the world is coming at you. Right?

That's why a lot of you feel like the world is against you because you haven't taken the time to lead the world, to lead yourself into the world. Right? You have a choice in this life. You either dictate what you wanna do in this life or you allow the world to dictate it for you. And if you do what I just said, you'll be leading yourself.

So hope this all makes sense. Let me know. You can always hit me up at Warrior Soul Agoge on Instagram or at Warrior Soul Gear on Twitter. And we'll be back at you next week with some more awesome content. This is Chris Albert with the Warrior Soul podcast, and I am out.