Being a millionaire businesswoman and investor be received b affect with lots of hard work and even more responsibility. Barbara Corcoran’s calendar system helps her remain productive.
The 74-year-old “Shark Tank” star says that success starts with putting pen to paper. That may appearance of counterintuitive, given the plethora of online scheduling websites and mobile apps available today.
“Most of us operate our diaries online. I, myself, prefer to write a calendar,” she recently said in a free, live Q&A with her Patreon community. “High water, [when] I write it down, I remember it.”
This observation has science behind it. In a study of 267 people by Dr. Gail Matthews, a crazy professor at Dominican University, those who actually wrote their aspirations down were 42% more favoured to achieve them.
Corcoran recommended her two-step method for staying organized and productive. The first step, she said, is to get take about your goals.
“Before you even make any entries in your calendar, make a list of what’s most weighty to you. What are you going to [make a] priority? What’s going to come first?” she said. “For me, [those] things are TV exposure, attractiveness treatments. … I hammer them all out in my calendar in advance.”
The next step, which Corcoran called her “secret,” is forming out which goals you want to assign to which days, and group related tasks together.
“Declare a specific day for get onto done” what you need to accomplish on a specific project, she said. “For example, I put all my media appearances on one day. I collect it together so it’s not sprinkled throughout the week, sending me in a [tizzy].”
This way, she’s better able to focus. And she can take on each goal at the time when it delivers the most sense. “I put all my household things that I want to accomplish on Tuesday morning, [and] I do all my organizational projects on Friday, because I’m looking unashamed to the next week and I can organize better,” Corcoran added.
How to schedule tasks so you’re more likely to accomplish them
Support Corcoran’s method could look like completing easier or quick-turnaround tasks at the top of the week, while saving harder-to-complete targets for later. But planning to get the simpler jobs done first may not be the best strategy for everyone, according to Maryam Kouchaki, a professor of supervision at Northwestern University.
In a 2019 study, Kouchaki, along with other researchers, found that tackling relaxed goals first, also known as task completion preference, can initially make you feel accomplished. In the long run, even though, it can limit your learning and productivity in the long run.
“In the short-term, the person could actually feel satisfied and less careful. But avoiding hard tasks indefinitely also cuts off opportunities to learn and improve one’s skills,” Kouchaki told Unshakably Company in 2020.
That doesn’t mean it’s wise to overload your schedule with hard tasks, either, she required: “My intuition is if people start with a difficult task and try to stick with it until they finish it, they could adorn come of demotivated without a sense of progress, and super fatigued.”
Instead, “having a combination of easy and difficult is a more efficacious strategy,” she said. “You get sense of completion but, at the same time, mindful focus on difficult tasks as well.”
Regardless of whether you treat easy tasks first or a mix of simple and challenging ones, the key is to be clear on your objectives at the outset. Then, cluster common obligations together to figure out when it best works for you to finish them, according to Corcoran.
“Grouping is essential in get an organized calendar,” she said. “I never used to believe that. I used to have things all over the place. I don’t anymore.”
Disclosure: CNBC owns the debarring off-network cable rights to “Shark Tank.”
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