Daily Highlighting Guide. How this one strategy can transform your life.
In this post, let's take a look at what a daily highlight is, why it's so good, and a few strategies and tips that will surely set you up for success.
What is a daily highlight?
At the start of each day, choose one task or project that you want to complete on that day. This will be your highlight for the day. After that, your main goal during the day would be to complete that task and you should primarily focus on it. A daily highlight can be anything from the simple “Clean my room” to the big “Code a website”. As long as you can get it done by the end of the day, go for it!
Why is daily highlighting good?
Choosing just one task or project to do in a day might seem unproductive at first. I mean, why do just one thing when we could do everything! But in reality, do we really finish all our tasks in a day? More importantly, do we finish the big and important tasks or do we just delay them?
For this reason, choosing a highlight will give you something to focus on. You will be trying to get the stuff you want to do done rather than worrying about how much you can get done. This is a much better and healthy mentality to have. I can guarantee that you will feel more satisfied and accomplished in the end if you complete your highlight.
In the long run, doing a highlight a day actually makes you more productive and accomplish a lot more. If you do a highlight a day, then you would have ended up accomplishing 30 tasks in a month! That’s quite a lot. And overtime, this will build up as well.
Let’s get things straight, you don’t just have to complete your highlight. You can complete other tasks as well. Just make sure you do your highlight first and prioritize it over other tasks.
How to Choose a Daily Highlight
So, now that you understand what’s a highlight and how beneficial it is, how do you choose a highlight? There are a few ways and methods you can use for choosing a daily highlight.
You can choose a highlight;
Based on how urgent it is
Based on how much joy and satisfaction it brings you
Using the batching method - batch all the small tasks you've been putting off into one big highlight
By repeating yesterday's highlight
At the end of the day however, you have to trust your intuition and gut feeling with choosing the highlight that's best for you.
Also, it doesn't matter if your highlight is too small and irrelevant, as long as you like it and want to accomplish it today, go for it!
How to Make Time for your daily Highlight
Making time for your highlight is the most important step. The whole basis of daily highlighting is so you can start accomplishing things. So, you can make time for your highlight by:
1. Prioritizing your Highlight
Remember, your highlight is the task you chose to complete today out of all other tasks. So, we should make our highlight the first task we do in the day or schedule our highlight before all other tasks in our calendars.
2. Time-blocking your calendar
In Google Calendar (or wherever else you record events and reminders), block out a certain amount of time and label it 'Highlight: '. Time blocking is a way more effective strategy than simple to-do lists because there is a set amount of time during your day for it so you can't procrastinate as easily.
3. Doing your Highlight in the morning
Not only will you naturally be more focused, but you also won't have to worry about sudden events or tasks coming up in the afternoon that might fill up the rest of your day. You also have more freedom if you just don't feel like doing your highlight. If you do your highlight in the morning, you can just reschedule it to another time in the day if you are interrupted. Whereas if you do your highlight at night, you either have to abandon your highlight (which should be avoided as much as possible) or get sleep deprivation.
4. Using Focus techniques
There are tons of focus technique out there that allow you to get your highlight done faster and more efficiently. So, if you focus when doing your highlight, you will automatically make more time for it. Try out the focus techniques in the next part of this Daily Highlighting Guide:
How to Focus on Getting your Highlight Done
Meditate right before doing the highlight
Meditating right before doing your highlight does a couple of things. First, it frees up your mind. You won't get distracted by things that happened in the day. Your attention will be fully diverted to the highlight.
Second, it makes you more focused. Meditation makes you more aware and attuned, on top of decluttering your mind. For example, I won't have the urge to grab a snack or browse social media if I meditate. Instead, I will be solely focused on my highlight. All in all, meditation will set you up for immense focus and productivity when doing your highlight.
Setting a timer for the duration of my highlight
When I set up a timer, it allows me to see how much time I have left. This will naturally make me more focused and productive since I can visually see that I'm running out of time. Furthermore, setting a timer utilizes Parkinson's Law where time spent on work changes to fit in the time allotted for it. By setting a timer, you’ll probably get your highlight done faster too!
Make a list of questions that popped into your head
I always have this moment where I'm super focused on something and then suddenly, a question appears in my head. The question would be something completely random and useless like "I wonder how that' YouTube content creator I watched when I was young is doing now." or "Why is there a salad named after the Roman emperor Julius Caesar?". Unfortunately, my curiosity will demand an answer immediately and so I head to google to waste 10 minutes or so.
Instead of answering those questions right as they pop into our head, why don't we just write them down somewhere and Google them later when we’re free? We would accomplish the same thing but at a different and probably better time.
Start daily highlighting now!
Pick a task or project using the choosing strategies above. Remember, it doesn’t have to be big, it can be small too. Now, open Google Calendars or Reminders and schedule your highlight for tomorrow morning. If you’re really busy in the morning, then schedule it after that. Block out at least one hour or more to do it. Finally, consider a meditating session before the blocked out time or setting a time limit for when you do your highlight. Make sure you get your highlight done, good luck!
For more reference on daily highlighting, check out the book ‘Make Time’ by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky.
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This has been Arjun, a writer from the blog Not Too Young. Please consider sharing and subscribing to our blog, it would mean the world to us. As always, thank you for reading and see you next time!