Have you ever gotten off track of schedule? How many times have you decided to give up for the day, week, month, or even year and mark it up as a loss? We then get in an argument with ourselves about how we will do better next time and we can start again on Monday, at the beginning of the month, and an all time favorite for everyone which is the beginning of the year. We do not necessarily have to stop and give up when we get off track. We can make a decision to get right back on track as soon as we discover. For some reason, this is much harder than it sounds though. We set out with a bunch of ambitious goals and we fail to achieve them because we got too busy with something or got taken off track by something else. It can often be easy for us to lose track of what we should be doing and there are several ways to help us remember what we need to be doing. We could use a course correction fo what we need to do and get back to where we need to be. Here are a few ways to do this.
Look back at your schedule. If you made a schedule and even more so if you made a detailed schedule, you should be be able to get right back on track by making a few tweaks to account for the detour.
Make a new schedule. It is very possible that the reason you got off track is that your schedule wasn’t working. You may have schedule too many things, or too few things for the schedule to be effective.
Schedule breaks in. Perhaps you have gone away from your schedule because you lost focus and took a break. Maybe you got lost on the internet and social media for an hour and realize that you were off track after that. You could just schedule these things in that way you have a better expectation to stop when time is up. Of course, this takes discipline and is not guaranteed to work.
Keep track of the times you go off track. Keep some kind of record of times you find yourself not sticking to your plan and look for trends and find out the reasons why.
Don’t beat yourself up. I used to get upset when I didn’t follow my schedule completely and when I got off track. Realize that life is always going to be inconsistent and there will always be things that happen out of our control to take us off track.
So you see that if you get a bit off track, there is no need to throw your whole schedule in a waste basket. It is always better to start again now rather than later. Remember, the longer you stay off track, the longer you will be off track. In addition, it will only be harder to get back on track when you need to. So get back on track now