Ever noticed that even with the best laid plans, some days just descend into chaos? When scheduled meetings run long, the school calls to say your child is sick, or a key project becomes much more involved than you anticipated, it’s easy for your schedule to get thrown out the window. As a result, you don’t get much of anything done except putting out small fires. Here are a few ways to find order on your busiest days and make time for what’s important.

Automate Actions

One surefire way to make a day that’s already busy even more stressful is to fritter away precious time on menial tasks. Losing five minutes here and ten there might not seem like much in the moment, but when you combine all these little distractions, they can add up to an hour or two you can’t afford to lose down the time suck drain.

You can make up small sections of time in advance by pre-making a bowl of overnight oats to leave in the fridge for breakfast, brewing an iced drink that you put beside it to avoid the drive-through line, and packing a lunch. Once you get to the office, pick a playlist to listen to instead of choosing individual tracks and activate predetermined do-not-disturb notifications to avoid interruptions.

You’re more likely to get stuck sitting all day when you’ve got to channel heads-down productivity. If you have an adjustable desk, it’s going to be a distraction if you have to remember to move it to a standing position, then back again if your legs and feet tire. Instead use Tempo from Ergodriven. This provides a cruise control function that automatically adjusts the desk height on a regular schedule. Or you can create your own beforehand to fit with the kinds of work you’ll be doing and your preferences for changing postures. This way, you’ll fit in extra standing and moving while staying locked in on your work.

Eat the Biggest Frog First

A daunting part of any busy day is that it likely contains at least a couple of difficult projects that you’d rather not do. As a result, you might end up putting them off until the afternoon, when you might already be too mentally drained to rise to the occasion. Or you find excuses to not do them at all, which only delays the unpleasantness temporarily and makes tomorrow busier than it needs to be.

Instead, you would do well to heed the words of author Mark Twain: “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” Since the Huckleberry Finn novelist said this, this has become a time management technique defined by motivational speaker Brian Tracy in his book Eat that Frog! If you take down your most dreaded task first, everything that follows will seem easy by comparison, and you’ll have a load off your mind. 

Do One Thing

One of the biggest temptations when you’re facing a lot of tasks to complete is to try and multitask in an effort to knock out several of them simultaneously. The trouble is that while makers of so-called smartphones might want us to believe otherwise, our brains are not wired to do this, or at least in an effective way. Research by Rescue Time shows that multitasking drains mental energy, compromises working memory, and – counterintuitively – reduces productivity by up to 20 percent.

In Steve Magness and Brad Stulberg’s book Peak Performance, they share that physician and venture capitalist Dr. Bob Kocher replaced multitasking with the mantra: “Do only one thing at a time.” You can follow his purposeful single-tasking method by compartmentalizing each busy day by the hour and assigning an achievable objective to each block.

Use the Premack Principle

In the 1960s, psychologist David Premack studied animals to learn more about behavior change and motivation. “The Premack Principle is a psychological concept suggesting that high-probability behavior can help reinforce low-probability behavior.” An Explore Psychology article stated. “In simpler terms, it involves using an enjoyable activity that someone prefers to encourage them to engage in a less enjoyable activity.”

The application for your busiest days is to reward yourself for doing a hard task – like eating the equivalent of Mark Twain’s big frog – with an easier or more enjoyable one. So when you finish that quarterly budget by mid-morning, you could go grab a latte. Dangling the reward in front of yourself in advance will make it more likely that you’ll do the task well. When the pace is frenetic, pair several enticing prizes with the must-do items you’re dreading to increase your odds of finishing them.

Add Brief Rest Intervals

In an article for Harvard Business Review, Alice Boyes writes that “When you’re very busy, it’s tempting to try to cram productive activity, like responding to email or thinking through decisions, into any small crack of time.” She suggested that it can seem essential to fill every spare second with activity to feel purposeful and believe you’re making progress. So you take those two minutes between calls, the car ride from your office to an offsite lunch, and any other gaps to do something, anything that’s work related.

Boyes believes this is a mistake to keep filling each gap with small tasks, as it will just make you feel more anxious, stressed out, and overloaded. “Instead, consider using brief waiting times for true mental breaks,” she suggested. “Take some slow breaths, drop your shoulders, and just chill.” Then you can come back with more clarity and focus and go hard again, rather than diminishing whatever physical and mental endurance you have left by checking your inbox, attending to yet more instant messages, or jumping ahead to the next to-do item on your overcrowded list.

This principle is used in sports training all the time. When doing short and hard bouts of activities like sprinting, athletes can’t go all out for too long. Instead, they break up the work into brief efforts, followed by enough rest to recharge, reload, and go again. Try a similar approach the next time a day gets too hectic, and you’ll probably get more high-quality work done.

Reinforce Priorities

Another way to ensure you fit in what’s most important on busy days is to set phone alarms and calendar reminders for nonnegotiable events. These could include picking your kids up from school, doing an efficient interval workout, or making sure you’re on time for date night with your significant other.

If you don’t give yourself an out with these kinds of priorities, then you won’t get stuck in a dilemma about whether or not to follow through with them. This will make it easier to prioritize your health, family, and friendships when you’re slammed. Focusing on mainly essential tasks will also force you to cut other, non-essential activities that probably weren’t worthy of your bandwidth anyway.