Messing Up on Planning My Day

J

Jimhardie74

Guest
In the mornings i like to plan my day so that I can block off time to work on things that are most important to me and ensure that they get done. I have all of my next actions and projects on lists, accurately thought out as instructed in the books. The problem is, when I plan my day it often ends up including somewhat reactive items and usually just ends up looking like one of my old messy to-do lists

Can anyone share their strategies for integrating next action items into their day and planning their day/planning their week. Looking forward to your responses. Thanks!
 

Longstreet

Professor of microbiology and infectious diseases
Carefully look at your projects and actions first thing in the morning. Determine what will provide you the most payoff. Rory Vaden speaks of multipliers -- people that choose things to do that have the most lasting impact moving forward. I am sure if you study what is on your plate, you can make this determination. Now, protect your calendar! Block time for these most important projects and actions. Do your best to make yourself unavailable. Sometimes, I leave my office and go to a coffee shop or the library. The key is to focus -- particularly on those difficult projects that require considerable thought.

I would be glad to correspond with you privately to discuss my GTD system and how I focus on deep work. Send me a private message. Best wishes!
 

TesTeq

Registered
Jimhardie74 said:
Can anyone share their strategies for integrating next action items into their day and planning their day/planning their week. Looking forward to your responses. Thanks!

What about making your day-planning decisions more Project/StandaloneNextAction oriented than context oriented? I mean: don't look at your at-work context to choose next actions but rather look at your active Project list to choose projects you want to make progress and change contexts to reach your goals. GTD contexts may hurt your productivity and motivation.
 

Folke

Registered
I might as well chip in a few more thoughts.

What if you start from the totally opposite angle and see how far you can go? In other words, try to avoid planning out your day in advance (in the morning). The beauty of GTD, IMHO, is the idea of staying "uncommitted" until you actually decide to do something. You decide in the moment what you will do in that moment.

Maybe you will find that on many days you can actually manage without any pre-planning at all - no tasks at all listed for today. On other days, maybe you feel that you definitely want to make a note of any really critical tasks you MUST complete that day or REALLY REALLY SHOULD be working on that day (and maybe you want to include that day's appointments on the same list just to keep the all together. I do that.) But that's still just a fraction of all the things you will actually do during that day. In addition, you will pick more actions from your next actions lists throughout the day and you will probably do plenty of things that were not on the lists at all in the first place (interruptions, impulses etc).

Reading and contemplating your lists in the morning is always a good idea. It refreshes your memory of what is on them and gives you a feel for the overall degree of importance and urgency in your life, and it helps you make good intutive choices in the moment thoughout the day.

Jimhardie74 said:
In the mornings i like to plan my day so that I can block off time to work on things that are most important to me and ensure that they get done.

I never do that. At the most, I flag them on my list without specifying any particular time for them.

Jimhardie74 said:
... strategies for integrating next action items into their day and planning their day/planning their week.

Sounds more like a regular planning routine than GTD. To regular planners, the next action list is often called "backlog" or something similar. All actions of any importance are "planned" with a date and often a time. GTD actually is quite different. Not that you cannot plan a few things and block out time, but the fundamental approach is more of a "carpe diem" nature - to decide in the moment what you will do, and to base this intuitive decision on a frequently reviewed and properly organized inventory of what needs to be done, and on a clear awareness of your overall priorities.
 

GTD-Sweden

Registered
Jimhardie74 said:
In the mornings i like to plan my day so that I can block off time to work on things that are most important to me and ensure that they get done. I have all of my next actions and projects on lists, accurately thought out as instructed in the books. The problem is, when I plan my day it often ends up including somewhat reactive items and usually just ends up looking like one of my old messy to-do lists

Can anyone share their strategies for integrating next action items into their day and planning their day/planning their week. Looking forward to your responses. Thanks!

Learning the hard way I now religiously follow Jim Rohs quote “Never begin the day until it is finished on paper.” That is I do a daily to do list with the big rocks in my day specific area of I-cal the night before. Flexibility is key, of cause, and the list is not set in stone. But if I get these 3-5 things done I am generally happy. Then, if I have time, I check my NA-list with flagged marked "Big rocks" in Omnifocus. These Big rocks I have selected carefully during my WR.
 

Folke

Registered
Haha :) And some of you other guys are such die-hard "planners" that I sometimes wonder what attracted you to GTD in the first place ;-) (e.g. “Never begin the day until it is finished on paper.” !? - not much room for flexibility there!)

There are so many standard time management methodologies that are explicitly based on managing time, blocking out time, putting stuff on the calendar "or else they will not get done" etc etc. For me, the beauty if GTD is that it is the first documented methodology that I am aware of that emphasizes the intuitively made decisons that most of us (lots of us, anyway) probably have been doing all along, but never had any "learned" support for. But that's a discussion we have had perhaps a bit too much of here in the past, and I will not go deeper into that now - I know you'll understand.

My best wishes to everyone with whatever system they are using :)
 

GTD-Sweden

Registered
Folke said:
Haha :) And some of you other guys are such die-hard "planners" that I sometimes wonder what attracted you to GTD in the first place ;-) (e.g. “Never begin the day until it is finished on paper.” !? - not much room for flexibility there!)

Folke, well it´s here the flexibility comes in - at every second be ready to tear up your sacred daily list if circumstances calles for it. BUT, as I say, if I don't plan like that the risk is that the whole day gets unfocused and unproductive. And we would not want that, would we? :)
 

Longstreet

Professor of microbiology and infectious diseases
@Folke: You are a good man, my friend -- and a GREAT GTD resource. Hang in there and keep up the good work.
 

TesTeq

Registered
GTD-Sweden said:
if I don't plan like that the risk is that the whole day gets unfocused and unproductive.

I think it is a very common and important problem with the context-based GTD. You are sitting at the computer with a list of 50 Next Actions and deciding what to do. Between each Next Action you decide what to do next (context, time, energy, priority). And each time you have to make a strategic decision! Isn't it too exhausting? Isn't it better to have a plan for the day? Strategic plan aligned with your current week/month/quarter/year/life strategy?
 

Folke

Registered
I agree with TesTeq that going through the whole next actions list(s) multiple times a day, as per vanilla GTD, is not ideal. And, let's be honest, vanilla GTD is not crystal clear (not to me , anyway) on how to best deal with that, and this, in turn, is one of reasons why so mnay of us have our little personal tricks (be it time blocking or highlighting or flagging or scheduling ...).

I also agree with GTD-Sweden that if you are prepared to scratch and redo your "today" list anytime during the day, you are in fact flexible, and you have easy access to a handy menu of highly "likely choices" for the day, and if you need to change it it is not too much work to just "unstar" ("unflag") these few actions (or add a few more). (I use that method myself, and in addition I can always dive into a particular context, project or area if I want to focus on that all of a sudden.)

And I agree with Longstreet that if you put a few really important ones on the calendar (instead of, say, flagging them on your list) you still have a very manageble situation. It all works.

Somehow I feel that the apparent differences between different people's opinions perhaps lie more in the fundamental views we take than in the exact "tricks" we use. At a fundamental level, some of us (e.g. I) feel that whatever we plan will not happen like we planned it anyway (due to interruptions, new events, new ideas ...) and we hate to redo too much of our lists or see the lists all twisted or made useless just because some particular date or time point has passed. I want some form of "planning" that stays as valid as possible. Organizing things by project, area, review frequency etc is in fact very stable for me, so this is what I do, personally. Time planning is not very stable for me at all, so I try to reduce that to the barest minimum in order to reduce aggravation, confusion and work.

I totally understand that some people come from the opposite angle (especially people outside the GTD camp, but even from within the GTD camp). They feel that anything that lacks a date is "out of control" and they tend to have dates on a large number of items even if these dates are often quite "artificial" (a result of planning rather than actual facts about the action - they could reschedule the action with just a stroke of a pen without asking anyone, but they do not seem to be bothered by this.) For me, I like to see clearly which dates are "hard reality" that I cannot tamper with easily; any other dates than that I have never had much use for, since I know that even if I had them I could just reschedule them; they carry no significance and just blur my view. We probably all want something we can trust that feels stable. Some find stibility in a timeline; some find stability in other kinds of "task characteristics".
 

Longstreet

Professor of microbiology and infectious diseases
I think TesTeq and Folke have made really good points. I think a key factor in all of this is determining what works best for you. I am sure there are many people who can work off of long next action lists and divided by many contexts -- essentially deciding in the moment what to do next. But as TestTeq pointed out, I find this exhausting. I simply work better if I have a schedule for the day - a plan. Will it change? of course. I like Cal Newport's statements on his daily planning in his pivotal book "Deep Work". He maintains that one who plans is actually being more decisive and thoughtful and flexible that one who does not. He has no problem with deviating from his plan. If something comes up, if he has a thought that he wishes to pursue, he simply goes and plays that out. THEN, he returns to his daily plan and modifies it to make the best use of his time for the rest of the day. This approach really resonates with me.
 

Oogiem

Registered
Jimhardie74 said:
Can anyone share their strategies for integrating next action items into their day and planning their day/planning their week.
I look at the calendar and weather in the morning. My calendar will have things I have to do on it and if I have decided that I need some dedicated time to work on something specific it's an apt. with myself as well. I use my weekly review to see if I am getting done the things I want to to get to my important goals. If the review is done well you have all the planning and thinking done then and only have to deal with action lists and work as it shows up. If I messed up and something the past week didn't work right I try to do a small correction during the weekly review. It might be as simple as putting several projects on hold or deciding to completely clear a particular context out so that it is empty.

I never do a "Today" type list unless it's a real deadline for something that has to be done that day.
 

TesTeq

Registered
Folke said:
I agree with TesTeq (...)

I also agree with GTD-Sweden (...)

And I agree with Longstreet (...)

I like it! ;-)

Folke said:
Organizing things by project, area, review frequency etc is in fact very stable for me, so this is what I do, personally.

"Review frequency" - that's the direction of my current thinking. I want to create GTA - the General Theory of Actionability. This forum post is a place where this term was first used. The GTA theory will be the foundation for FAM - Future Actions Management (or Time Demands Management) methodology. Yes I'm playing with acronyms but good names and acronyms motivate me to seriously think about problems.
 

Longstreet

Professor of microbiology and infectious diseases
TesTeq : Great! I would love to be involved in these discussions! If you go with "Time Demands Management", we should actively engage Francis Wade!
 

LizH

Registered
I read the original question as wanting ideas on different ways things can be done.

For private life, I don't normally plan in much detail, with a huge exception: When I feel overwhelmed. On those bad days, I do a quick mindsweep and capture actions on a very detailed level for what absolutely must be done as soon as humanely possible, it's down to the "wash floor" level. This could easily be done on a sheet of paper, I use Evernote and stuff actions into the relevant notebooks. Having that list to work from during an intense day really frees up my mind to do each task better, and the feeling of seeing (most) list items finished is inspiring.
 

Myriam

Registered
LizH said:
I read the original question as wanting ideas on different ways things can be done.

For private life, I don't normally plan in much detail, with a huge exception: When I feel overwhelmed. On those bad days, I do a quick mindsweep and capture actions on a very detailed level for what absolutely must be done as soon as humanely possible, it's down to the "wash floor" level. This could easily be done on a sheet of paper, I use Evernote and stuff actions into the relevant notebooks. Having that list to work from during an intense day really frees up my mind to do each task better, and the feeling of seeing (most) list items finished is inspiring.

To me, that sounds more like capturing than planning. But I agree 100% that it can give a great feeling to have it all captured and then cross it off the list as the day goes by. Sounds like the typical last day before you leave on holiday ;-)
 
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