You probably hear the words “plan my day” and think it’s something involved, detailed, structured, explicit.
You likely think of prioritizing tasks.
You know, where you go through and figure out which tasks are most important, which are less important, and which are unimportant.
Maybe you use a color system, or high/normal/low, or something else.
Maybe you don’t prioritize at all. But you feel guilty about it, or worry that you’re not working on the right things.
The fact is, if you’re taking time to prioritize your tasks, your engaging in masturbatory planning.
You may have heard of planner porn, where you go read articles or books about planning, or drool over new apps or tools, but then never really make any changes.
Masturbatory planning is similar – it’s where you engage in planning for it’s own sake, to the point that you don’t actually get anything done, but you sure do have some good plans in place.
It’s a lot of fire and noise, without any substance or progress.
Prioritizing is almost always masturbatory.
Either something is important enough to include in your plan, or it isn’t.
If you have so many things to do that you feel the need to prioritize the right solution isn’t color codes or high/low priorities – it is deciding not to do some of them.
For a few, you could defer them to later using a functioning tickler (built right into Cue, by the way).
But for most, you should just decide to keep it or drop it.
And drop enough that you no longer feel the need to prioritize what’s left.
Of course, going through your todo lists and removing stuff that isn’t important enough is prioritizing. But it’s the kind that gets you back to work. When you don’t have too many tasks on your plate, it’s much harder to spend time rearranging them without actually doing something.
And getting stuff done is the whole point.