I’ve said before that planning your day is simple, that it shouldn’t take very long (5-10 minutes), and that the primary product is not a plan, but an ordered mind.
But what does this process look like?
If a plan is a by product, does it matter how you create it? Or what the byproduct looks like?
First, you should know that the process of planning your day will morph over time as you figure out what works best for you.
You’ll begin with something simple. Over time you will add things.
Eventually it will become too complex, and you’ll pare off the stuff that isn’t important.
Some changes will happen gradually, and you may not notice unless you look back at old daily plans.
Others will be very thought out and purposeful, because you recognize a problem or need.
Oops, I went philosophical again. Let’s get back to the bare bones of daily planning.
Here’s what I do, and it really doesn’t take long
- Create a new daily plan using my tool.
- Outline the day. This is where I enter stuff that will just happen, like meals, bedtime, going to work. I also add any daily habits at this point.
- Look over my plan for the day before, and move unfinished items to my tickler or to my plan for the coming day.
- Go through my tickler for the day, and add items to my plan. When done, move the daily tickler to the end of the week.
- Fill in the rest of the day with anything else on my mind
Although I’ve outlined these steps as distinct items, they flow very naturally once you become comfortable with them and with the tools that you use.
Step 1 takes mere seconds, and steps 2-5 take at most a minute each.
The plan itself (remember, it’s just a byproduct), is a list of how I see the day going. It may occasionally have items grouped when they fit together, as with all the stuff I do at work. But beyond that there isn’t a lot of structure. For stuff that has to happen at certain times, I will note the time for that item.
Ok, now I’ll give you an example. This is my plan from a couple weeks ago, on a Friday. Some things have been redacted, but you should get the idea of what a typical plan looks like:
Vitamins
Plan day
Journal
Life planning
Read BK
Order: clothes
Cade up
Levi and Liberty up
Breakfast
Shower
Floss
Brush
Work planning
Take notes in meetings
Standup
360 Meeting
Ligature Glyphs
Code reviews
Schedule other coffee talks
Fix bugs
Lift
Cue: write an email
Cue: blockstack reading
Navarre: expand potato farm
Reagan talk to customer
Reagan off on campout
Dinner
Swan Lake w/Liberty
Kids down
Plan day
To bed
Ignore the details, squint a little, and describe what you see. It’s a list, with breaks that match the natural breaks in my day. You can see where my workday fits. You can see I’ve got a morning routine.
It doesn’t take long to type it up, especially after doing this every day for over two years. There are abbreviations, the descriptions are short, possibly incomprehensible to others. But it lays out the day in my mind.
And that’s what you’re aiming for. A simple outline that lives in your head. The byproduct, the physical or electronic copy, lives on as a set of cues you can return to when you need to get back on track, or adjust. It provides structure, but is easy to adapt as the realities of life come your way.