Seconds, minutes, hours.
These are the abstraction levels at which you plan your day.
Seconds
There won’t be many entries in your daily plan that only take a few seconds, but some can be valuable: taking your vitamins comes to mind.
Because they take so little time, they’ll be included only if they’re important to remember or need to be done at a certain time. If not, you can just let them go by, include them as part of other activities, or just do them, rather than adding them to your plan.
Minutes
Activities that take minutes are more common: brushing your teeth, flossing, eating breakfast, writing in your journal, etc.
These will make up the bulk of your plan, but not the bulk of your day. Most of my daily habits take 10-15 minutes each. From one perspective, they’re the most important things I’ll do during the day.
Hours
Stuff that takes an hour or more generally has some internal structure to it, and that structure doesn’t make sense to add to your plan. My lifting will take an hour but involves a bunch of different exercises. Some tasks at work can easily take two or three hours, and it’s good to set aside the time to do those things.
The trick with big tasks is knowing when it’s really more effective to break them down in your plan. It won’t be obvious at first. So it’s worth experimenting to find out what works for you. Maybe if you’re adding some cardio at the end of your workouts it makes sense to call that out in your daily plan. It helps you remember, gives the dopamine boost when you check it off, separately from the rest of your workout, and helps to build the new habit.
On the other hand, I sometimes have lots of code reviews to do at work, and they can take an hour or two to do right. But it doesn’t really make sense to have a separate entry in my plan for each one.
Beyond Time
Immediately beyond the seconds, minutes, and hours are two other levels of abstraction: microseconds and days. Things that take less than a second are all done subconsciously or automatically by your nervous system and other biological systems. You don’t really have control there, except through hours of deliberate practice (imagine a concert pianist).
Things that take days need to be broken down into smaller tasks for planning purposes.
That’s a good thing to do when planning your week, which I’ll look at more in future emails.