Once you’ve built up a habit of daily planning, you’ll start to see areas where your execution is off. The times where you miss an appointment, or drop a project for a week or a month or a quarter because you just forgot to write something down.
We’ve all done it. We all will do it. It’s fine.
But it’s also frustrating. And, in the worst case, it can be devastating. I think back to when Uncle Billy misplaces the big deposit in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s totally understandable, and at the same time, totally life changing. A little bit more discipline on Billy’s part, and George Bailey could have enjoyed a nice Christmas at home with his family.
Because of that, building some little disciplines into and around your daily planning habit can make a big difference.
Write it down!
Put everything in the system. If you think of something you need to do, write it down, and keep track of it. Even if it’s just something you might want to do. Even if you’re going to go do it right after writing it down. The discipline to take 5 seconds and right it down won’t matter a lot of the time (but it won’t hurt either). And on those occasions when you get distracted and forget, it will matter. Or when the same category of things keeps coming up as something you want to tackle down the road, you may realize it’s time for a directional change in your life that would never have become clear without the discipline to write everything down. Even if you ultimately say no to something you wrote down, it will be conscious choice, and you’ll feel more at peace.
This can be expanded to so many areas of life. Have a meeting at work? Take notes. Just got through an intense conversation with your spouse or a child? Write about your thoughts, takeaways, and what you committed to. Heard about a cool new restaurant from a coworker. Note it down. See a problem in your yard or house. Add a reminder to deal with it.
I like to use OneNote’s Quick Notes feature to make sure all my random writings end up in the same place. Then, I can go back through them at my leisure to pull out todos, reference decisions made etc. Once a week, I clean it out by processing everything in Quick Notes.
Process everything
Once you write things down, you have to process it all. That means looking at it and deciding what to do with it. The four D’s give you a framework: do it, delegate it, defer it, or delete it. Doing it and deleting are pieces of this little discipline. If it will only take a minute or two, do it. If you’re done and don’t have any follow up, delete it. Delegating it will depend on your resources for delegation, and often requires additional tasks on your part (i.e. hire someone to take care of your lawn, or email Lynn in marketing). Your personal system is going to focus on handling the “Defer” option. This is where something like Cue shines, as it’s easy to defer things in timeframes that match up with the natural cycles of your life: tomorrow, next week, next month, etc.
Break tasks down as small as possible
I’m going to add a fifth D: disect it. Disecting a task is just breaking it up into smaller pieces. Pieces you can take on in the course of your daily life. It’s so easy to add something like “organize the storage room”, or “write up a marketing plan”. But those are not tasks you can just do. They’re made up of many smaller jobs. You’re going to break them up into smaller pieces one way or another, if you make any progress at all. Often the first step towards either one should be a “Disection” task, where you actually write down “Brainstorm steps towards building a marketing plan”. The smaller the steps, the easier it is to keep moving forward.
Review the future by cycle
Processing can naturally occur as you look forward. Reviewing the future is a big part of the benefit of daily planning. You’re looking forward one day, and thinking about what will happen. Do it for larger cycles too: take some time on the weekend, or maybe Monday morning, to go over the coming week. Once a month, consider what’s coming up and how to prepare for it. Some people like to take a full day, or even a weekend, to think through the coming year.
By taking a few seconds to think out into the future, you naturally start considering what needs to be done to prepare for things down the road. See that you have a dentist appointment on Thursday afternoon? Give your boss a heads up. Important work deadline coming up? Great chance to make sure you’re on track to meet it. And if not, to reset expectations.
Set a date for everything you defer, disect, or delegate
If you’re putting something off, make sure you’ve got a system and process in place that will bring it back to you in the right time frame. Otherwise, you might as well just delete it. The same goes for delegating to others. Delegating can save you time, but there will still be follow-up, overhead, and management tasks to make sure what you delegated was done and was done to the right standard.
Say no to new stuff or say no to old stuff
Some things you can “delete” before they ever show up as a task or something you need to process. If you have an idea that sounds cool, but know your life is to busy to accommodate, write it down, and toss it out. If someone presents you with an opportunity that doesn’t align with your medium or long term goals, it’s another opportunity to exercise the little discipline of saying no.
Alternatively, sometimes the new opportunity or passing fancy really is something important to you. Maybe it’s a “passing fancy” that’s been nagging at you for months because your subconscious knows better than your conscious mind what you should be focusing on. In those cases, it’s important to look at your life and say no to some of it. Give up a hobby that’s become stale or consciously choose to turn down side consulting jobs, or whatever it is.
Deal with follow up stuff
Many of your tasks, meetings, hobbies, and daily work will have follow up work. Often we almost finish things because we do the big task, but not the small follow up thing that actually makes a huge difference. We have the retrospective meeting and discuss 6 ways we need to fix our processes, but never assign those out for further action. We write the blog post, but get hung up on wording and never post it.
And on that note, I’m posting this little article. It’s taken too long, even though writing it didn’t take long. Follow up stuff is often the easiest, but also the place we get most stuck.
Do it for the small things, and you’ll build an identity as someone who finishes.