How I Plan
I love to plan. It allows me to be in full control of my life and how I spend my time. This post goes over exactly how I plan from my lifetime goals, to projects, to tasks, to the daily to-dos. Even if you’re a planning novice, planning-adverse, or just not into the hyper-organized vibe… I think there’ll be something in this post for you to walk away with to help improve your life.
What do you want to get out of life? Where do you see yourself in one year? Three years? Five years? 10 years? What are your lifetime goals? By knowing where you want to go, you can take the steps needed to get there. If you’re into going with the flow and being surprised where life takes you… you do you. But if you want to walk through life with more purpose and direction, you can take some time to plan out where you think you want to go. This prevents you from looking around when you’re f***ing old as hell, wondering where the time went. If you have an idea of where you’re headed, you’ll have the gift of discernment. You can weed out the projects that don’t align with your goals and jump on the right opportunities when they head your way.
Breaking down a project into discrete tasks with deadlines. Now you can take your goals or a big project you’re working on and break it down into discrete tasks with deadlines. Let’s say I have a feasibility analysis due three months from now. I know I have to do a 15% design effort, create representative sketches, create a cost estimate, and write a report. Within the report, I know I have discuss five major points: constructability, permit-ability, sustainability, resiliency, and schedule. Sustainability involves 2 hours of reading the guideline and 1 hour for filling out the worksheet, for a total of 3 hours which I can finish by Tuesday. So you’d do similar breakdowns for each task and layout all the tasks into a schedule. It can be as detailed or big picture as your heart desires. This accomplishes two major things. One, by setting mini-deadlines for each task, you can keep yourself accountable. And two, it allows you to see if you have the time and budget to complete the task at the start. Which gives you the ability to communicate with the project manager when something actually can be done, i.e. before s*** hits the fan.
Creating daily task lists. So you have all your tasks laid out, but what are you doing today? I like to plan my week the Friday prior. I have my each day of my five-day work week broken down into morning tasks (i.e. pre-lunch) and afternoon tasks (i.e. post-lunch or pre-dinner). I put a manageable and realistic (did you hear that folks? MANAGEABLE and REALISTIC) amount of tasks into my daily task lists. It’s usually around five tasks total, including meetings. If I have the flexibility, I will give myself an hour or two each day of chaos time. This is extra time built into my schedule for putting out fires that may pop up during the week. If I don’t use my chaos time, I can start on the next day’s tasks or miscellaneous tasks in my overall to-do list. But I find that my chaos time almost always gets eaten up by the end of the week.
Keeping an overall to-do list. You get an email with an action item? Put it on your running to-do list. A project manager calls you to ask you to work on a task? Put it on your running to-do list. Have a personal goal you’re trying to prioritize? Put it on your running to-do list. The goal is to keep all your open tasks in one place. Why? One, it makes it easier to pull items to add to your daily to-do list. Two, it minimizes the potential that you’ll forget a task.
Tools: I use a lot of tools to help plan my life.
Physical Planner: I like having a physical planner that I can doodle and write in. My planner is more geared toward my personal goals, but I also block out my work schedule in the weekly layouts. My planner encourages me to set a focus for the week. Whether it’s “GET S*** DONE” or “QUIET FOCUS & PRODUCTIVITY” or “USE YOUR VOICE,” I like being intentional setting the tone for the week.
One Note: An extremely nifty tool for keeping track of my running to-do list, daily to-do list, and task breakdown schedules. Being able to add check marks, stars, or question marks with a quick keyboard shortcut makes formatting and organizing your lists so much easier. You can organize your data with different colored tabs at the top and subsections within each tab. Everything is on the cloud, so you can check your list from anywhere and you don’t have to worry about forgetting to save changes.
Outlook: All my appointments are scheduled in my outlook calendar. The reminders for meetings are really helpful, it identifies available time for coworkers trying to schedule a meeting with me, and it’s easier to move appointments around than in my physical planner.