Why I stopped planning my days (and why you probably shouldn't)
Originally published in my newsletter on sustainable pace. Subscribe for free.
I used to be rigorous about planning my workdays. I would sit down after breakfast, with a cup of coffee next to me, and open an empty document (or navigate to the “Today” section of whichever task management app I was using at the time) where I would write:
One Big Thing — the most important task for the day
Up to three other things — that I would also aim to get done
Other stuff — small tasks to take care of and things worth reminding myself about
Then I would start by working on the One Big Thing. I have always been good at focusing and blocking time, so I never had much trouble with that. More the opposite: the big thing would often expand and consume the time I had reserved for other tasks. By the time I was done with it (for the day), I would be too exhausted to work on anything but the most trivial and cognitively easy things.
Far too often nothing I put in the “up to three other things” section would get done. As a result, I lived in a state of perpetual disappointment for years. I would make a plan for the day in the morning, and nine times out of ten I would fail to execute it. Tasks would get postponed to the next day, and they would start piling up.
On a rational level I understood that what really mattered was to make progress on the One Big Thing. If that meant it happened at the expense of other, less important tasks, then it was a fair price to pay. Emotions, however, rarely follow reason. The incomplete daily plan gave constant subtle reminders that I was not good enough. Every time I had to reschedule a task was an indication that I had failed in what I set out to do.
This started to change when I learned about the work of Oliver Burkeman. I was using the Waking Up meditation app at the time, and it contains two excellent audio series about time management. His book Meditations for Mortals is also worth reading. One of his core messages is that we as humans are finite beings, with a limited amount of time and energy to spend. Yet modernity gives us an infinite amount of things to do and spend our time on. The practical implication is that saying ‘yes’ to one thing means saying ‘no’ to a plethora of other things.
Making this tradeoff would be easy if the other things were unpleasant, uninteresting, and not useful. But often they are something that we would like to do, if only we had time and energy to do them.
At some level I had lived under the illusion that whatever I put on my to-do list, or daily plan, would eventually get done. Burkeman has taught me to slowly let go of this assumption, and to accept my own limitations. To be more focused on 1-2 truly important goals, projects, or tasks at a time. If I make progress on them, I can then be satisfied.
I have also learned not to start a new thing until something else is finished. Trying to fragment your attention to multiple projects or goals just means that none of them will make progress. Peter Drucker, who came up with the whole concept of knowledge work in the 1950s, wrote in The Effective Executive (originally published in 1966 and still a must-read for anyone who does knowledge work for a living):
“Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results. They force themselves to set priorities and stay with their priority decisions. They know that they have no choice but to do first things first—and second things not at all. The alternative is to get nothing done.”
In practice this has meant that I rarely plan my workdays anymore. If there’s a deadline, or if I’m working on something that requires a lot of focus, I block time for it on my calendar. Then I focus on that one thing until it is done, or at least done for the day.
At that point I don’t have a plan to follow, but options to choose from. I often let inspiration and how I am feeling at the moment guide me towards the next task.
This works because I have organised items on my to-do list based on the cognitive effort required (high, medium, low). There’s only so much cognitively intensive work that can be done in a day while still being able to recover from it (3-4 hours, it seems). After that reservoir has been emptied, it’s better to move on to things that are routine, easy to handle, and require less focus.
Perhaps paradoxically, I would still recommend that most people plan their workdays. Especially if you find yourself often procrastinating on the important work. Or if you have a habit of starting the day by checking email and group chat, and often lose yourself in them instead of actually doing work that matters. The template in the beginning of this essay is a good starting point to regain control.
Just don’t make the mistake I did, which was to treat the plan as something that needed to be done. The goal is to make progress, not to achieve perfection.
References
Drucker, Peter (2002). The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done. HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
The daily plan format I use is originally from an article by Nick Burka.