Planners are for…wait for it…PLANNING!

Posted on January 4, 2010 by LJ Earnest
Categories: Organization,Productivity

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Mondays are productivity days at SimpleProductivity blog.

This is going to have people rolling their eyes at the obviousness, but I recently had a realization: planners are for PLANNING. Somehow in the {ahem}-some years I’ve been using planners, I have been using them all wrong.

Planners as Taskmasters

Every planning system I have tried apparently didn’t state the obvious well enough for me to pick up on planning. Regardless of what I have tried, I just keep making longer and longer lists. They could be lists of things to do in a given role, next actions, or even things I am going to do tomorrow. And the list would sit there, and I would try like a super-human to get through everything. Inevitably, I grew to resent the system and would end up burnt crispy and cranky.

And so then I would jump onto the search for the next system.

With Daytimer, I just listed everything, no thought. With 7 Habits, the lists of things to do for each role got way out of control, and I felt overwhelmed with everything that was supposedly important to me. With GTD, the next action items went on and on, and kept right on coming. Even the weekly review was just restocking the next action list. With Do It Tomorrow, the list just grows, even with the concept of a “day’s work”.

Planners as Planners

I was watching a video of an artist across the world from me display her latest to-do book. And sometime in that video it hit me: I needed to plan my week. Not so that I would get everything done. Not so that my lists would go away (because they never do, do they?). But so that I could get a reasonable amount of things done every day, based on my other activities, yet leaving time for ME.

The New Approach

The first thing I did was decide to see what my load was over the next few weeks. I printed out several of my planner sheets. These have appointments at the top, and room for tasks on the bottom. I printed out four, and filled in the calendar events.

Next, I took a blank book (I have tons lying around), and sectioned off about 30 pages. On the front page, I listed all the things I was working on. This came from my project list in Bonsai.

Next, I started listing on a right hand page, one page per item, each of the projects. Underneath I made notes of things that either needed to be done, or some brainstorming. For those things with hard deadlines, I wrote the dates next to the task. I then went back and put those into the dates on my planner sheets.

After the section for the projects, I put a sticky flag. I wrote the date at the top of the right-hand page. On the left hand page I wrote the mundane repeating tasks that needed to be done (laundry, paper processing, etc). These tasks come out of Remember The Milk.

Then on the right hand page, I did the planning. I looked at the planning sheets to see if anything needed to be done that day. Then I filled in a few items from the projects section, keeping in mind the other things I had going on that day.

So pardon the explanation of the obvious, but I really didn’t get it until this past week.

Photo by koalazymonkey

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