Planning the day ahead

I just saw this short from Alex Hormozi.

Please watch it before reading what comes next.

I started a few years ago planning my day and filling my calendar with all the tasks I want to focus on in the day. I do that every morning before starting working. When I started this habit I saw a very serious boost of productivity, for me this works 10 times better than working directly from a todo list. The reason for that, I think, is that with a todo list, when I finish a task I need to go back to the todo list and figure out what is the next most important thing to do and this has to be repeated many time in the day, creating a lot of context switch.

I still use a todo list but during my planning session in the morning I decide exactly what I'm going to do and in which order and I lay it out in my calendar. I do this for personal and professional stuff.

I find this approach has many advantages:

1. reduce context switch during the day, at any point in time I know what I need to work on next without spending additional energy
2. limit procastination on low energy days: I've decided at the start of the day what I feel I can get done and this encourages me to stick to it
3. timeboxing: I decide ahead of time how long I should spend on a specific task and I try to stick to it. Without that it's very easy to spend a lot more time than necessary on a task (see Parkinson's law)
4. reduce stress: I find this approach far less stressful than operating directly from a todo list. Before using this approach I would go back to a massive todo list 20 times a day and that would make me feel overwhelmed at times.
5. track your time: a nice side effect of planning everything in your calendar is that it give you a detailed breakdown of where you're spending your precious time. I color code different activities (sales, marketing, delivery, etc) and this helps visualise how much time is spent on various activities.

It's interesting that he's doing that planning/scheduling session in the evening.. I guess it's a good way to close the day and to make sure you don't have too many things in your mind and have a good night sleep because you know everything is under control for tomorrow... I'll give that a try...

If you've not tried this approach, I'd encourage you to do so. It's actually easy to try, you just need to book a 15 to 30min slot every morning next week. During this session you:

1. Look at your todo list and decide what's most important and you'd like to tackle today
2. estimate how long it should take
3. place the item in your calendar, just like a meeting, except that you're the only invitee
4. repeat the operation until your day is full (I generally keep an hour free as there's always a last minute meeting and the schedule needs some flexibility)
5. Start your day and follow your calendar

Inevitably some things will come up and you'll have to adapt the schedule but that's really not a big deal: you just move tasks around in your calendar, either later in the day or to tomorrow if it no longer fits.