How do you plan your day?

@alara_akcasiz Clean steps 🚀 Do you reflect your day at the end or check yesterday's remaining?

@alara_akcasiz If you only prioritize due to deadline, you never do tasks, that are strategically important. Those tasks are never time sensitive, so it's very easy to postpone them forever. Unfortunately, that leads to a never ending loop of putting the fires down. How do you deal with that?

@ramonwilliamson It is amazing Ramon, thank you for sharing your routine. Do you stick with the time interval that you assigned for tasks? Do you track how many hours it takes? I am curious about the reflection at the end of the day, and how to improve tomorrow's session specifically. How to get better at estimating which task will take how many hours and set them clear.

@ramonwilliamson Yes, I am such a big believer in reflecting at the end of the day and planning the next. Starting a day with a plan in place already, makes it such much easier to just get into it. Love you reflection questions.

@elifduran It’s all about thinking differently about time and how work works. Then developing the mindset and supporting skills and behaviors. I think about work as purpose (why I’m actually doing this or that), playbooks (learning and optimizing the approach), practices (ongoing activities I do over and over, things that help me be at my best and the fundamentals that are essential in the business), and projects (a set of activities that produce a “product” from my work). Within projects, there are micro tasks connected to specific knowledge and skills I must get good at or outsource to others. These tasks are modular and show up in many different projects. I’m really tracking and improving a series of micro tasks vs 1 big project, and improving thinking and building playbooks. This is how you become the most valuable person in any room. Let’s break this down: I’ve found that there are 7-10 primary projects and maybe 50 micro tasks in my work. I use a timer when I work to track time and also because it helps my focus. The time blocks prefilled in my calendar for “completion” of projects and tasks are 90 minutes. The breakthrough for me was understanding which tasks really matter and documenting the time for the micro tasks, also assigning times to the daily 135 (1= one big thing that takes 60-90mins, 3= three important things that take 25-50mins, 5= five quick things that take 5-15mins). This helps me schedule in tasks efficiently. For bigger projects, I break the project down to 25 minute cycles, there are 3 per 90 minutes. I’ve learned over time that certain tasks take x amount of time so knowing this helps me plan better. I’ve also shifted my thinking from how long an overall project takes to how much time I’m giving the overall project and the micro tasks within the project. That constraint is helpful to me. The end of day reflection is 3+1 questions answered in a project journal shared with a coach. I trained my coach in my method so they know how to coach me. I do the same thing with my coaching clients, and teach entrepreneurs and managers of remote teams. The thing that’s helped me and my clients most is knowing what really matters and what to improve. Mostly I find it’s refining and speeding up completion of micro tasks and paying attention to the flow in my system and checklist. I make a checklist for every project and micro task. This makes me very efficient and I don’t need ti be creative. I wasn’t very good at estimating time. I got better by defining the outcome of a project, overcoming overthinking, perfection, and procrastination, making a checklist for each primary project with all the micro tasks, doing the project and tasks and timing it. Because I break everything down, I’m actually timing tasks within a bigger projects. So I don’t think in terms of how much time to write an essay, I think in terms of how much time for each step. What I discovered is that many of the steps or micro tasks are modular, in other words, they are part of other projects so when I’m doing a new project and that step/task is in the checklist I have a better idea of the time. One final note: Notice I said I don’t need to be creative. It’s important to get you needs met outside the work you do. Most of the nonsense and drama you see in work is people trying to get their emotional and self worth needs met. When you get all that stuff handled outside work, you can focus on what matters and find joy in the process. This is being a craftsman vs whatever you call yourself now. Useful? Let me know.

@brenna_donoghue Thank you Brenna. The two most important things I’ve learned about this are (1) put it on your calendar as an appointment and (2) answer the focusing questions in 1 place every time.

Thank you Mayank! I am curious about how do you plan your 8(working) hours, do you estimate which task is gonna take how many hours, do you track your time?

@selin_anil I think the pen and paper are irreplaceable, the feeling of intention and completion; but if I want to see what I did specifically on a day, I get lost.

@elifduran by agenda I meant digital version ;-) I also need to have retroactive visibility on what happened each day, that's why i sometimes even correct my meetings & activity in my online agenda a posteriori!

@angeli_ Clean workflow, do you think it is important to see how many hours you assigned them to finish? How do you decide how many task you are going to finish in a daily basis?

@aaron_jacksonyy How 😱?

@dawnsli It is the most straightforward one for me as well, do you assign time intervals for them?

@elifduran Yes, for some daily to-do tasks, I try to finish them within a specific time. For some challenging tasks, I will assign specific intervals and try to do them in advance.

@anoirhoumou Hey Anoir, do you need to go back to check what you have worked on before?

@kinga_gro What about your daily plan? With the meetings and not finished tasks?

@akriti_nayal Hey Akriti, do you analyze your time spent on tasks?

@pablo_ignacio What about planning your tasks for work? How do you manage that interval?

@elifduran in a mix between Google calendar, a physical board here in my room, notion and my phone's notes