Planning your day
The simplest way to improve your velocity – no AI required
As a founder of Range, it’s no surprise I think it’s important to plan your day. I’ve been a religious planner since I was a small child — just ask my mom about my to-do lists in middle school. My dad used to joke that they included “wake up” just so I could have the joy of checking it off first thing. He wasn’t entirely wrong.
Over time, planning my day has evolved beyond simple to-do lists to become a ritual in its own right. While planning my day has been incredibly useful for making the most of my personal time, I’ve found it to be of most help at work. We often talk about OKRs or team-level planning, but we often neglect the individual, day-to-day plans that turn OKRs into reality. From my experience in startups, when my team takes time to plan our days, and share our plans with one another, the entire team is able to move faster and achieve more.
In this post, I’ll focus on my own process for planning my day, but I’ll also give high level thoughts on why planning your day is important and how to devise a system that works for you. I’m a big believer that like shoes, not all processes fit all people. It’s important to identify a system that works for you, otherwise you won’t actually use it.
In a future post, we’ll delve into what team planning can look like — we might even recommend you try Range. 🙃
For today, we’ll start by diving into the concrete ways that planning can improve your outcomes, and then, we’ll get into specific approaches to help you plan your day.
Optimizing your time and output
Have you ever found yourself with an open block of time, a very important project, and absolutely no clue where to start? You end up spending the entire block of time procrastinating and focused on other, smaller tasks. The “very important” project never gets any attention.
Over the years, I’ve learned that I have to identify exactly what I’m going to do during a period of time — not just what project or general theme I’m going to work on. With a clear plan of specific things to be done, it’s easy for me to switch contexts from a meeting or other work stream or even family life and quickly get back into execution mode.
That small step of planning lets me make the most of my time and ensure that I actually make progress on important projects. You can imagine that for teams if everyone is dragging their feet a little, the cumulative effect is quite large, which is why individual planning is so impactful at work.
Understanding your own capacity
Planning your day requires that you first look at your schedule of meeting and any other obligations — like picking up kids from school. Then, consider what tasks you need to get done. Looking at your calendar forces yourself to face the actual “work time” you have. That understanding allows you to better assess what you can get done and what’s going to have to wait until tomorrow or later in the week.
Plus, with daily planning (and tracking what you actually got done), you can learn about your true capacity and what’s possible to get done in a specific amount of focus time. For myself, this habit has been particularly helpful when identifying difficult tasks I can get done. For example, I know that trying to cram in multiple creative, big thinking tasks in one day is impossible, but I can easily pair one such task with many smaller, easy-to-knock-out tasks. That knowledge has helped me better assess when I can get work done and address what I might need to move or delay in order to prioritize something.
At a team level, if everyone on the team has an accurate sense of what they can get done, the team can better estimate their timelines and commitments too.
Building trust with others
There’s nothing more undermining of trust than promising to do a task and then not doing it. It’s even worse than not having committed to doing it in the first place!
With planning and the associated clear-eyed view of your day, you can more accurately tell others when you’ll get to something.
I used to overpromise and underdeliver — always saying yes to projects but then struggling to complete them due to overwhelm and the whole there’s-only-24-hours-in-the-day problem. Instead, with effective planning, I can share clear timelines of whether I will get this task completed by tomorrow or this evening or even next week — all I have to do is look at my plan of what has to get done.
By being accurate in my timelines, others begin to trust what you say and rely on your work. At the team level, you can build a reputation for hitting deadlines and being reliable.
Now that we understand some of the key benefits, let’s look at a basic formula for planning your day.
How to plan your day
This might sound simple, but having a recipe for what to do makes things that much easier. This process is one I use each day or every few days. Sometimes, it’s easy to plan a few days in a row with quick updates in between, whereas at other times, I need to take stock each day. My typical approach is to plan my day the afternoon or evening before, so that I can start the day off quickly (like many folks, I’m often in a mad dash from childcare drop off, so starting the day with planning is difficult).
Take stock of the immovable objects: These objects are anything you can’t move such as important meetings or personal obligations. Looking at your calendar means you can understand what time you have left to get other things done.
Prioritize urgent and/or important tasks: Start with anything that has to get done today, e.g., something someone is waiting on or that’s blocking a deadline. From there, consider the other most important things to get done or make space for — you can and should consider both work items and personal.
Revisit the immovable objects: Based on your urgent to-dos, do you have enough time? Do you need to cancel a meeting or rejigger your schedule? Sometimes after reviewing my urgent tasks, my important meeting no longer looks so important.
Add stretch goals: Now’s the time to add a few items for “if you have time” — things to fill in if you find a meeting randomly cancelled or something else gets delayed. These are items that if they get shifted to the next day, it’s totally fine. It can also be useful to include fun items here — tasks you can do when you need a break from other work but are also things you need to get done.
Implementing this system can mean using online planning tools, but it’s also very easy to do with just your calendar and word doc or notebook. I often switch between the two, but right now, I’m in a physical notebook stage.
At the team level, it’s helpful to share with folks if you’re working on urgent and important tasks, particularly if someone is waiting on that work. That way, everyone has insight into when to expect next steps.
Tips for planning well
Once you’ve got the basics down, there are several ways to improve your planning and make it work better for you.
Track your plan daily: Write down your plan ahead of each day (or first thing) and revisit it at the end of the day to see what got done. This practice will make each day’s planning easier — you’ll know what still needs to get done, and you’ll learn what’s working.
Keep a backlog: Starting over each day with what needs to get done can get repetitive quickly. Instead, organize work by projects or themes and keep a clear list of immediate next steps. Then, each day, your planning simply involves choosing which of these tasks to get done today. If a project never seems to make it out of the backlog, it’s time to reconsider whether it’s worth doing. As a consultant, I organize my backlogs by company to keep things straight.
Plan based on your values: It’s easy to lose track of what really matters to you — work often feels urgent and like it’s more important than everything else. When that happens to me, I find myself just trying to get through other parts of the day, so I can focus on work. It feels like I’m fast forwarding through time with family or rushing through meals. When planning my day, I try to remind myself of what matters to me and that taking time with family isn’t just taking time away from my to-do list. Sometimes that looks like scheduling a half hour buffer towards the end of the work day, so I can transition better. Other days, it looks like making sure I’ve got plenty of time blocked off to take my daughter to a swim lesson, so we’re not rushed.
Focus on the next step, not the end point: When drafting your backlog or what needs to get done, try to focus on the tactical next step — something that can be done in less than an hour. Try not to draft tasks based on the end state of the project. That will make it harder to actually get the next step done. And if you’re not sure of the next step, then the next step is to identify the next step. 🙃
Flag items that aren’t under your control: Sometimes you’re waiting on a teammate or an external partner. You can include those items on your list but flag that you can’t take any action on them yet.
Select one “main focus.” The main focus is the primary thing you need to get done that day. It doesn’t have to be a big task. It’s just what you are most focused on getting out the door today. And sometimes, the main focus is a meeting.
Bonus: Share your plan! Take a few minutes and share your plan with teammates or even family members. Highlight what’s relevant for them to know, like I’m going to a doctor’s appointment this morning or I’ll have this prepared by the end of day. This step is also a great time to ask for help — like hey, can you cover bedtime tonight? Or could you take that meeting solo? I really need some heads down time.
You can decide which of these tips make sense for you — you don’t need to use them all. And if you’d rather start with a highly prescribed system, keep reading.
Specific techniques and formats
This post provides a dynamic recipe for planning your day. Some folks also find that specific structured methodologies around planning and productivity really work for them.
A few of the top techniques I’ve heard about are:
You might consider experimenting with them to see if anything clicks for you. Personally, I use aspects of each method but don’t adhere to any specific one too closely.
Getting started
Getting started with planning doesn’t have to involve project management tools or even tools like Range (though I do recommend it for planning and sharing with your team!) Instead, just take five minutes at the end of today and jot down what you think you need to get done tomorrow. That’s all it takes to get started!
You can slowly incorporate more tips and process as you move forward, but your first task is to get started.
Each person planning their day can drive improved outcomes, but at the team level, planning can multiply effectiveness and execution. In the next few months, we’ll be sharing a follow-up post about how to approach planning at the team level. In the meantime, let us know if you have any tips that have worked well for you or your team in the comments.