4 ms·

That is in fact the core of the idea. I suck at low-level planning. All the wishful annual life goals have to trickle down as concrete daily activity to get any

That is in fact the core of the idea. I suck at low-level planning. All the wishful annual life goals have to trickle down as concrete daily activity to get anywhere. My mind is excellent at building castle projects in the air and even good at high-level analysis of them using flowery language. What it sucks at is converting all that into concrete steps. That's why I have to explicitly break them down into monthly, weekly, daily, and even hourly chunks.

MarsAscendant 8y ago
Was this a natural progression of your system, or did you have to try it to see that it works?
- lovelearning 8y ago
  Good question - made me revisit my memories. TLDR some aspects were a progression, but the planning part was something I had to try out over a year to convince myself that I finally have something that works. I'd say I have always done the daily todo all my professional life. Started it as my daily work plan when I was a salaried employee. Only tracked work-related tasks with it, but it was necessary because I had multiple project responsibilities and deadlines then. I actually thought of myself back then as a very disciplined person. Even the life goals thing is something I have been doing from my salaried years. An annual document where I wrote details about my career wishes and personal improvements for the coming year. There were plans in those docs, but they were rather nebulous and not tracked. That system worked ok for my salaried life. But when I became a consultant, things fell apart. When I had client projects to work on, my work-life balance became terrible, I missed project deadlines constantly, missed out on hobbies, and felt stressed and demotivated. When I did not have client projects, I went the other extreme - making lots of plans but terribly distracted and not finishing anything. Until then, I had not realized just how much of my earlier discipline was not because of me alone, but actually because of the structured and supervised environment inside a company. When I went alone, much of my discipline disappeared, and along with it, my self-confidence. I had actually refused lucrative client projects because I wasn't confident of meeting any deadlines. I tried many planning systems over those years. GTD, Trello, Mind mapping tools. It's taken me a lot of self-analysis, experimentation and tweaks to understand why I had planning problems, and what I should do to overcome them. The main evolution between the system I have now versus the system I had back then is that all life goals now trickle down into concrete hourly tasks. While 2015 was a terrible year professionally, this system helped me improve my situation in 2016, and more so in 2017-2018. It's working out for me, thankfully.
  - MarsAscendant 8y ago
    Thanks a lot for the answer. Do you have a routine to (re)visit your plans and see if you're on the right track? Do you even have a concept of the wrong track under this system? How does your work time, according to the `todo`, fare against leisure time? Is it similarly scheduled, or does it come whenever the work hours have been accomplished? Do you ever miss your goals during the hours of work? What do you do if that happens?
    - lovelearning 8y ago
      Revisiting: Yes, all the time. The yearly plan would be framed at the start of the year, but new opportunities and personal ideas arise quite often and unexpectedly. If something can help me achieve my life goals better, the entire planning cascade gets reprioritized from that point on. I have done things like defer personal projects, drop ideas that turned out to be impractical after prototyping (an example of a wrong track), and renegotiate scope of client projects. It's a dynamic thing - the idea of the system is to force life goals to convert into concrete daily activities, but the goals themselves can and have changed. Leisure time: Leisure time is very much part of the daily plan. I put tasks like jogging, workout, reading, going out in all my plans. Even have things like fitness annual goals and explicitly write them in my weekly schedule and daily plans. Anything that I should allocate time for goes into these files. Missed goals: Yes, that happens. I'm quite bad at time estimation, and some ideas involve a lot of exploratory prototyping that may take much more time than anticipated. I mark incomplete tasks as [PARTIAL] or [SKIPPED], analyze at the end of the D/W/M what made me skip them, adjust scope if required, and modify my plans to correct the problem by next D/W/M.
      - MarsAscendant 8y ago
        > Leisure time is very much part of the daily plan. I put tasks like jogging, workout, reading, going out in all my plans. This kind of discipline sounds impressive. (I don't think I can follow something quite so meticulous: it'll probably confuse me.) How do you fill out a `todo`? Are they different for each category? are they mostly similar? under the same template?

MarsAscendant 8y ago

Was this a natural progression of your system, or did you have to try it to see that it works?

lovelearning 8y ago
Good question - made me revisit my memories. TLDR some aspects were a progression, but the planning part was something I had to try out over a year to convince myself that I finally have something that works. I'd say I have always done the daily todo all my professional life. Started it as my daily work plan when I was a salaried employee. Only tracked work-related tasks with it, but it was necessary because I had multiple project responsibilities and deadlines then. I actually thought of myself back then as a very disciplined person. Even the life goals thing is something I have been doing from my salaried years. An annual document where I wrote details about my career wishes and personal improvements for the coming year. There were plans in those docs, but they were rather nebulous and not tracked. That system worked ok for my salaried life. But when I became a consultant, things fell apart. When I had client projects to work on, my work-life balance became terrible, I missed project deadlines constantly, missed out on hobbies, and felt stressed and demotivated. When I did not have client projects, I went the other extreme - making lots of plans but terribly distracted and not finishing anything. Until then, I had not realized just how much of my earlier discipline was not because of me alone, but actually because of the structured and supervised environment inside a company. When I went alone, much of my discipline disappeared, and along with it, my self-confidence. I had actually refused lucrative client projects because I wasn't confident of meeting any deadlines. I tried many planning systems over those years. GTD, Trello, Mind mapping tools. It's taken me a lot of self-analysis, experimentation and tweaks to understand why I had planning problems, and what I should do to overcome them. The main evolution between the system I have now versus the system I had back then is that all life goals now trickle down into concrete hourly tasks. While 2015 was a terrible year professionally, this system helped me improve my situation in 2016, and more so in 2017-2018. It's working out for me, thankfully.
- MarsAscendant 8y ago
  Thanks a lot for the answer. Do you have a routine to (re)visit your plans and see if you're on the right track? Do you even have a concept of the wrong track under this system? How does your work time, according to the `todo`, fare against leisure time? Is it similarly scheduled, or does it come whenever the work hours have been accomplished? Do you ever miss your goals during the hours of work? What do you do if that happens?
  - lovelearning 8y ago
    Revisiting: Yes, all the time. The yearly plan would be framed at the start of the year, but new opportunities and personal ideas arise quite often and unexpectedly. If something can help me achieve my life goals better, the entire planning cascade gets reprioritized from that point on. I have done things like defer personal projects, drop ideas that turned out to be impractical after prototyping (an example of a wrong track), and renegotiate scope of client projects. It's a dynamic thing - the idea of the system is to force life goals to convert into concrete daily activities, but the goals themselves can and have changed. Leisure time: Leisure time is very much part of the daily plan. I put tasks like jogging, workout, reading, going out in all my plans. Even have things like fitness annual goals and explicitly write them in my weekly schedule and daily plans. Anything that I should allocate time for goes into these files. Missed goals: Yes, that happens. I'm quite bad at time estimation, and some ideas involve a lot of exploratory prototyping that may take much more time than anticipated. I mark incomplete tasks as [PARTIAL] or [SKIPPED], analyze at the end of the D/W/M what made me skip them, adjust scope if required, and modify my plans to correct the problem by next D/W/M.
    - MarsAscendant 8y ago
      > Leisure time is very much part of the daily plan. I put tasks like jogging, workout, reading, going out in all my plans. This kind of discipline sounds impressive. (I don't think I can follow something quite so meticulous: it'll probably confuse me.) How do you fill out a `todo`? Are they different for each category? are they mostly similar? under the same template?