The crucial one percent

I ended last week’s blog by teasing you with The Most Important Question You’ll Ever Ask Yourself and I’ll come back to it in a minute, I promise. But first, I want to make it clear that if you’re serious about getting more done this year, you’re going to need to adopt the discipline of regular planning.

Discipline sometimes has a bad reputation but it’s discipline that allows us to do… well, pretty much anything. You won’t have the freedom to play a musical instrument unless you had the discipline to practice. You won’t have the freedom to compete as an athlete unless you had the discipline to train. You won’t have the freedom to achieve your goals if you don’t have the discipline to plan them out. This means planning each week and each day and it’s daily planning that we’re looking at now.

It will only take you five minutes, at most - that’s taking less than 1% of your day to ensure that the other 99% is well spent. It involves checking your Master Task List, deciding which of those tasks you can reasonably expect to do today, and then transferring them from your Master Task List to your To Do list.

The length of your To Do list depends on your answer to The Most Important Question You’ll Ever Ask Yourself, which is, how long do I want to work today. It’s a simple but powerful question and if the answer, every day, is “about 30 minutes”, do yourself a favour and get another job! Most people find they have enough work to keep themselves going 24 hours a day – you don’t want to work that long, so asking this question determines the number of hours you have available to spend on tasks. From that number, you subtract any meetings or travelling that you have to do. Whatever number is left, halve it and then that lower number is the number of hours' worth of tasks that you put on your To Do List.

Why halve the number? It’s common sense, really: the unexpected happens every day and we need to build flexibility into our plan to accommodate it. The primary reason why people fail at planning is they fill every available minute and don’t take account of what Donald Rumsfeld called “the known unknowns” – the stuff we know will happen, we just don’t know when: the emails, phone calls, chats with colleagues, trips to the loo and so on that stop us actually working.

Trying to plan each day from your Master Task List without a To Do list can be overwhelming; faced with an endless list of tasks that never seems to shrink, it’s easy to get discouraged. Using a shorter To Do list will give you a sense of perspective and progress and using some common sense ensures you won’t get overloaded. But how do you ensure that you’re staying on track? For that, you’ll have to come back next week when we look at weekly planning.