PLAN
Once you know how many work hours you have available to you, the next step for transforming your career is figuring out what you’d like to do with them. Teachers’ contracts often allow for a planning period so they can set objectives and create lessons in a time separate from their “on” hours in front of children. It doesn’t always work, but having that designated time creates a culture where thinking through what you intend to do before you do it is possible. Erica Woolway, the chief academic officer of Uncommon Schools and coauthor with Doug Lemov and Katie Yezzi of Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better, studied effective teachers and found that they were “Really, in a detailed way, scripting out lesson plans, scripting out questions you will ask students. That type of planning is a big distinguishing factor between the good teachers and the not-so-great.”
But when’s the last time you gave yourself a planning period? When I poll audiences about what they’d like to spend more time on, planning and thinking land near the top of the list. People lament that they’d love to have strategic-thinking time, but they’re just too busy! This always strikes me as a bit backward. You hope whoever built your house wasn’t so busy hammering and sawing that he couldn’t look at the blueprint. Likewise, successful people—who have the same 168 hours per week as the rest of us—simply build planning into their lives. Pham’s thumbnail sketches help her and her publishers decide the order of panels and what each one will contain. It would not make sense to attempt 32 sequentially related paintings without thinking through what would be in them. It would be a colossal waste of time to start a painting only to realize halfway through that the cloud would look much better on the left side of the moon.
Design is half the battle, and this is true in business contexts, too. The Executive Time Use Project, run out of the London School of Economics and Political Science, has had executive assistants keep track of CEO time use at publicly listed companies in multiple countries. Preliminary analysis from CEOs in India found that a firm’s sales increased as the CEO worked more hours. But more intriguingly, the correlation between CEO time use and output was driven entirely by hours spent in planned activities. Planning doesn’t have to mean that the hours are spent in meetings, though meetings with employees were correlated with higher sales; it’s just that CEO time is a limited and valuable resource, and planning how it should be allocated increases the chances that it’s spent in productive ways.
This is the thinking behind Michael Soenen’s work ritual of a weekend planning period. Soenen was the CEO of FTD (the florist network) for years, and now runs EmergencyLink, a company that stores emergency information in a way that’s accessible to family and first responders. He says that his most important personal habit is to carve out the back half of Sunday for strategic thinking. He spends a few hours considering “What are our priorities, and I make sure those priorities are distributed to the team. I think through any questions I have, what are the important projects. If those are made clear Sunday night, coming into Monday morning, everyone really knows what to do.” The team can have a quick call Monday morning and go. Such planning makes the whole week more productive, says Soenen, because his role, as a leader, is “To help my people be as efficient as possible with their time. It’s hard for them to be efficient if you don’t think, institutionally, what are the best ideas.” If he waits until Monday morning to plan, then it’s not until Monday afternoon that people figure out what they need to do, and he risks his people running hard in the wrong direction. If you’ve got 10 people working for you, 4 haphazard hours on Monday morning means 40 misdirected hours. That’s like losing a full-time equivalent from your staff. But if Soenen has a great Sunday afternoon, then everyone else has a great week. “For me, I’ve noticed when I spend that time it makes a big difference,” he says.
Devotees of David Allen’s GTD system—which stands for “Getting Things Done”—carve out time for a weekly review. During this time, they look at loose ends, put things on the “someday/maybe” list, and define the next actions required on big projects. Allen himself finds that “the end of the week is a nice time to do it,” he says, or on Sundays, or on long plane trips. “That’s a good time to sit down and do that kind of back-off thinking.” The key is finding a time and place where “the world kind of slows down, the phones aren’t ringing, people aren’t pinging me instantly while I’m at my desk.” Since some of his clients almost never experience a slowdown like that, he reports that some of them don’t schedule anything before 9 a.m. so they can start at 7 a.m. and “get zeroed out before the madness.” Some of them decide to work at home on Fridays and use the first half of the day for reflection time so they can review their weeks without the world clawing at them at the office. Whatever you choose, get everything out of your brain and figure out unfinished business. “I don’t want to add any new creative stuff on top of stuff that’s stale,” says Allen, but with work defined, he can then welcome new ideas and ponder what’s next.
I tend to do my own planning on three levels. Each December, I think of questions I’d ask in the “performance review” I hope to give myself at the end of the next calendar year. What would I like to accomplish in my next 2,000 working hours? To be sure, the future is unknowable, and goals can be changed. Nonetheless, setting annual goals—such as “double my blog traffic” or “write a draft of a novel”—focuses my brain on actions that would help achieve those goals. With my annual goals in mind, I then make a priority list every Sunday night of what I plan to accomplish in the next week. That priority list will include both immediate assignments and steps toward my annual goals (like “study Google Analytics for 30 minutes to see what drives traffic” and “write 2,000 words of fiction”). I tightly schedule Monday and loosely schedule the rest of the week. Then on Monday night I schedule Tuesday more tightly, based on what’s left on the priority list and what’s come up on Monday. Tuesday night I schedule Wednesday, and so forth. I’ve usually gotten most things done by Friday, which can be a mop up day or a time for more planning.
People work in different ways, so there is no one version of planning that will work for everyone. If you work very closely with another person—an assistant, for instance, or the librettist who writes the words for all your operas—that person will need to participate in some of your planning. If you have many requests for specific chunks of your time, your planning might require more careful scripting than if your work culture permits wandering into a colleague’s office and spending 4 hours debating a mathematical proof. The important thing is not so much the format. It’s getting in the habit of scheduling a planning period. Once you get in the rhythm of planning, though, of thinking through things before you do them, you’ll find it’s quite addictive. You might start working at strange times just to be sure you get your planning fix. Durval Tavares, CEO of Aquabotix, a company that makes underwater robots, confesses that he’s sometimes up at 4:00 a.m. “not because of the alarm,” but because he has lots of things on his mind. “You want clarity,” he says. “It’s hard once you get into your office to have a moment to just think and strategize and figure out things.” So he plans before breakfast and comes to work ready to face the day.
You might also start planning your personal life. Mike Williams, a former executive at GE who is now the CEO of the David Allen Company, reports that he spends a few minutes at the end of the workday reviewing what he’d like to focus on in the evenings. For instance, he’ll mark on his calendar that his daughter had a presentation that day: “Ask her how it went.” That way, when he walks in the door, he’s truly present for his family. As he notes, he has just four more years before his teenager leaves home, and he sees the chance for communication and to do special activities together “as gems I don’t want to lose. In the past, if I didn’t write those down, I’d miss those opportunities.” As with work hours, leisure and family hours pass whether or not you think through how you intend to spend them. Knowing where you’re going vastly increases the chances that you’ll get there.