8
WEAVE YOUR PROJECT INTO YOUR SCHEDULE
Don’t be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of.
CHARLES RICHARDS
The weekly block schedule, the Five Projects Rule, and your project road map together create a plan you can follow and space to do the work. Addressing the natural drag points also helps make sure you use the space and plan you have to do the work.
To start doing your best work, you have to start weaving your project into your total work-life schedule, and reality will start defying your best-laid plans as soon as you lay them. When your plans and reality don’t match, the only sensible choice is to adjust your plans. It’s counterintuitive, but the better planner you are, the more often you’ll review and adjust your plans.
Momentum planning is my term for the continual process of making and adjusting plans across all time perspectives. It incorporates well-worn practices such as weekly reviews, morning planning, and triaging, but it also weaves in time blocking, the project pyramid, and the Five Projects Rule. But now that we’re talking about reality’s effects on your plans, it’s time to consider whether the reality you’re working in is working for you.
MAKE SURE YOUR ENVIRONMENT IS WORKING FOR YOU
When I was in graduate school and found myself unable to write, I’d go to my secret writing place: Love Library at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Love Library has some half-level floors that are rarely used, but these floors still have desks that look out toward the capitol. In the near stillness amid the smell of old books and journal articles, I’d open up Mellel (at the time, the best writing app for academics), turn on some background classical music, and write for hours. It was reliable enough that a week before the deadline, I could review my research notes, do last-minute reading (or all the reading) up until three days before the deadline, write for a day, edit it the next day, and send it on the deadline.
But if I tried the same thing without going to the library, my plans for meeting the deadline would all fall apart on me. The pressure of the deadlines meant that I could force myself through a long night of writing at home, but it was torturous and never produced my best work because I’m a lark (more on that later). While it feels odd to admit that all of the writing I did in the seven-odd years I spent in graduate school was probably done in less than sixty days of focused writing, it was the same for many of my peers.
A dozen years and a few hundred thousand words later, I know that it would have been much smarter to just go to the library twice per week — probably on Monday and Tuesday — ready to write. That’s wisdom that young adults and creative amateurs can’t hear, though.
But you’re much smarter and ready than I was at the time, and you probably know how important environment is for your focus, momentum, and creativity. You’ve also experienced what it’s like for your best-laid plan for the day to go sideways because your chatty coworkers distracted you all day or the construction crew started next door on the day you had allotted for quiet writing. The question is whether you’re actively creating the space for you to do your best work — like Tony Stark.
While I could wax on about how the first Iron Man movie was a watershed moment for me, what’s relevant for our present conversation is the way Tony Stark’s lab was set up for him to be able to build his high-tech power suits. He’d touch a virtual screen, swipe to the left, tell the computer to add different components and materials, and then the robots would spin and whir in the background to build the myriad ideas he just put in the queue. Tony Stark’s lab was custom-made to capture his ideas with as little friction as possible and then start making whatever he wanted with as little work for him as possible.
That is the ideal, and though you may not be one of the smartest and richest people in a fictional universe, knowing what your lab — or workshop, sanctuary, kitchen, or whatever metaphor most resonates with you — would look like is a powerful way to work backward to an environment that works for you. If your lab would have big windows to let the sunlight and seaside vista come in, you know that your desk in the corner of the basement is temporary and that it may be time to get some beach posters and better lighting.
The following are some environmental factors to consider when thinking about whether your environment works for you:
​ Sound. Consider coworkers talking in the background, the sounds of a coffee shop, the buzz of children playing in the distance, the hum of the ceiling fan, the babbling of a brook, or the hustle-bustle of a busy city street. Each sound affects us differently. Figure out what background noise best serves your best work.
​ Smell. It’s obvious that disgusting smells can make it hard to focus, but there may be smells that really get you in the zone. Of all the senses, our sense of smell brings us closest to our memory center, 1 so smells can have a powerful effect on getting us in the zone.
​ Sunlight. Studies show that sunlight affects our moods, 2 and there’s a right amount for each of us. Night owls often prefer working in darker rooms.
​ Clothing . Yes, what you wear is a part of your environment and is worth considering. Pants that don’t fit in all the wrong places can be distracting, as can itchy socks. It’s also true that you may not take yourself or your work seriously if you’re working in your pajamas and a shirt you’ve been wearing for the last three days. It may also be that those pajamas and shirt make up your lucky outfit. If it works for you, I’m not judging.
​ Clutter/Organization. It’s not necessarily true for everyone that a clean desk equates to a clean mind, as I’ve witnessed people who can’t focus with a clean desk or in a Zen/spartan environment. Your tolerance for clutter or tidiness may also depend on the space in question.
​ Amount of space. Some people like the coziness of small rooms with lots of furniture, shelves, and so on, whereas others prefer more spacious rooms with less furniture. Like clutter, it could also be that only parts of your work area need to be spacious. Even further, it could be that certain kinds of stuff in your space create different feelings for you.
​ Music. While studies show that listening to classical music increases focus and creativity, 3 you may not be able to concentrate with it. It may be that certain kinds of music work for you or really don’t work for you, or the level of music makes a lot of difference. For instance, I typically can’t do focus blocks while listening to music with spoken words, but the “This Is Coheed and Cambria” playlist on Spotify has been in the background for much of the drafting of this book; Jack Johnson radio on Spotify powers my admin blocks. Coheed and Cambria is an uncharacteristic choice, but it just works. Your best-work music may be similarly variable and unusual.
JOSHUA BECKER​ HOW A MINIMALIST WORKSPACE ENHANCES FOCUS
Work — whether it’s paid work or volunteer work or creative work — is a big part of what we’re here for on this earth. It builds the dignity of self-reliance in us at the same time it satisfies our generous instincts by utilizing our skills and talents to help others.
Minimalism maximizes our potential — work included. Choosing to focus our time on endeavors that matter is important. Additionally, clearing physical clutter (external chaos) from our workspace increases our potential.
Some of us have the idea that a messy, crowded office typifies a busy, productive worker. “My office is a mess, but I know where everything is” is a common mantra. We pile papers, folders, notes, and books on our desk almost as if we wear our clutter as a badge of honor.
Unfortunately, more often than not, a messy office typifies a disorganized, unfocused, stressed-out worker who is running behind and out of control. A cluttered workspace doesn’t contribute to meaningful work, it distracts us from it.
When you free up space in your work environment (whatever that may be for you), you’ll feel more at peace and be able to do your work more efficiently. You’ll find that you’ve freed up your mind to think clearer and deeper, make decisions better, and plan further ahead. Rather than working at the mercy of the business and busyness of modern-day life, you’ll be more proactive about your future.
Clearing clutter turns our environment into one that helps us get more and better work done with less stress. More than that, it might actually transform the legacy we leave.
Joshua Becker is the bestselling author of The Minimalist Home: A Room-by-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life and The More of Less: Finding the Life You Want Under Everything You Own. He is also the founder and editor of BecomingMinimalist.com , a website inspiring others to live more by owning less.
The recurring theme is that what works or doesn’t work in your environment is unique to your preferences. Approach this as if you’re Tony Stark. While you’re considering what in your environment might not be working for you, you can also consider what it would look like for your environment to be optimal for you.
Making your environment work for you may come down to moving to a different location rather than changing what’s in your location.
You may find that going to a coffee shop, library, or the unused conference room for your focus blocks is the best way to do your best work, but why you do so is probably because of one of the factors I mentioned. This may be especially true if you work in an open-plan office. Luckily we’re trending away from open-plan offices in favor of the hub-and-spoke model based on evidence that the open-plan office environment isn’t conducive for focused, deep work. 4
Depending on how poorly or well your environment is working for you, making it work for you could be its own project, which also means you have to watch out for it being a convenient excuse to avoid doing your best work.
It’s a matter of taking the steps, large and small, to make your environment ever closer to Tony Stark’s lab. And yes, sometimes it’s as simple as going to the coffee shop or hiding away in unused levels of a library.
BATCHING AND STACKING WORK INCREASES YOUR EFFICIENCY
Thinking about where you work and how it’s working for you naturally leads you to consider what kinds of activities you might do in different places and contexts. For instance, if you need to print and review your work, working from a coffee shop or airplane will be inefficient. If you’re organizing a community event, it may make more sense to do a lot of the required prep work at the physical location of the event. Or if you’re out running one errand, it may be more efficient to do multiple errands at once.
Batching and stacking are strategies that help you work more efficiently. Batching is the process of doing similar kinds of work in a contiguous stretch of time. Stacking is the process of doing dissimilar kinds of work in the same stretch of time.
Batching is easier to explain and what you’re probably already doing, so we’ll start there, using processing email as an example. You could check and process 5 one email at a time, then switch to something else, and then switch back, but it would be horribly inefficient. It takes us sixteen minutes to refocus after fielding incoming email. 6 You would spend a third to half of your day refocusing and transitioning. (Yes, many people do spend their days in a digital fog.)
In this case, it’s clear that processing multiple emails at once is more efficient; you’re already there and in that mode, so you may as well knock out a few at once and then transition back to focused work. Batching is already baked into the concept of admin blocks, because while you’re in an admin block, you’re likely going to triage and process admin tasks.
Batching works so well because it minimizes the context shifting and mental or physical back-and-forth that can occur when we jump from context to context. It prevents the waste that would happen if we, say, went to our physical mailbox multiple times per day to retrieve or place one piece of mail rather than going once to retrieve and place all our mail. It’s great for errands, chores, admin work (transactional calls, email, filing, etc.), and organization.
On the surface, stacking appears to be multitasking, but multitasking is a troublesome concept and, if done unreflectively, actually leads to distraction and inefficiency because most of what people call multitasking is actually rapid refocusing, to use productivity coach and bestselling author David Allen’s appropriate term. Jumping from email, to social media, to your calendar, to a website, to a different tab, back to email quickly zaps your cognitive juice at the same time that it primes you for more clicking. A day of clicking is rarely a day of getting your best work done.
What distinguishes stacking from batching is that it uses different kinds of physical and mental resources simultaneously. A few easy examples of task stacking are:
​ Doing laundry while listening to an audiobook
​ Doing an audio or real-time meeting while hiking
​ Exercising in the park while spending time with the kids
In the first two examples, muscle memory is doing most of the physical work, so there’s open cognitive bandwidth to do other things. For the third, it’s possible to keep an eye on the kids and/or include them while exercising.
It’s when you’re doing things that require mental or physical focus that you need to watch out. Checking email while doing deep writing doesn’t work very well, as does having a focused conversation while trying to do deep reading. While stacking might seem to redefine multitasking, the point of using a different term is to (a) break the habit or disrupt the belief of trying to do inefficient multitasking, and (b) have you think about the kinds of activities that you can do well simultaneously.
KEEP THE DREAD-TO-WORK RATIO DOWN BY DEALING WITH FROGS EARLIER AND EVERY DAY
While we’re on batching and stacking and energy drain, it’s time to address frogs, which you’ll recall are the things we really don’t want to do. It’s amazing how some of the smallest tasks can take on lives of their own. Of course, the truth is that they don’t take on lives of their own — we are the ones that give them their vitality.
A frog could be something as simple as paying a bill, even though we have the money to pay. Or it could be responding to an email that might take three minutes to do, if we’d just make up our mind and do it.
Mark Twain was dead-on with this: “If you know you have to swallow a frog, swallow it first thing in the morning. If there are two frogs, swallow the big one first.” 7 You swallow the frog first thing in the morning so that you can avoid increasing the dread-to-work ratio of your day.
THE DREAD-TO-WORK RATIO, EXPLAINED
Most tasks generally require a fixed minimum amount of work, meaning that doing them later won’t make them any easier. If a task was going to take five minutes at first, then odds are it’s going to take at least five minutes whenever you do it. The “work” part of the equation stays the same.
It’s the “dread” that increases substantially with time. The longer the task sits there, the more you think about it; the amount of time you’ve invested in thinking about and putting off the task somehow gets added to the psychological size of the task. The frog gets bigger and wartier, and the warts themselves start growing hairs and warts. It feels that way, at least.
After a while, the distinction between directly working on that task and indirectly working on it blurs to the point at which it doesn’t make sense to make the distinction. If you’ve spent all day (or week) avoiding and fretting about the task, then you’ve spent time and energy on it that you could have spent on other things. To think about it in terms of the soft costs of inaction belies the point that it’s still costly.
A FROG A DAY KEEPS YOUR ANCHORS AWEIGH
My prior suggestion to catch the frog first thing in the morning isn’t quite fine-grained enough. Just as with time, not all frogs are the same. A frog that requires a creative solution to address may require a focus block. When a bunch of little frogs can be caught at the same time, they should be batched and caught together. But be honest with yourself about whether you’re putting off catching your frogs because you have a more effective plan or because you really don’t want to catch them.
As a general strategy to keep momentum going, identify your frogs and catch at least one a day. When you do this, three interrelated effects occur:
​ You keep your dread-to-work ratio lower because you identify your frogs early on, acknowledge them for what they are, and swallow them sooner rather than later.
​ You get fewer and smaller frogs because you start thinking about the nature of your frogs and see trends and patterns in your workflow. Once you see those trends and patterns, you can start eliminating or minimizing the parts of your life and work that generate those frogs in the first place.
​ You start the momentum spiral that I mentioned previously because you release a lot of the energy held up in not working on frogs while at the same time having fewer of them. That reclaimed energy and time can be spent on your best work.
But I should be clear here: there will always be frogs. They may be smaller, they may come up less often, and they may be an entirely new type of frog, but they’ll pop up nonetheless. “Do you have any frogs?” is thus not the question but rather “Where are the frogs you need to address?”
Spot ’em, weave addressing them into your day, and move on to the next thing. There’s no need to increase the work by dreading it so much.
WHEN BEFORE WHAT
Addressing frogs opens the door for us to consider more pattern-level considerations around when to do certain kinds of work. Many people buy a ticket to ride the struggle bus for a week before the week even begins because they start their plans with what needs to be done rather than looking strategically at when it’s better to do it. But we need to look more narrowly and more broadly than just the week, as there are better and worse times during the day and during the year to work on projects.
Before we get too far down this road, though, do not be lulled into thinking that figuring out when to do your best work is a magic pill. Just as it’s a trap to keep waiting until you have empty days and weeks to work on what matters, it’s a trap to believe that all it takes is an ideal schedule for you to start making progress. At best, planning to do the work during the right times removes barriers that make progress harder — you won’t be fighting dragons when your energy and resolve are the lowest. That said, you want to create all the advantages you can.
TIME OF DAY
There’s no shortage of admonition and advice to get up early and focus on first things first, with little regard for the reality that humans have three chronotypes, defined as “the individual propensity for sleep and activity at particular times during a twenty-four-hour period.” 8 The ubiquitous exhortation to be early birds (larks) attempts to shoehorn the night owls and afternoon emus, 9 but a person’s true chronotype only seems to change with age.
While it’s typically the case that the Industrial Revolution’s paradigms don’t fit us, in this case, the standard three factory shifts do reasonably well. Alas, many creatives now work in standard nine-to-five environments, and even when we don’t work in co-located buildings, we’re expected to be “on” during those hours. Just as the workday is wrapping up, emus may just be getting in their creative peak and owls may be approaching their warm-up.
Your boss may have a strong influence on your timing and availability, but if you’re an independent creative, it’s often better to shift your schedule to match your chronotype than try to shift your chronotype to match people’s preferences. Most creative people are far more capable of shifting and creating their schedule than it at first seems — it’s more often lack of awareness and courage than possibility. Our education system and work cultures normalize us to be larks to the degree that people often don’t know they’re not larks or give themselves permission to explore emu or owl schedules; when they become aware and give themselves permission to work on their natural schedules, there’s often a series of conversations to be had that require courage to see through.
For instance, many lark creative mothers spend what would otherwise be their most creative times waking up their kids and getting them to school. One option for reclaiming the morning might be to ask their partner to be the kid wrangler; another might be to negotiate with the family to go to bed earlier so they can get up earlier, in which case the kid-wrangling occurs after their focus block and serves as a postcreative incubation cycle. Emus might prefer their mornings to start with meetings, so they free up their afternoons for focused work, but doing so may also mean negotiating no-meeting afternoons with coworkers and colleagues. Owls may follow a similar strategy with the afternoons being their social time, so they have the evenings and nights free.
MIKE VARDY​ YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE AN EARLY RISER TO BE PRODUCTIVE
I’ve got a little secret to share with you: you don’t have to be an early riser to be productive. You don’t have to be a morning person to get ahead of the game. In fact, it’s more important if you’re someone who works better in the later hours of the day to avoid the allure of trying to be a morning person instead of paying attention to your natural tendencies as a night owl.
Why?
You have bigger battles to fight — such as taking care of your to-do list — and spending energy on changing your body clock isn’t the best use of your time and attention. Instead, focus on being proactive in a different way than your early-rising counterparts . . . like I do.
Here are two quick tips to thrive as a night owl in a world geared toward early risers:
​ Flip the script and do your big tasks later to stay proactive, and do your easier tasks in the early part of your day so that you save your best self for your prime working hours.
​ Make sure you have both a morning and evening routine. In fact, I’d say your evening routine is more important than your morning because having it in place allows you to start off the next day with less friction.
It’s okay to be a night owl. I’ve made it work for years, and if you follow the simple steps above, you can make it work for you too.
Mike Vardy is a writer, a productivity strategist, and the founder of TimeCrafting. He is the author of several books, including The Front Nine: How to Start the Year You Want Anytime You Want and The Productivityist Playbook. He is a renowned speaker and has taught productivity practices on the popular online education platforms CreativeLive and Skillshare, where his courses are among the most popular in the business category. Mike lives in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, with his incredible wife, daughter, and son.
As you’re thinking through when might be the best time of day for you to do your best work, realize that people don’t know what’s on your schedule and will often assume that you have other commitments driving your availability. I bring this up because a lot of people approach the schedule-making process as if they need to defend their unavailability. But unless you tell people or you have entirely too-limited availability, your unavailability rarely comes up. So rather than making your focus blocks fit around other people’s schedules, set your focus blocks as the default that others need to work around. Unless everyone you work with is the same chronotype as you and have expressed incompatible schedules, you’re likely to find times that work for everyone.
DAY OF THE WEEK
Some days of the week may be better to do certain kinds of work than other days. For instance, you may find that Monday is a great day for planning and getting caught up with your work, so you can batch meetings and work to be focused on getting the week started off right; doing this on Friday may not work nearly as well if you and your team are checking out. Or maybe Monday is a particularly challenging day to do any heavy lifting because your ex has the kids for the weekend and there’s emotional fallout Sunday evening and the next morning, so it makes more sense for Monday to be more focused on admin and self-care.
While it’s true that your work context and level of autonomy will vary, you can still set yourself up for success by thinking through what days of the week are best for certain kinds of work.
Here are some general principles:
​ Put the work that requires the most effort — decisions, analysis and evaluation, and deep work — on the days when you have the most creative, positive energy. Those days should have the most focus blocks as well; having more focus blocks on the days when you have the best energy for them provides a useful default that will aid your momentum planning. For many people, Mondays and Tuesdays make the most sense, though it may take some work to clear up those days from routine meetings and the Monday-morning busywork mindset.
​ Batch follow-up and collaborative work for the days when more people are available and “in the zone.” Again, for most people, this is Tuesday through Thursday. Sending check-in and heavy-thought emails on Monday morning and Friday afternoon just increases the likelihood that the receivers will punt the emails and calls.
​ Schedule “lighter” social meetings on Thursday and Friday. By light, I mean conversations that are mostly about rapport-building and relationship maintenance more than major decision-making, strategy discussions, or coworking. Thursdays and Fridays are also great for weekly reviews and checkouts with your coworkers or success pack, since those events tend to create deadlines that focus attention for the week.
The overlap in the days above reflects reality, and how you arrange your blocks in the days will allow you to address multiple goals. For instance, if you’re a lark and a Monday seizer, Monday and Tuesday mornings may be focus blocks just for your best work; Monday and Tuesday afternoons may feature meetings that require a lot of braining and energy to get through, and you may also make sure your admin blocks in the afternoons on those days are for follow-ups and check-ins. In this scenario, you can bet your Fridays are going to need to be much less intense and demanding, so you can have your networking, checkouts, and admin work scheduled then.
Weekends are your wildcards. While I’ve advanced the hegemony of the Monday-through-Friday workweek, 10 it’s just a social convention. It’s a powerful one, for sure, but
there’s no necessary reason that you can’t claim parts or all of Saturday and Sunday for your best work.
In fact, Saturday and Sunday are often the very best days for people to do their best work because many of us don’t have professional distractions and interruptions — our coworkers are less likely to interrupt us if they’re not actually working.
With the idea that Saturday and Sunday are possible work days, we can take it one step further: there’s no reason that Monday has to be the “start” of the week. Many people are frustrated that their Mondays are so full of busywork and they’re already behind and unable to do their best work for the week. But if Sunday is the day you get your best work or weekly planning done — and you do that work — then you’re already on track for the week. You’ve done your first things first just by changing what day you mark as first.
An important caveat here is to remember to schedule time to rest. I recommend at least one day per week for my clients — which is often a fight in the first place — but two or three might be what you need because, after all, your work isn’t the only thing you’ve got going. The exception here is when clients are on sprints, project pushes, or in a high season that’s just part of their work cycles, but the constant sprint–push–high-season pattern is the road to burnout.
While we’re on reclaiming the weekends, many creative parents or caretakers overlook the reality that they could get sitters or caretakers during the weekend days just as well as the evenings. If you’re a lark or emu who’s also a parent or caretaker, having a sitter watch the kids on a Saturday while you’re going after it at home or at the office can be a powerful way to make progress on your best work, and it’s honestly a far better bang for your buck. Would you rather pay fifteen dollars an hour for a sitter to watch movies with your kids in the evening or pay that same fifteen dollars an hour to have them take your kids to the park and then you get to watch the movies and have dinner with the kids after having the satisfaction of getting your work done? (Yes, you may now be thrashing with competing priorities in a different way; this is also why we made a project budget.)
With some weekly schedule calibration and mindset changes, you can stop being resigned at the end of the week or anxious that you’re behind at the start of the week. Remember: when reality doesn’t fit your plans (schedule), don’t try to change reality — change your plans.
You could take this idea of timing further by considering seasons of the year. You may be naturally inspired and have more best-work energy in the winter but be sluggish in the summer. Or maybe spring is when it’s best for you to kick off new major projects. And, obviously, if your best work requires you to be outdoors or is tied to the natural seasons, factor that into your project road maps and the Five Projects Rule.
“FIRST THINGS FIRST” ISN’T NECESSARILY ABOUT SEQUENCE
“First things first” is a reminder to make sure that you’re taking action on your most important priorities rather than letting less important stuff eat up your time. That’s straightforward enough, but it often leads to an inference that the most important priorities should be attended to before other things in sequence .
That’s not necessarily the case. First in priority doesn’t mean first in sequence .
For instance, if your top priority is to do your creative work, but you’re not a morning person, then it’s probably better for you to focus on noncreative work in the morning so that you’re not trying to do creative work at the wrong time of the day.
Similarly, your most important project for this quarter might fruitfully be delayed until you’ve cleared the deck of other urgent and noisy projects, so you can focus on that big, important project without a cacophony of chattering monkeys in the back of your mind, screaming at you about the other projects.
Or perhaps you’ve determined that getting the right champions behind your project is the single most important priority to ensure the success of your project, in which case you might need to complete an initial project blueprint before you approach those champions.
If you’ve been frustrated about the things that matter most to you not being the first things you get to — in a day, week, or month — it’s all good. What’s more important is whether you’re getting to those first things at the right time.
WHEN TO DO YOUR MOMENTUM PLANNING
While we’re discussing when to do what kinds of work, you might be wondering when you should be doing your planning. Before we get into when might be the best time to create your plan, it’s important to remember that the best time to create a plan is when you realize you don’t have one. It doesn’t matter if it’s midday, midweek, or midmonth — if you’re scrambling and feel like you’re falling behind, you can stop scrambling for fifteen minutes or an hour and get your plan on. Please don’t fall into the trap of thinking that just because you didn’t start the day, week, or month with a plan that you should tread water until the start of the next day, week, or month.
To address when to do your momentum planning, though, we have to cover frequency. Luckily that’s the most straightforward aspect of the practice. Once a week, create your weekly plan. Once a day, create your daily plan. And so on.
If you’re in a groove with your momentum planning, it typically doesn’t take that long to plan because of the Five Projects Rule.
Here’s what tends to work well for people:
​ Daily planning — the night before or the first thing in the morning before checking email . Making your plan before checking email helps prevent OPP from driving your plan. This can typically be done in less than fifteen minutes.
​ Weekly planning — Sunday night or first thing Monday morning before checking email. This can typically be done in less than thirty minutes.
​ Monthly planning — the weekend before the month starts or the first Monday of the month. This may require a focus block if you haven’t been doing your weekly momentum planning.
​ Quarterly planning — the week before the quarter starts. Quarterly planning often takes multiple passes if you haven’t been doing your monthly momentum planning.
​ Annual planning — the month before the year starts . Annual planning may take multiple passes.
While the presentation above is bottom-up, the reality is that it’s much easier to do the lower-level momentum planning if you’ve done the higher-level momentum planning. Knowing what five projects you’re working on this month and what recurring projects need to be woven into this week makes it pretty clear what you need to focus on each day.
Additionally, if you did last week’s momentum planning, it’s pretty simple to figure out what projects you might do this week because of how projects are linked and sequenced. Frequent plotting and course correction (at the right level of perspective) makes it a lot easier to do so.
USE THE 5/10/15 SPLIT TO BUILD DAILY MOMENTUM
The 5/10/15 split makes your momentum planning a breeze and helps you course correct when reality pushes against your plans. It fuses the Five Projects Rule with the daily frequency of momentum planning. You use your five projects (for the day and week) to create and update your daily plan for ten minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes at the end of the day.
The magic of the 5/10/15 split is that it helps us navigate the two challenges we all have: (1) getting a great start on the day, and (2) letting go at the end of the day.
These two challenges are intimately related. Since we often don’t know what we should be doing, we get involved in a lot of easy-to-engage-in tasks that often aren’t the things that matter the most. By the time we get our heads on straight, we’ve squandered a lot of time, so we end up trying to overcompensate by working longer.
Then, at exactly the point at which it’s clear that we’re no longer able to do something without messing it up, we remember all the stuff we should’ve been doing in the first place. We know that it won’t get done no matter how hard we beat ourselves up about it, yet we also can’t just let it go.
Here’s the deal:
unless you’re good at planning your day, it’s really hard to do it first thing in the morning.
It’s much easier to check email and get distracted with OPP, which only serves to repeat the same pattern that you’re trying to interrupt.
So instead of trying it that way, work on the 10 and 15 parts of the split. The 5 part is the Five Projects Rule, and since you’re familiar with that, you can constrain your focus to the weekly and daily perspectives — that is, what are your five projects for this week, and based on that, how you’ll spend your blocks to fuel those projects.
The key to getting the 5/10/15 split going is actually the evening checkout rather than the morning check-in. That’s why it gets a bit more time, but it’s also because you’re asking harder questions. We’ll start by talking about the checkout.
THE 15-MINUTE CHECKOUT
The checkout is critical because we usually have a better perspective at the end of the day than at the beginning of the day. We know what we did and didn’t do, and we have a good idea of the next steps we need to take to keep the ball rolling. So while our level of overwhelm might be higher, we don’t suffer the mental cobwebs that cloud the beginning of the day.
The 15-minute checkout has three questions:
​ What did you accomplish? (Celebrate!) Acknowledge what you did rather than just focusing on what you didn’t do. Always, always, always celebrate what you accomplished. Life is but a series of small steps, and if you don’t celebrate the small wins, it’s harder to build up the momentum for the bigger ones.
​ Is there anything that you need to do right now to be able to disengage? This question answers that nagging feeling that you’ve forgotten to do something. Check your inbox and your to-do list for those things that have to happen today. Ask yourself what would really happen if you didn’t do whatever you’re considering — you would be surprised how many things can wait until the next day.
​ When do you need to do the things that you didn’t get done today? There might be a lot of things that came up during the day that need to get done sometime soon, but they don’t have to happen today. If something needs to happen tomorrow or some specific day in the future, put it in whatever app, tool, planner, or calendar you use so that you’ll see it tomorrow. That way your mind can let it go and you can get some peace.
If you didn’t finish whatever you were working on today, make a note of where to start for the next time you pick it up. This is great for those creative projects on which you need to maintain momentum but that you might not be able to work on every day.
THE 10-MINUTE CHECK-IN
If you start the 5/10/15 split with the 15-minute checkout, you’ve done most of the hard work. All you have to do next is show up and do what you told yourself you were going to do.
Here are the questions to ask yourself during the 10-minute check-in :
​ Has anything significant changed between now and the last checkout? The key word here is significant. Some events do change the course of your day. For instance, your kids might get sick and you’ll need to change your plans to be able to take care of them.
​ What did you plan for today? This is where you review the plan you made for yourself the day before. Remember, you probably had a better idea of what you need to do today when you did your checkout than you do right now.
​ What’s one thing you’re going to start on right now? This step is all about setting the intention to focus on this one thing for your next block rather than shuffling through a few projects and not making any real progress on any of them. Better to complete or make some real progress on one thing than shuffle through three.
You might be tempted to answer the first question by checking email and voicemail, but before you do, ask yourself what’s in there that would change your day. Did you start scheduling something? Are you waiting for something that’s related to a project you’re working on this morning? Plan on how you’re going to process email and voicemail; at this stage, it’s best to look for a few key messages that are relevant to what you need to do right now rather than just jumping on to check email.
You might be wondering why it’s a 5/10/15 split and not a 5/10/10 or 5/15/15 split. It’s a 5/10/15 split because I’ve learned through trial and error — personally, and with clients and students — that it’s a good balance between not giving yourself enough time and requiring too much time. It’s hard to get the right level of perspective and thoroughness in less than ten or fifteen minutes, and much longer than that makes it just another thing to resist.
The 5/10/15 split makes every other level of momentum planning that much easier and quicker. Since you’re never that far from the guide rails that are your plans, you don’t have to struggle to get back to them. And since it’s more likely that you have been staying focused on your five projects, there’s not a lot of gymnastics and recalibration.
DON’T PLAN OUT TOO FAR IN ADVANCE
Another seemingly counterintuitive practice with momentum planning is intentionally not planning further out than you need to. Planning too far out is an excusable way to avoid doing the work that needs to be done today — some of us like the puzzle-solving aspect of planning more than rolling up our sleeves and getting the work done.
There’s an obvious tension here, though, because not planning out far enough in advance can lead to being underprepared and asking for support too late in the process. For instance, realizing that it would be beneficial to have some of your peers (from your success pack) review an aspect of your project three days before your deadline will make it really hard to get the support you might otherwise need. But the flip side of the coin here is that letting them know you’ll need them to look over something in four months before you know how the project is progressing may mean you must let them know that you’re behind, if you get off track.
Assuming you’ve accounted for deadlines and relay time and have them captured at the monthly level of planning, four weeks tends to be about as far out as you can reasonably plan daily blocks with any degree of confidence. The project pyramid is your friend here, because, say, three weeks out, you only need to know what week-sized chunk you need to be working on; when it’s time to do the momentum planning for that week, you can get into the details of how you’re going to use your blocks for that week.
It should be clear that I’m using plan in a very specific way: it’s not that you don’t have any idea of what you’re going to be doing in the future but that you haven’t gotten into a level of detail that will require overadjusting your plans because they’re too detailed. As an analogy, if you’re making a transcontinental road trip, planning out every bathroom, meal, and fuel break for the next week is overkill. You really only need to know what’s ahead of you for the next day.
With practice, you’ll find your unique Goldilocks level of advance planning that works best for you. Most of the time, I find that having a good idea of the next two weeks’ worth of projects is enough for me to keep things moving without overplanning. At the team level, having a good idea of the next two months’ projects (at that time perspective) is enough for me to guide the team and ensure that work they need from me is on my plan. But keep in mind my next two weeks’ worth of work is tied to the context of the bigger picture — I may have blinders on, but I know I’m running in the right direction on the right track.
HOW TO DO YOUR FIRST ROUND OF MOMENTUM PLANNING
The 5/10/15 split is a great framework to use to tie your days together, but it doesn’t show you the bigger picture. The hardest part of momentum planning is doing the first round, because it’s not completely obvious where to start.
Here’s a quick rundown of how to do your momentum planning if you’re starting from scratch:
​ Start with the month-level perspective. It’s big enough for context but small enough to not require planning a time to plan.
​ Review and capture any deadlines or major events. A major event at the monthly level is usually something that will pull you out of your normal routine for a few days or a one-day event that will require significant preparation; major presentations, weddings, travel that requires four or more days, first or last days of school/work, and move in/out days are all examples of major events at the month-level perspective. These deadlines and events create hard constraints on your schedule and influence both how many blocks you have and what you need to dedicate to them.
​ If you have a good picture of your five projects for the quarter, review, adjust, and capture them. These five projects give you the context to determine what your five projects for this month should be.
​ Decide what your five projects for the month need to be. Remember that the Five Projects Rule is technically no more than five active projects per time perspective, so you don’t need to fill up those five project slots — you may not be able to, given step 2 above — and you’re committing to doing projects rather than just writing them down. It may be helpful to review the action verbs in chapter 5 to figure out which verbs you need to use for your five projects.
​ Chunk those five projects into week-sized chunks for every week of the month. Some projects may not need to be spread out over the full month; for instance, if one of your deadlines is to complete an important report, you may decide to spend a few blocks the week prior to its deadline to get it done and reviewed by your colleagues, so it may not need a full slot the week it’s due. Remember to apply the Five Projects Rule to those weeks and to account for events (which usually take a slot) and recurring projects.
If you’re like most people, you’ll need to take a couple of passes to revise your weekly projects, as the first pass is usually overoptimistic even when people use the Five Projects Rule. Remember that you’re committing to important projects you’ll finish, not everything you might work on.
Once you’ve started with the month-level perspective, you can decide to zoom up to larger perspectives of time pretty easily. Many people find it easier to jump to the annual perspective from there, since they can then see how the quarters roll into each other; but you probably don’t need to go down any further than the monthly time perspective for future quarters, since doing so would be planning too far in advance.
Also, if you’re a top-down planner, it may be easier for you to start with your five projects for the year and work down to the monthly view. The good news is that the steps are the same, but you’ll just need to make some substitutions for time perspectives.
Since the 5/10/15 split is such a powerful aid in helping you keep your momentum going, give yourself a focus block to make the momentum plan for the month, following the steps above. You’ll definitely find it easier to use the free Monthly Momentum Planner download available at startfinishingbook.com/resources , but you can also use a blank sheet of paper.
Next up, we’ll be covering how to keep the bobbing and weaving going as you navigate the wins and setbacks that show up as you’re doing your best work.
CHAPTER 8 TAKEAWAYS
​ Momentum planning is the process of continually making and adjusting plans across all time perspectives.
​ The seven environmental factors to make work for you are sound, smell, sunlight, clothing, clutter/organization, amount of space, and music.
​ Batching work is the process of doing similar kinds of work in a contiguous stretch of time; stacking work is the process of doing dissimilar but compatible kinds of work in the same stretch of time.
​ Frogs are the tasks and chunks of projects that we really don’t want to do — addressing them more frequently helps keep the dread-to-work ratio lower.
​ Rather than using what needs to be done as the foundation of your daily or weekly planning, make when it’s best to do certain kinds of work the foundation.
​ First in priority doesn’t always mean first in sequence.
​ The 5/10/15 split combines the Five Projects Rule with momentum planning for ten minutes before you start your work and fifteen minutes at the end of your day.
​ Planning too far in advance can create frustration and resignation since the further out you plan, the more likely it is that your plan will be incorrect.