TL/DR:
- Planning at the end of the day or week (instead of the beginning) helps you disconnect from work and start each morning with clarity.
- Effective daily planning takes 2-5 minutes when your systems are already up to date.
- Most people’s planning sessions take too long because they’re reviewing instead of planning.
The Whole Shebang:
If planning feels like “not real work”, or something you don’t have time for, or futile, because plans always change, well, you might be mistaking “planning” for “review”. (And don’t worry, lots of people make this mistake!)
In my coaching sessions, and in my courses, I teach simple, low effort, hig- ROI planning practices.
End of day, and end of week.
Planning at the end of the day or the end of the week, instead of in the morning, or the beginning of the week, has 2 primary benefits. (Well, 4, if you count benefits that any kind of planning has!)
- You can much more easily disconnect at the end of each day and be present with whatever you do outside of work your kids, your partner, your friends, Netflix, your hobbies, whatever.)
- You get to start the day without that “oh shit” feeling of “what does the day have in store for me.
- Planning reduces stress
- Planning saves time in execution
As a point of reference, I spend about 30-45 minutes near the end of the week planning out next week (leaving enough buffer for the unexpected, but inevitable, changes, emergencies,etc.), and about 2-5 minutes at the end of each day planning for the next.
Sometimes people don’t believe me that effective daily planning can take so little time, but here’s WHY:
I’m not using this time to look back, to review, because by the time I’m planning my systems are up to date.
How? Because I updated in the moment, when I was doing the thing, to avoid the terrible circumstance of having “update by task list” as an item on my task list.
A plan is forward-looking.
It’s not an end of day review; it’s a planning session to set you up for success tomorrow.
It’s not an end of week review; it’s a planning session to set you up for success next week.
When people tell me that their end of day planning session is taking too long, they’re almost always falling prey to the following:
- They are stuck in the “review” mindset, looking backwards, updating, etc.
- And because they’re looking backwards, they’re getting sidetracked by things on their list that they didn’t do yet, but wanted to, and thus using the planning time to “catch up”
It’s hard to move forward when you’re looking in the rear view mirror.
And when you update in the moment, instead of doing it “later”, not only are you much more likely to do it, but you’re setting yourself up for planning success.
And therefore, tomorrow’s success.