Planning systems

Daily planning is the shortest routine in this catalogue and the one people abandon first, usually because they try to do it at the wrong end of the day. Planning tomorrow at eight in the morning means planning while the day is already arriving. Planning it at the close of today means deciding while you still remember what happened.

The twelve minutes

1. Empty the capture list (5 minutes). Everything you wrote down, half-wrote down, or agreed to in a corridor. Do not sort yet. Getting it out of your memory is the entire job of this step.
2. Choose six (4 minutes). Six commitments, no more. If everything on the list feels essential, the honest version of the day is that most of it will not happen; choosing which part is better done now than at four in the afternoon.
3. Place the first block (2 minutes). Give one of the six a named start time and a length. Not all six — the first one. Days rarely fail at item four; they fail because item one never began.
4. Write the sentence (1 minute). One line describing what a finished day looks like. It is the thing you check at five o'clock instead of counting ticks.

Why six

The cap is not arbitrary. When we asked people to log planned against completed items for four weeks, lists of six or fewer were completed at roughly four times the rate of lists of twelve or more — not because the shorter lists contained less work, but because the longer ones were never really plans. They were inventories with a hopeful heading. A list you routinely fail to finish teaches you to stop believing your own planning, and that habit is much harder to repair than an overloaded Tuesday.

When the day is not yours

If your work is reactive — support, care, front-of-house, anything with a queue — six commitments is the wrong shape. Plan two: one thing that must be finished, and one thing that will be started. Everything else is the queue, and the queue does not need planning, it needs a clear point at which you stop adding to it.

The sheet for this routine is the six-item daily checklist, and the tool version is Task Planner. Either works; the routine is what matters.

The weekly review is where a planning system either becomes durable or quietly stops being used. Daily planning keeps a day upright. The review is what stops six weeks of small deferrals from becoming a backlog you no longer want to look at. It takes about thirty minutes, and it is best booked at the same time every week rather than fitted in when convenient.

Four sections

1. What closed (5 minutes). List what actually finished. This is not self-congratulation; it is calibration. Most people substantially underestimate their own output because completed work stops being visible the moment it is done.
2. What stalled (10 minutes). The longest section, and the one people skip. For each stalled item, write the reason and the next physical action. “No time” is not a reason — it is a description. The reasons that actually appear are: waiting on someone, missing a decision, the task is bigger than it was written as, or you do not want to do it. Each of those has a different remedy.
3. What changed (7 minutes). Scan the next two weeks of calendar. Note anything that moved, anything newly booked, and anything that now needs preparation. Most crises in week two were visible in week one.
4. What next week protects (8 minutes). Not a list of everything. One commitment, written last, that the coming week is arranged around.

Choosing the slot

Friday afternoon and Sunday evening both work well, for different reasons. Friday closes the week while the detail is still available, and leaves the weekend genuinely clear. Sunday gives distance and tends to produce better decisions about priorities, at the cost of putting work into a rest day. What does not work is alternating between them: the review depends on happening at a predictable moment, and a floating appointment is the first thing a busy week removes.

The stalled-work section, in detail

The sheet is the weekly review sheet, and the reference document is a reference guide to weekly review.

A project is work that will not finish this week, involves more than one person or decision, and has a state that someone might reasonably ask about. That definition matters, because most of what people call a project is a large task, and most of what they call a task is a small project. The organising cost is worth paying for the first and not the second.

Phases, and what a phase must earn

We use four phases across our project templates. Each has an entry condition, which is the point of naming them: a phase you can enter without meeting a condition is a label, not a stage.

Milestones are evidence, not dates

A milestone that reads “design complete, 12 August” tells you nothing on 13 August. A milestone that reads “design complete: three layouts reviewed and signed off by the print lead” can be checked by someone who was not in the room. Write the evidence first and the date second; the date will usually change, and the evidence rarely should.

Recording decisions

Projects longer than a month accumulate decisions that everyone remembers differently. The decision record exists to prevent the spring argument you had last spring: options considered, the decision in one sentence, the owner, the date, and the conditions under which you would reopen it. Write it within a day. Records written weeks later describe the outcome and lose the reasoning, which is the only part worth keeping.

When to split rather than extend

If a phase has moved twice and the scope has grown both times, the project is not late — it is two projects. Split it, close the first one properly, and start the second with a fresh brief. Extending is easier in the moment and costs more by the end.

A personal workflow is the path a piece of work takes from the moment it arrives to the moment it is finished, including every place it is allowed to wait. Most people have one already; they have simply never written it down, which is why work disappears at the handover points rather than in the doing.

Mapping what you already do

1. Name the inboxes. Every place work can arrive: email, a chat channel, a shared board, the pocket of a coat, a colleague at your desk. Most people find between five and nine. That number is the first useful finding.
2. Name the waiting places. Where does work sit when you have seen it but not started it? If the answer is “in the inbox”, that inbox is doing two jobs and will fail at both.
3. Find the handovers. Every point where work passes to another person or system. Note what you do to track it after it leaves. If the answer is “nothing”, you have found where things go missing.
4. Write the path in one line. For example: arrives anywhere, collected daily into one list, sorted at the weekly review, worked from a daily selection of six, archived on completion.

Reduce the inboxes before improving anything else

The single change with the largest effect is reducing the number of places work can arrive, or agreeing a collection routine that visits all of them at a fixed time. Nine inboxes checked erratically produce more genuine losses than a badly-designed task list ever will. You cannot always reduce the number — other people choose some of them — but you can decide when each is emptied.

Where work is allowed to wait

Waiting is not failure; unmarked waiting is. Give waiting a place and a review date. Something waiting on a colleague should carry the name and the date you will chase. Something waiting on your own decision should carry the date you will make it. Anything waiting with no date attached will be discovered in six months, and by then the cost has already been paid.

Reviewing the workflow itself

Once a quarter, look at the path rather than the work on it. The questions worth asking: which step do I skip when busy, which step have I added without deciding to, and what have I lost in the last three months. A workflow that has never been revised is usually one that stopped matching the work some time ago.

Priority management is straightforward when one thing matters and everything else can wait. The difficulty arrives when several things genuinely matter, at once, with real consequences attached to each — and that is when most sorting methods stop helping, because they were designed for lists containing filler.

Separate deadline from consequence

These are different questions, and conflating them is the most common error we see. A deadline says when something is due. A consequence says what happens if it is not. Work with a near deadline and a mild consequence — a report nobody reads until Thursday — is not more important than work with a distant deadline and a severe one. Score both, briefly, before you sort.

Negotiate scope, not hours

When capacity is genuinely exceeded, offering more hours postpones the problem and usually damages the following week. Offering less scope is the honest response and, in our experience, the better-received one, provided it is specific: “you can have the analysis on Thursday or the analysis and the summary deck on Monday” is a workable conversation. “I am very busy” is not.

The holding area

Our priority matrix includes a holding area for work that has been declined but not deleted. This is deliberate. Deleting declined work feels decisive and creates a small anxiety that something was lost; keeping it in the main list creates a large one. A holding area with a review date resolves both, and roughly a third of what lands there turns out never to have needed doing.

A note on urgency that is manufactured

Some urgency is real and some is a communication style. The test is simple and worth applying quietly: ask what happens if this is delivered on Wednesday instead of today. If the answer is specific, it is real. If the answer is a restatement of the request, you are managing someone's discomfort rather than a deadline, and that is a different problem with a different solution.

Time blocking is the practice of assigning work to named periods in the day rather than to a list. It is the most effective method in this catalogue for people who control their own calendar, and the most frustrating for people who do not — so the first question is not how to block, but whether your calendar is yours to block.

Building a day

1. Mark the fixed points. Meetings, collections, appointments, anything with another person attached. What remains is not free time; it is the raw material.
2. Place one deep block. Ninety minutes at your best hour, protected. One is sufficient; a day of three deep blocks is a day nobody sustains for a fortnight.
3. Group the shallow work. Email, approvals, small administration — one block, not fifteen interruptions. The cost of shallow work is almost entirely in the switching.
4. Add transitions. Ten minutes between consecutive blocks. Without them, every overrun compounds and by two o'clock the plan describes a different day.
5. Leave one buffer block empty. Not for optimism — for the thing that will actually arrive. If nothing does, you have gained an hour, which is a pleasant way to be wrong.

Blocks need names, not categories

“Admin, 2–3 PM” is a category and tends to be spent deciding what admin means. “Approve the three outstanding invoices and reply to the print supplier” is a block, and it starts without a preamble. The naming is where most of the benefit sits, which is why the practice survives even when the timing does not.

Planned against actual

The time block builder carries an actual column beside the planned one. Fill it in for two weeks and stop. What you are looking for is the multiplier — the ratio between what you thought a category of work would take and what it took. Most people find something between 1.3 and 1.8 for writing and analysis, and closer to 1.0 for routine work. Once you know your own figure, estimate as usual and apply it. This is a more reliable improvement than trying to get faster.

If your calendar belongs to other people

Block less and defend one thing. A single protected ninety-minute block, declared publicly and held for a month, is worth more than a fully blocked week that colleagues overwrite by Wednesday. Blocking is a negotiation with the people around you before it is a technique.