Creating a Daily Plan

I’m a planner. Knowing exactly what I’m supposed to do next prepares me to deliberately and confidently take my next step without delay. I only have a finite amount of time here, so I want to make each moment count. Planning helps me prevent wastefulness, especially with nonrenewable resources like time. Just as having a budget tells your money where to go, having a daily plan tells your time where to go. A good daily plan should be a strategic outline of how you intend to invest your time and energy to support your larger mission and vision. If you lack a plan, others may enlist you in a plan supporting their agenda, whether it's your boss, a friend, or another influencer. Daily planning ensures we work on the intended vision by implementing simple systems, creating healthy routines, and developing antifragile adaptability.    

Simple Systems 

A good daily plan requires a simple, easy-to-use system. It’s not the right system for you if it doesn't meet those requirements. I’ve used many systems over the years but the freedom of a simple dot grid journal has been my preference for the past four years. For me, a good planning system has a few key parts: 

1. Time Management: a calendar to schedule priorities, events, and appointments 
2. Task Management: a list to capture and prioritize actionable items and project 
3. Information Station: a section to jot and organize notes, ideas, and reflections
4. Optimization Station: a palette to create, align, and reflect on vision, goals, and priorities   

Another consideration is whether your planning system will be digital, paper, or a combination. There is a lot of potential for technology to help us buy back our time, but I love the tactility of capturing a good plan on paper. If you are on the fence, it may be worth trying both. My main system is on paper, but I have some supporting digital pieces. 

Healthy Routines 

Healthy Routines are the superheroes of our daily plan. They are the pieces that can be put on autopilot, saving valuable mental energy for the less predictable portions of our day. We want to make as much of our daily plan into a routine as possible. If we’re building a new routine or improving an existing one, it’s helpful to jot down what we currently do, whether it’s intentional or not. Writing it on paper or in the notes app shines a light on what’s working for us or against us. We create room to work on aspirational habits when we identify and eliminate unintentional, negative habits. We’ll also want to find or create an obvious cue to signal the start of our routine. I have a few key routines that keep me on track during my day: Rise (5:00), Workflow (7:30), Self-Care (3:00), Prep to Connect (4:00), and Wind Down (8:00). Some routine cues are built into the day naturally, but I still have to use an alarm for my afternoon routines. Have grace as you figure out what works best for you. If you’re just getting started, I highly recommend starting with a morning rise routine and a bedtime routine. A healthy structure in these two parts of your day will greatly impact your energy levels.  

Routine Optimization Steps: 

1. Write down every step of your current routine, whether it’s intentional or autopilot. 
2. Mark steps as positive (+), negative (-), or neutral (.) 
3. Recreate the routine without the negative steps. Display or pin it for easy accessibility. 
4. Review and practice this new routine until it becomes natural. 
5. Then, consider if there are any aspirational habits you’d like to anchor into this routine. 

Antifragile Adaptability  

We created a fantastic plan… then it imploded. Excellent, we found an opportunity to practice antifragile adaptability, a foundational skill for daily planning. We can’t control our circumstances, but it’s better to go into our day with the graceful flexibility to pivot instead of stumbling through without intention. Whether we’re working through an inevitable inconvenience or a full dumpster fire, algorithms help us optimize our antifragile adaptable response. For instance:

• If (when) my family interrupts my daily plan, then I will take a centering breath and thank God that I have people to share my life and love with. 
• If I don’t feel like working out, then I will lace up my shoes, set a timer for five minutes, and start my workout anyway. 
• If my break timer alerts me before I’m finished with my work, then I will STILL break to optimize my production capacity for the next round. 

Without a solid plan and if/then algorithms, we may be tempted to respond to every bid for our time, energy, and focus. This can take us down some paths we never wanted to go. A daily plan serves as a proposal of how we intend to invest our resources, and we can also use it to communicate our daily priorities and targets with others to prevent overleveraging our resources. There are times to say no and there are times to pivot. Knowing the difference will come with time and properly evaluated and applied experience. Here are a few polite responses I've learned to use over the years. 

Polite Responses to Protect Your Daily Plan: 

1. No, but thank you: “Thank you for thinking of me to help you with this, but after reviewing my commitments, I realized I do not have the reserves to commit the level of time/energy this important project/task needs.”  
2. Yes, but later: “I’d love to help you with this, but my time/energy has already been scheduled/invested for this week. Is this something you’d like an hour of my time to help with next week?” 
3. Yes, with sacrifice: “I’d love to help you with that, but I have to complete this on deadline. Would you like us to move this deadline back to work on that instead?” 

Start Tiny 

I knew that creating a power hour routine to prepare for and plan my day would change my life, but I struggled for years to make it happen. It was so disappointing to start a new season knowing that I had failed to consistently accomplish the one behavior that I knew would pay dividends. Finally, I decided to make my goal so tiny that it would be nearly impossible to fail. My goal became to open my planner every day. That’s it. I didn’t have to create an elaborate schedule or overwhelming task list. I didn’t even need a pen. All I had to do was open the planner after I woke up. During the first week, there were a couple of days that was literally all I did. By the second week, it felt easy enough to jot down a quick task, so I did. Checking off a simple task to do a load of laundry or pay the utility bill was my super important daily mission, and it felt good to complete it. The sense of purpose created by that tiny action was rewarding. Little did I know, the momentum I unlocked was about to change my life.

My Power Hour has over-complicated, re-simplified, and continuously optimized quite a bit through the years, but it all started with breaking down a big elusive goal into a tiny habit. What tiny habit or micro action do you need to start to support a big goal you’ve been struggling to achieve? Is it time to purchase a planner or notebook? Do you need to set an alarm or reminder cue? Is it time to do a curious, but honest review of what’s working and what’s broken or missing in your current system? No matter what level we find ourselves on, there’s always something that we can refine, optimize, or improve. What’s your tiny next step today to optimize your daily planning system? 

Simple Steps to Create a Daily or Weekly Plan:

1. Timeblock your important routines (appointments with self: rise, bedtime, etc.). 
2. Add your commitments (appointments with others). 
3. Create/review your task list.  
4. Identify one to three priority tasks to move you closer to your goal/vision. 
5. Time block when you’re going to accomplish those one to three priority tasks. 
6. Imagine responding with antifragile adaptability to the inevitable challenges that will arise.

Pro Tip: Create tomorrow’s daily plan at the end of today's work so your mind can smoothly switch from work to recovery. 

Faith Encouragement: 

• Proverbs 16:3 - Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and he will establish your plans. 
• Proverbs 16:9 - In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps.
• Proverbs 11:3 - The integrity of the upright guides them, but the unfaithful are destroyed by their duplicity.
• Moltke: “No plan of operations reaches with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main force.”  
• William Blake - “I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's.”
• James Clear - “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”