Get Everything Done

I was talking to a friend who runs a business that has some similarities to my own. He is particularly effective as his company's prime salesman. He spends most of his life on the road (he is in the US), with hundreds of nights a year spent in hotel rooms.

I asked him what particular lesson he would impress on someone wanting to emulate him. His answer was "separate the planning from the doing".

By this he meant that he devotes several days in his office to scheduling a trip, calling prospects and arranging appointments with them, juggling the schedule until it makes the best use of his time in a distant city. Then, once the timetable is set, he embarks on the trip and simply executes what he has preplanned, without having to consume any brain power thinking about it. By contrast, when I do such a trip, I am still anxiously scrabbling for the final appointments even as I am attending the first ones, and wondering whether there is space to fit in yet more.

The injunction "separate the planning from the doing" has lingered in the back of my mind for a long time now. I've finally accommodated it, not just with respect to business trips but more generally, by scheduling my activities four days at a time, which is the number of columns I can easily fit on two facing pages in an A5 notebook. I might spend a couple of hours scheduling a four day period, but once I've done it, I can do the tasks I have set myself without much further thought. The four-day schedule is fed by an AF-style list.

Sometimes unforseen events upend the plan and it has to be changed. That's rarely the case, in part because I give generous allowances per task, and only schedule 8:30 - 7:00 so that there's time at the extremes of the day for contingencies. Most new tasks go on the AF-style list, candidates for inclusion in the next four-day schedule. In effect, rather than asking which item on the list stands out or seems ready to be done after completion of each prior task, I am batching up four days' worth of those questions at a time.

The approach has many of the benefits of DIT, except that the buffer is four days long rather than one day. I am finding a good sense of completion at the end of the day, and feel much less stressed by the pressure of competing demands on my attention, because other than in the 1-2 hour period every four days when I am giving that subject explicit attention, I can relax in the knowledge that I have already reflected my choices from those demands on the schedule.

In theory I schedule at the end of day 4. In practice, I sometimes feel the need to start marking some things in to the next four day block after about two days. That departs from the ideal, but it still gives me a good two days of selection-free time.

I am using this seven days a week.

Mark McCormack the great entrepreneer has wrote 2 incredible books. One was what is what they dont teach you at harvard business school and getting results for dummies I red last year which in page 163 he explains how he scheduled his time. He explained that it was better to make a schedule instead of a todo list and did his own system with a note pad. Sadly I never foun any example of what he did on the web.

I really think that there is an idea around this. I which I could build a method around this.
I know some very efficient business men who often never take calls but always re call at a certain time or hour.

May be it would be possible to plan and group process and stuff at a certain day and certain time.

I will read again MCH soon and give a try next week to the system. I will try to block some times on specific task each week and see if I can do it or not and if it works or not.

I thinks that the real problem in now life is the speed of everything. Sometime it is better to slow down and do a pause.

I encountered last week a very difficult personnal situation. It began non monday. IO received a lot of emails which certain quiet threatening. I decided not to answer on anything until I had a good point of view and law information then decide the apropriate answer. I decided on tuesday to answer sunday evening. Not before. It was difficult to maintain this engagement. I was so worried.

10 years ago when I was in a famous company I would have made a lot of emails. Spending my time answering, argueing and so on... Now I decided to let clearly decay the situation.

30 mn ago I answered my decision. I did it clearly. With non anger. Quietly. Perfecltly knowing what I did and why.

So I thing it is a good idea to plan. I explained in another thread how I planed my goals. I think I will plan the most important things in my life. I noticed that One day is too short and complicated. 4 days could be great because I try not to work on wednesday I mean only for urgencies and non commercial things. wednesday is my weekly core day. I do my weekly review, plan my goals, adapt them, decide on what to do next week and review it on sunday that's what I am going to do just after this ;-).

So thanks for this thread David it gave me lot of ideas. I would be very interested to understand how your friend does it. I mean a step by step method.

On the controversy between listers and schedulers I found quite interesting the following article.

http://perfect.mytimedesign.com/learning-to-optimize-each-day/

@Nick thanks For the article it shows the différence between two approach shedulers and listers. I dont see any real recommandation. I always made list and never real shedules (except for my goals) I think i could try it may be it could work. I only see o,e advantage with scheduling wich is avoiding details and focus on the most important things to do.

@David . I Gave a try today. I did it simply. I put on saturday and sunday all the big rock I intended to do. It forced me to be concise and to focus on the core and nothing else. Then, today I planed what I wanted to do just putting nothing else but the subject. No task, nothing else except some little detail I could forget during the action.

I was very productive. All went fluently and fast. I was coolest than usualy. I was very focus on my subjects. The methods seem to stick with me. It is much better than list. I still put waiting for and plan things in omnifocus. It is interesting because as I work with omnifocus 2 I can see in the forecast perspective all my projects planned on my agenda. It then force me to work on project as they are coming.

I feel happy tonight and relax. Thanks !

I Forgot one thing, It force me on each subject I want to follow or make a treatement when I have a client to make an habit to set the next time I will Have him on line to treat the subject. Let's me explain. I had a client about building x today. He said that he had to consult his partners before giving it to me. We fix a call on wednesday because I planned to work on his buiding from 2PM to 3 PM and he was available. Interesting....

The main benefit I am getting out of scheduling four days ahead is that I more frequently identify circumstances when, if I don't do something in whatever slot I have allocated to it, I will have no other opportunities to spend time on it before the relevant deadline.

I also favour hybrid approach. I am not scheduler and I am not lister - I stand in between.

I plan my week in paper week calendar which has days on left side, notes on right side. On left side I write major (not all) actions/appointments/reminders for each day (but not all appointments - I use google cal for them). On right side I list other activities grouped by ad-hoc categories (3-5 categories for work, 3-5 for non-work), which I want to do that week but not necessarily on particular day - or "little and often" tasks.

So my weekly plan is not tight schedule but also not loose list.

Every morning, I make daily task list with all activities I want to do that day (mainly transferred from week calendar mentioned above). Some days, I work only from this list (prioritized by importance/resistance), but some days I structure more with loose daily schedule, inspired by GSD - http://utilware.com/gsd/ (it is mentioned here under term "prioritization / time ladder").

This schedule consists of some daily activities/tasks precisely defined in time (e.g. 11.00 leave home...,) with other tasks generally spread around (before, after) timely-based tasks (e.g. task "iron my shirt" before "leave home" task - it is not scheduled for 10.50 or 10:45, I just know that I want to do it before 11.00 when I am leaving).

From years of experimenting - this is the exact level of structure I need - with some tasks in "daily schedule / time ladder", and some tasks in daily task list.

For project tasks, ideas, someday/maybes, checklists etc. I use lists.

I also use a blend of calendar and lists, and in my article listed above - Learning to Optimize Each Day's Plan from the Controversy Between Listers and Schedulers [ Research] http://perfect.mytimedesign.com/learning-to-optimize-each-day/ - I deliberately drew on extremes in behavior to help show that there is some science behind the choice of one technique versus another.

It need not be a random trip between one technique and another, but an orderly evolution that matches an expected increase in time demands in one's life.

In the article (which is _quite_) long I show that everyone starts out using memory at first. The path from using memory to To-Do List(s) to using a calendar to using an Auto-Optimizer like SkedPal or Timeful is one that can a professional can anticipate and expect to undertake in his/her career. One day, this progression in skills may be seen as ordinary the steps one takes from Arithmetic to Geometry to Calculus.