Plan ahead, folks!
In Dad on Organizing I wrote about writing things down. Guess what, we’re writing down plans too! Getting good at making (and following) plans is a path to success. Some folks’ careers are all about making plans. In class, your teacher is following a plan. You already make plans, I’m sure. What else is there to talk about? Lots!
First, what is a plan? You already know this: A sequence of steps, often following a schedule. Why do you need to plan? Well, sometimes you don’t. For a math worksheet, maybe it takes longer than 2 minutes, but you can still just do it. A book report essay, on the other hand, you can also just do it, but it might get done better with a plan. To distinguish from making plans to meet up with friends, let’s talk about planning projects.
Planning Projects
Maybe there’s a better word than “project” but I just read that PMI page linked earlier, and so we can consider most anything a project:
- Completing a math worksheet
- Getting dinner on the table by 6 tonight
- Writing “Dad on Planning” or a college essay
- Getting our Capital Hall to Level 10 Some projects are more difficult than others, and benefit from being broken down into tasks. Specifically, those projects that feel like a lot of work. The math worksheet maybe is a bit of work, but that essay for English, oof! Where do you even start? For work that elicits that feeling of “oof” and “maybe I should check TikTok instead”, try the first step of planning: breaking down a task into smaller tasks.
Breaking Down Tasks
Let’s take that book report for English. We can break apart the assignment into smaller components that maybe feel a bit better. Instead of “do my book report”, maybe:
- Read the book, or enough of it.
- Make an outline of your report or essay,
- Fill in parts of the outline,
- Edit as necessary, and
- Turn it in. Can’t this all be done at the same time? Of course, but it is easier if you break apart the steps. I’m following this plan to write this post (currently on step 3), and I have a larger plan to complete this website project, with several pages.
Or does one of the task (perhaps that first one) still feel like “oof”? Continue to break it down. Step 1.1 could be “read chapter 1” and 1.1.1 could be “read the first page” but consider that there is a balance between planning work and doing work, and too much planning counts as procrastination. After breaking down the work, hopefully you feel better about completing the individual tasks. On the other hand, maybe there are a lot more of them than before? That suggests you might want to plan ahead, so you have time to do them all. Remember, they are the components of the work you have to do, so not breaking them apart doesn’t remove any work, it just obscures it.
It is easier to complete work if you spread it over time. This also helps you learn the material better, as when you return to work you started earlier, this signals to your brain: “hey, this is important, maybe we should remember it.”
In ”How to be a High School Superstar”, Cal Newport suggests writing papers over 3 days. Day 1: research/outline, Day 2: Write, and Day 3: Edit. These days don’t need to be contiguous, and maybe day 2 is harder than the other days, so plan accordingly. Saving it all for the night before it is due is less fun, and leads to a worse result.
Planning your Time
I hope we’ve established that spreading out the work beats doing it all the night before. It may feel that the time required to do work expands to take up all the available time, but I’ll address this fallacy when I write about doing work, next.
The best way to schedule work that I have found is called “time blocking.” Here’s an article about that, and Mr. Newport wrote a whole book on it.
Time blocking works by scheduling your day. I wake up at 6, and go to bed at 8:30, so that’s 14+ hours where I could conceivably be doing something. I certainly don’t want to be working that whole time. I have things I want to do, too! I have found I have more time to do the things I want to do if I schedule when I plan to do the things I am less interested in doing.
Some of your time will be filled, for example by classes or meals. If you are over-scheduled, perhaps most of your day is filled, leaving “after dinner” the only time available to schedule. Then you might try:
- 7-8 clean up dinner
- 8-8:30 math worksheet
- 8:30-9:30 write essay
- 9:30-10 break and so on.
Do I have any fancy apps for this? Nope, sometimes I use a text document, and other times I’ll use a pencil and notepad.
How important is it to stick to the schedule? Not very. Well, that’s up to you, but things take longer than expected, interruptions happen, and so forth. A low-tech solution (a note) means I can cross things out as needed. I read somewhere that if you stick to 80% of your planned schedule, you’re doing just fine. We’ll talk more about this when I write about adapting, skill #5.
Planning beyond a day
Most of the time I don’t time-block my day. At work, I have meetings which fill much of the time, and I find I don’t need to write down what to do in the unscheduled parts. (Maybe I would get more done if I did!)
A more popular form of time scheduling is across a week, month, or beyond. You are forced to learn some of this in school, in that assignments are due at various days and times. For that, we use a planner. There are many forms of planners for sale, and some people get really in to this, making beautiful, detailed schedules. As I wrote about in Organizing, I use Todoist to collect and organize my tasks. Another key feature of that app is scheduling tasks: annotating them with a due date, and optionally a time. Besides dentist appointments and exercise reminders, I scheduled work deadlines, which may be due dates set by somebody else, or may be targets that I just made up.
I don’t have a lot of work with strict deadlines, other than “what’s for dinner?” task that doesn’t work if I save it for the last minute. I also don’t use a planner, beyond putting things in Todoist and my Google Calendar, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. Try various systems and see what works for you.
Instead of scheduling all my work, I use a system called Kanban. The planning aspect of Kanban is collecting work I will do in a “backlog”, then moving tasks I start to an “in progress” state, and finally to “Completed” once it’s done. When I go to do work, then, I can continue whatever is “in progress” or select something from the backlog. This system doesn’t work if you don’t take initiative to work vs. play, but it can if you set blocks of time for work that are distinct from those where you won’t work.
Goals vs. Routines
You probably know what goals are, and those fit with prioritizing. Routines can help you schedule when to do work. For example, when you come home from school, you might decompress for 15 minutes, and then work on homework until dinnertime. If you don’t decide upon a routine, you will find yourself falling in to one. Maybe you come home from school, and then find yourself decompressing on the couch for several hours until dinnertime, meaning that homework time now extends into bedtime.
So what?
Maybe this all seems like extra work. That’s true, and the benefit to me is that it makes the other work I do more efficient, at a net savings of time. Maybe that won’t be the case for you? You won’t know until you try it. That’s the last idea here, is to incorporate a feedback loop. Maybe you try planning your weeks and breaking apart essays into 3 days, and find it to be helpful. Maybe you try out time blocking your days, and find it to be unnecessary overhead. From time to time, (Sunday afternoons or evenings?) you can see what’s working, what’s not, and adjust accordingly. Here you go, it’s a Weekly Review!