An ordinary to-do list will quickly grow too crowded to serve as a useful planning tool. A more structured organizational scheme is required—one that reflects the actual complexity of work.
Creating such a system requires a kind of structural analysis: you have to start by recognizing that your job involves juggling multiple roles and competing priorities, and then make space for those in your system.
A professor, for instance, might divide her responsibilities by role into “Teaching,” “Research,” and “Service”; an office manager might identify “Personnel Requests,” “Supplies,” and “Maintenance Issues.” In addition to recognizing your roles, you need to grapple with the fact that not all obligations are the same. You can categorize them by status. There might be generic status categories, such as “Back Burner” (for work you need to eventually accomplish), “To Clarify” (for vague commitments that still need to be fleshed out), “This Week” (for top priorities), or “Waiting to Hear Back.” But there might also be statuses specific to your job. A professor’s Service role, for example, might include a “Student Requests to Process” status, or an office manager’s Supplies role might include a collection of items “To Order.”
instead of asking yourself “What’s next?” before consulting a huge to-do list, you can choose a specific role, and then survey the various tasks associated with that role, organized by status. In this way, you can achieve a quick gestalt understanding of what’s on your plate at the moment, allowing you to make a smart decision about your next activity without feeling overwhelmed by all that you have to do.
Structured task systems can help tame the chaos of your commitments, but they can’t address the sense of meaningless busyness that haunts so many knowledge workers in our current moment. Ideally, we want to prevent our days from devolving into nihilistic walkabouts from one random task to another. But this requires intention—and that, in turn, requires planning.
One unconventional way to improve your plans is to create them on different timescales simultaneously. You can start with a seasonal plan, which describes your main objectives for the next three or four months.
You can then refer to your seasonal plan each Monday, when you outline a weekly plan for the days ahead. This weekly planning process is more tactical than its seasonal counterpart; the idea is to survey your calendar for the week, see what you’ve already scheduled, and then figure out how you can make progress on the goals in your seasonal plan with the time that remains. In many cases, you’ll want to add the efforts identified in your weekly plan directly onto your calendar so that they’ll be protected like any other appointment.
When you make your weekly plan, you can also review your structured collection of obligations, using your roles and statuses to identify a strategic set of tasks that will actually fit into your available time.
Finally, there’s the daily plan. Each morning, you can consult your weekly plan to quickly configure a plan for the current workday. Don’t simply write an abstract list of things you hope to accomplish. Instead, directly confront the time that’s actually available to you, assigning specific work to specific hours. This time-blocking approach forces you to be more realistic about how much time you really have. It’s hard to perfectly predict how long everything will take, so it’s likely that your efforts will deviate from your plan. That’s O.K. Every so often, you can step back and fix the plan for the remaining hours in your day. The goal isn’t to be prescient about your time but to be intentional with it.
The challenge in cultivating a sustainable approach to modern knowledge work is to locate the space between productivity fetishism and the knee-jerk rejection of productivity thinking as toxic or unnecessary.