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„It’s not the will to win that counts – everyone has that. What matters is the will to prepare to win“ – Paul Bryant, six-time American Football Coach
This article is on How to plan and execute effectively. Have you made the following experience: the more commitments or goals you have, the more you feel like you’re going nowhere? You have to reorganize or nothing works anymore? How would feel if somebody says you should claim back time?
Well, you should! And that’s also why gainmoretime.com exists, gain the time you deserve for your goals. Gain back the control in your life!
In this post, you learn how you achieve the things you planned and not let the commitments “own you”. The annoying housework, this scientific work, this important call, or finally your tax return – if we finish things, we can enjoy time with friends or family earlier and – more importantly: for sure and without a bad conscience.
Use effective planning and disciplined execution. This is one of the best ways you can be a proactive controller of what happens in your life. Achievement plans can be a game-changer in this respect. I don’t like to call them to-do lists as they are more than that. This blog shows you an achievement plan system, easy-to-apply and backed by the art and science of planning, prioritizing, and how to stick to it.
The goal is that you get more things done in a shorter time, do not forget stuff and do not worry about procrastination (which is when you postpone things again and again…) – ultimately: reach your goals earlier!
It’s a natural method for organizing your daily life, designed to help your mindset of finishing more and achieving more in less time. After field-testing it for many years, I can confidently say: it works unbelievably well!
I. Simplification is King: Organize in Simple and Feasible Ways
Call it “action plan”, “achievement plan”, “task management system” or “to-do list”: in this article I make no distinction. Why? Because simplification is the ultimate sophistication. I like to call it an achievement plan. There might be slight differences between different terms, but in the end I wanted something practical everyone can apply.
I distilled an approach for you that I have used for many years and that fulfills the criteria of simple application, but still combines the best knowledge from the worlds of neuroscience and psychology.
In our daily lives, it’s crucial to have an approach that is not only applicable and proven by some but also practical and feasible for us. Otherwise we won’t do it.
My previous post on the General principles behind this achievement planning system and time management covers many of the principles the system is based on, grounded in scientific research and insights from numerous influential authors.
II. Effective Planning & Execution: a Proven Strategy for Daily Life
First note, that I use a different achievement plan privately than at daily work – the reason is that the requirements at daily work are different when you cannot set and define your own goals, because somebody else (your boss, the company) does this for you. Therefore, most job achievement plans are more of a breakdown of tasks or work buckets. At the end of this chapter I will briefly walk you through these job achievement plan as well.
So, I prefer to have one regular, weekly achievement plan. I follow Stephen Covey’s recommendation regarding the weekly frequency. In his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People I learned some of the most effective planning methods. One idea he suggests in to plan the week in advance while maintaining flexibility to adapt for unforeseen events.
The idea is, that yearly and monthly achievement plans cover a too long period to stay motivated in execution mode (including reviews and adaptations). And daily achievement plans are too short of a period as the effort to always write new daily plans is too high for most of us, practically speaking.
Weekly achievement plans in contrast are concrete enough and the effort is manageable.
But I have 2 more lists, that help me fill my regular weekly achievement plan:
1. The first is my digital Trello board. Currently, I also test the tool “Asana“. It doesn’t matter which digital tool you use or whether it’s handwritten or digital. The only thing that matters is that you use it wisely. I use it to be able to quickly note new smaller tasks (remember from the blog post Maximize Your Time: Transformative Principles for Greater Returns: these are “sand” activities that can easily and quickly be done, but have to be done. I also use it to “park” ideas in a “pipeline”.
In Trello you can create typical Kanban boards. A simple Kanban Board has three lists named “To Do”, “WIP” (Work in Progress), “Done”. So, explicitely my lists are called “Pre-Pipeline”, “Pipeline”, “Next”, “Today” and “Done”.
The pipeline lists only differ by long term and medium term goals. In the list “Next”, I park activities that will become goals on my achievement plan in one of the next weeks. The “Today” list is filled with spontaneous small “sand” goals like doing the shopping, some household activities etc. – typical “to-do list” items.
You do not need the Pipelines and “Next” lists, this might seem a bit too complicated in the beginning (for me it grew like this as it made sense for me) – the only Trello list I recommend is one for spontaneous small sand activities in order to be flexible enough to fill in small things that might be important and might need to be preferred.
I find this very useful as sometimes ideas of what I have or want to do just pop into my head and I want to capture them directly and since I have my mobile phone quicker in my hands than the handwritten achievement plan I capture them in Trello not to forget them. You do not always need paper and pencil with digital tools, so it’s helpful when speed is necessary.
2. The second is a yearly list of goals. Twice a year during vacation I screen that yearly list and cross things I achieved and put new activities in my digital Trello Pipeline.
PDCA: Plan, Do, Check, Act
The execution of this achievement plan system follows a general principle from the Lean Management Philosophy. It’s called the “PDCA-Cycle”, standing for: Plan-Do-Check-Act.
The “P” reflects the planning process as described above, “Do” are your daily actions trying to achieve (cross) goals from your list. “Check” is a review or reflection on what you have achieved compared to what you wanted to achieve. Lastly, “Act” refers to the act upon the review, i.e. adapting activities and goals. If necessary, the original plan is adapted based on what you achieved and what’s still to do.
So, let’ me explain to you’s dive deep into how the achievement plan process works in detail. We will now cover all the steps “P” for “Plan”, “D” for “Do”, “C” for “Check” and “A” for “Act”.
“P” – Plan
The planning process is simple, intuitive and always the same:
1. Goal gathering
2. Goal clustering
3. Goal scheduling
1. Goal gathering
Write the weekly timeframe on the achievement plan (e.g. 29/07/2024 – 04/08/2024) and then begin gathering activities that now can come either directly as an idea from your mind or from pipeline lists, pre-planning lists or yearly planning lists.
It doesn’t matter so much for now, but it’s important to just gather these activities randomly for your weekly achievement plan, in no specific order. If you do not have any “pipeline” list, just brainstorm on what you want to achieve in the upcoming week. Also think about regular routines.
For example, I put sports on my list with a tick box and write the weekdays under it, so I can tick it when it’s done. I cross the whole line, when I ticked all the boxes.
2. Goal clustering
You need a suitable cluster system, these can depend on your purposes. I’ve tried several clusterings, but I only go for one now. If you like, here’s what I’ve tried in the past – I’ve clustered…
- … in sequence/ by urgency (1st, 2nd, 3rd, …) → if you know the activities very well and can foresee how long it takes you, e.g. housework.
- … by effort, if you don’t want or cannot estimate the time duration, then you separate them by big/medium/small goals → I thought, it fosters the pareto thinking and the rule-of-3, but it ended up being hard to schedule these goals, if you are not estimating the duration which is why I discarded this approach in the past. If you don’t know yet about pareto thinkging or the rule-of-3, read this blog post about Maximize Your Time: Transformative Principles for Greater Returns
- … by duration (30Min, 1h, 2h, 4h, 8h, 2 days, …1 week, …) → This is the one for me that works really well! You can always estimate the duration of a goal, it doesn’t matter, if you can estimate it reliably;
- … by scheduled periods, i.e. time periods when the work takes place (e.g. Day 1, day 2, … CW1, 2, 3…, July, August, …) → I would not recommend this except for days within the week, but still then you need to be more concrete as you don’t know the duration and when on this day you can do it (scheduling issue). It can make sense for yearly planning activities and I tried it in the past, but it’s not recommendable in the end as the first months you stick to it, and then over the year you lack behind it the plan has to be changed and so on. So, what I searched for was a “procrastination protection mechanism”.
- … into content buckets (“Order” for handcraft activities or household, “Finances & Investment”, “Family”, “Purchases”, “Vacations”, “Morning routines, etc.) → this is what I often used for a yearly planning in the beginnings, where the goals then had to be transferred to the weekly achievement plan. Still, it worked for me. I did this also, when I found I didn’t use a system for a long time and gathered so many activities, that it made sense to cluster them in order to see their relevance and when it might be possible to do them.
Of course, types of clustering can be combined with each other and so on… But: the simpler, the better.
3. Goal scheduling
The last planning step is to think about where in the week these goals can be scheduled in order to begin them or to finish them. Try out what works best for you: specific times in a day or just “in the evening”. It depends since everyone’s life is different.
The more goals you can schedule, the better. Some goals are schedulable, others not and have to be done day-by-day or when another one is done. Be flexible. However, this point is really important. If you put a day or even a time to the goal, your achievement plan has so much more binding force. You feel commited more and that’s important in order to achieve more!
So I figured out that duration clusters are best. The reasons are closely related to scheduling:
- By estimating a duration, you explicitly define what needs to be scheduled well.
- You implicitly know the effort (small/medium/high) and high effort goals (the ones with the longest duration) can be identified as the ones that have to be scheduled inevitably, otherwise they won’t happen, as they take too long. Even if you cannot finish them at that dated time, at least the scheduling helps you to begin with them. I even began to mark these goals with a color in order to identify them quickly. You can also use other colors, if you have goals or routines that are really important to happen this week (e.g. finding and buying a gift for the wedding anniversary…)
- The duration clustering leads to scheduling, which is a process that helps you train yourself to “think Pareto“. You often need to “kill” the hardest parts of a problem first, before you can tackle other parts. In constraast for “new territory goals” you just need to get started before you even know what the parts of the problem are! But think about the duration and you’ll get a clue on the effort behind it. However, remember: the biggest effort does not necessarily mean that it is the most effective task. Learn on what effectiveness means and how you can be more effective in your daily life!
D – “Do”
I like to cross the goals when I finish them. Science tells us that everytime we finish something dopamine is released, the “feel-good” hormone. It makes us happy and keeps us motivated. This burst of happiness from completing something not only feels great but also fuels your motivation further, creating a positive cycle of productivity and satisfaction.
I love this insight as it basically tells us that the reward itself already is finishing things, it’s simply more fun when we complete something. So, you can cross a goal from the list and it releases more dopamine or you move a goal into the “done” column in Trello.
In fact, I do both, ticking days for routines on the achievement plan, crossing whole goals on the achievement plan and moving goals into the “done” column in Trello. So, multiple boost 😉 It’s probably a matter of taste, but to me the crossing is most satisfying as it gets the goal out of your head as you don’t see it anymore on the remaining list.
C – “Check” and A – “Act”
This step is so important, but it can be summarized into one because it’s one flow of thinking.
So, as mentioned before, the Check is a review on the passed week’s achievement plan. What did you want to achieve and what did you actually achieve? Oftentimes the reason is obvious (something else was more important), but sometimes you can ask yourself whether you misjudged some activities (e.g. in duration) and learn from it.
“Act” means the act upon the review, so you adapt and enhance your activities and goals. If necessary, the original plan is adapted based on what you achieved, what’s still to do and what new goals are included.
Simply speaking, you always adapt your plan and stay flexible. The only necessity for this is to take a couple of minutes of time to review your plan and make these adaptations. Think about regular check-in’s and check-out’s. The PDCA-cycle can only be realized by a regular check-in and a check-out.
I love this so much, because from the moment you begin these check-in’s and check-out’s you begin sticking to your plan more and more and you take control and become more proactive. Life not just happens to you, but you begin to shape it.
Let me describe the check-in and check-out within a PDCA-cycle:
1. Check-in: before the week begins (e.g. Sunday evening) write your weekly achievement plan, i.e. do the planning steps of goal gathering, clustering and scheduling. Also do a daily check-in in the morning where you look at your achievement plan and decide what you want to achieve today.
2. Check-out: in the evening, cross the goals that have been achieved. If you don’t have time for a daily check-out, only do the really necessary weekly check-out. In a check-out you cross achieved goals and look at what’s still missing. However, the weekly check out should be combined with the new check-in, which completes the cycle:
3. New Check-in: basically, this is similar to the check-in from before. however, I want to emphasize the cycle process here: you write your plan for the next week based on the results from this week (i.e. from the weekly check-out).
So, goals that remained uncrossed still have to be done and therefore carried into the next week and new goals can only come into the list, if enough “old” goals could be achieved. As mentioned, don’t overload yourself, rule-of-3.
This is important as you otherwise begin to procrastinate more and more as the list gets longer and longer and you are demotivated like a cat that suddenly realizes the tuna it was promised is actually just broccoli. 😉
III. Bonus: Job Achievements Lists
I promised an excursion to job achievement lists. So here it is.
In my daily jobs I have always used a slightly different planning system where I also use duration clusters. But in this case you work for someone else’s goals and do not have to worry so much about finding time slots as you have plenty of time in a row and work buckets are often rather comprehensible.
My achievement list for job environments contains the following:
Date and day of the week
- tasks or goals, that are crossed later
- Estimated hours for the goal (duration clustering). Here, it’s not just a feasible estimation, but rather an allowed time or a target time for that goal. Everything above that needs adaptations for the plan. This moment is an important chance to think about why it took you longer. You analyze what went wrong and what you can improve next time. You will realize that often it is a distraction, working on minor tasks or getting off topic.
- Secret tip: I also use this list for “stopping points”: you write down at which activity you stopped your working day and write down the next 1-3 necessary tasks so that when you come back the next day you immediately know what to do, you don’t lose time familiarizing yourself again and get back into the flow faster.
IV. Summary: How to Execute Achievement Lists and Stick to them
So it’s as simple as that:
- On Sunday evening gather your planned activities.
- Cluster them mostly by duration (don’t be too strict in your first clustering tries),
- Think about my week and where the most important activities might be possible. For the short-duration tasks you can find a slot usually quickly, the longer-duration ones have to be scheduled or maybe even broken down or at least you begin with them and see.
- Day by day you are trying to cross scheduled activities from that list and your daily digital list for small things like shopping, household activities. If you could not make even 1 from the achievement plan, in your check-out you will analyze the reason (maybe the daily job kept you too busy today) and it’s okay.
- As long as you do the check-out and check-in in the morning and in the evening you are focussed on your goals.
If you need further information about the psychology and principles behind this planning system and time management in general, read this post about Principles on the Returns on Time! An important thing is not to put yourself under stress or pressure in this whole adventure.
When you cannot finish certain tasks, it’s fine. It wasn’t meant to be today or this week. So these goals stay on the list for next week. It is not important to perfectly stick to a plan, it’s important to have a plan. Having a plan and staying on it makes the difference!
Supportive to the achievement plan system, here’s how you apply Goal-Setting Methods that help you finding the long and medium term goals on your achievement plan.
In order to filter and priotize, I described the Eisenhower matrix strategy in it’s probably most advanced description you’ll find on the web for you that will help you to gain more free time and more degrees of freedom for your achievement plan.
What are your experiences? Maybe you use another system and you are happy with it – leave me a comment below or contact me via the contact form.