Daily Planning: Getting Things Done

Yesterday’s post explained the vital importance of properly planning your productive efforts.

Such planning holds the key to the transcendence of tedious and stressful work, elevating us to the level of inspired creation. 

It’s almost a spiritual experience 🙂

So, let’s start where the rubber meets the road: getting things done on a day-by-day basis. 

Our short-term minds

Any worthwhile project takes months, if not years to yield significant results. But the human mind did not evolve this way. No, it demands instant gratification and overnight success.

When this fantasy inevitably crashes to the ground, we are discouraged. And when we get discouraged, we start letting the days slip by in an empty, unproductive blur. 

Days become weeks, weeks become months, months become years. And before you know it, you’re trapped for life slaving away on the consumerist hamster wheel. 

The purpose of daily planning is simply to prevent this unproductive blur that has spawned so many uninspiring dead-end careers around the world. 

Make a list

A to-do list is one of the most cliche pieces of productivity advice out there.

But there’s a reason for that: 

It works so well that I can confidently say the listless are severely handicapping themselves in this great game of life. 

You must have a list. 

If you want the best out of life, this is not negotiable. The only thing up for debate is what this list will look like. 

Features of a good daily list

Here is a little list for effective list-making:

  1. Make sure your list is extremely user-friendly. Otherwise, it simply won’t happen. 
  2. Properly integrate it into your life. Populate it as part of your morning routine and control it as part of your evening routine. 
  3. Make sure it’s always accessible. The ability to add important things that come to mind on the fly is crucial. 
  4. Ensure it can automate recurring tasks. This is a direct pathway to the superpower of consistency. 

For me, Google Tasks offers the best solution for bringing all these features together (described earlier). 

A crucial added benefit of Google Tasks is it’s natural integration with the longer-term planning we’ll be discussing tomorrow. See you then!