In This Episode…
Having upgraded my approach to planning my effort over 3 monthly, weekly and daily timescales, I have started to notice a worrying trend. My recent focus on understanding deep work and an idea from a recent episode of this podcast helped me identify the problem and come up with a change in my behaviour as a solution.
Episode Show Notes
00:17 – There are two factors that have combined to stimulate the recording of this episode:
- My recent focus on deep work.
- A fabulous tip I picked up from an article my Anne Clarke I talked about in episode 105 – A Quick Trawl Of The Best To Do List Management Tips From The Web.
01:17 – I recently upgraded my approach to planning my activities by extending my planning horizon to develop new planning sheets for my 3 monthly, monthly, weekly and daily goals.
01:35 – I have noticed I tend to generalise the description of a task at a very high level – usually just with 1 or 2 words.
02:08 – In the moment of writing out the to do I know exactly what it means but when it comes to doing it, I really have to think about it to make sense of it.
02:46 – This means I often don’t do the thing because it is not clear enough. I am reminded of the excellent quote from Chip and Dan Heath:
Resistance is often the lack of clarity
Chip and Dan Heath
03:38 – My suggestion to fix this problem is to take the suggestion from Anne Clarke discussed in episode 105:
Write your to do list for your future lazy self
Anne Clarke, Comedy Writer
05:05 – This aligns with David Allen’s Getting Things Done philosophy of knowing what your next action is.
