How Do I Convince Myself to Execute Plans?

00:00:00.000 | [Music]

00:00:04.700 | All right, we have a question here from cplayer.

00:00:09.000 | cplayer says, "I often spend a lot of time on daily, weekly, and monthly plans,

00:00:15.600 | but I never follow through.

00:00:18.000 | I have this issue where I know what I should be doing, but I don't do it.

00:00:21.400 | I'm even mindful that I'm making a bad choice. Help!"

00:00:25.400 | Then he or she elaborates,

00:00:28.900 | "I really admire you, David Allen, Jocko, and Ryan Holiday."

00:00:33.200 | By the way, that'd be a cool dinner party.

00:00:35.600 | It'd be a weird, interesting dinner party.

00:00:37.800 | I think we would, after one or two bottles of wine,

00:00:40.500 | Jocko would beat up David Allen

00:00:43.200 | while Ryan gave us a lecture on Epica Tetris,

00:00:47.700 | and I fell asleep because, you know, I don't get enough sleep because of my kids.

00:00:52.100 | All right, going on with the elaboration,

00:00:54.500 | "You each have this great discipline and follow-through.

00:00:56.500 | I don't. I put all my effort in the plans.

00:00:59.100 | I'm great at planning, but I'm poor at doing the work."

00:01:01.100 | All right, so see, player, let's spend less time planning.

00:01:03.800 | Forget that for now.

00:01:05.600 | What I want you to commit to is a single thing, metrics.

00:01:11.000 | You're going to have a notebook

00:01:13.400 | that every single day at the end of the day,

00:01:15.900 | you write down whatever the key metrics we're going to design for here

00:01:19.400 | in a second to track every day, you're going to write them down.

00:01:21.900 | You can use, like, my time block planner has a metric space.

00:01:25.500 | If you're just tracking metrics, you can get,

00:01:28.400 | I like the Moleskine monthly planners,

00:01:31.500 | where it has a little bit of space for every day,

00:01:34.000 | and you have a whole week on one two-page spread.

00:01:37.300 | So it's a perfect amount of space if you're just tracking metrics.

00:01:39.800 | And this is the thing you want to commit to,

00:01:41.500 | is there's a small number of metrics I track every day,

00:01:43.800 | and I'm going to track them.

00:01:44.600 | If they're good, if they're bad, I don't care, I write it down.

00:01:47.200 | So now you only have to do one thing.

00:01:49.000 | Am I the person that does this one thing or not?

00:01:52.200 | When you put all of your energy on just one thing,

00:01:55.000 | that is a much easier commitment to maintain than the amorphous,

00:01:58.500 | ambiguous demands of, I want a fully captured,

00:02:02.200 | organized, multi-scale planned productivity life.

00:02:05.100 | That's a big complicated ask.

00:02:06.800 | Writing down three metrics for five seconds every night,

00:02:10.700 | and it's right there on your dresser, so you see it,

00:02:12.400 | that's something you can commit to,

00:02:13.500 | and you have to commit to something.

00:02:14.800 | At some point, you have to commit to something.

00:02:16.400 | This is what I want you to commit to.

00:02:17.700 | Now, what metric should you put in there?

00:02:21.800 | I want you to start with a really basic productivity-related metric.

00:02:27.900 | And it really could be as simple as this.

00:02:30.400 | SD is what I do in mine.

00:02:33.200 | SD is an acronym for shutdown.

00:02:35.700 | And there's going to be two hash marks you can put by this.

00:02:39.100 | So there's three options.

00:02:40.300 | It could be SD with no hash mark by it,

00:02:42.200 | SD with one hash mark,

00:02:44.100 | SD with two hash marks.

00:02:46.000 | Now, what are these going to correspond to?

00:02:48.700 | You get to write down that first hash mark next to SD

00:02:51.900 | if at the beginning of your day,

00:02:53.900 | you do the following things.

00:02:55.500 | You take a notebook for jotting down loose ideas or tasks

00:03:01.000 | that things to come up to mind.

00:03:02.000 | You take that notebook,

00:03:03.200 | and you go through everything on it,

00:03:05.000 | and you put it on whatever your formal lists are

00:03:07.500 | that you keep track of on your computer.

00:03:09.000 | Two, you look at your computer calendar,

00:03:12.000 | what's on my schedule for today.

00:03:14.000 | And three, you jot down some type of plan for the day,

00:03:17.800 | even if it's just, I have meetings today, do them.

00:03:20.200 | Or I'm going to go to the gym first thing and run some errands.

00:03:25.600 | That's it.

00:03:26.600 | You do those things, you get the first hash mark.

00:03:28.500 | At the end of the day, if you do a full shutdown,

00:03:30.800 | so you get everything out of your head,

00:03:32.200 | you process the things that you've captured,

00:03:34.500 | you look at your calendar, you look at your week,

00:03:36.400 | you kind of have a sense of what you want to do the next day,

00:03:38.500 | you get the second hash mark.

00:03:39.900 | And that's it.

00:03:41.700 | That's your productivity metric.

00:03:44.100 | That is going to go a really long way.

00:03:47.800 | Because you don't want to put down no hashes.

00:03:50.800 | You feel good after a couple days putting down the both hashes

00:03:54.000 | and it doesn't take long.

00:03:55.100 | But now you're locked in, you're beginning your day,

00:03:57.600 | things aren't loose,

00:03:59.100 | the stuff that was captured loosely gets looked at,

00:04:01.500 | you look at your calendar, you have a plan,

00:04:03.100 | you shut down at the end of your day.

00:04:04.500 | Now you are not running in an ungrounded mode.

00:04:08.000 | You know what's going on,

00:04:09.200 | you're not keeping track of things in your head,

00:04:10.700 | you're doing your best to keep plans.

00:04:12.000 | I don't care if you fail with your plans,

00:04:13.300 | we're not talking about that yet.

00:04:14.600 | You're just making a little plan.

00:04:17.200 | At the end of the day, you're shutting down that plan.

00:04:18.800 | And then you should have a couple other metrics,

00:04:20.700 | maybe one about eating or fitness or exercise

00:04:23.800 | or one about, you know, if you're religious,

00:04:25.500 | did you do your prayers?

00:04:26.600 | Or if you're into meditation,

00:04:28.800 | did you do your meditation session?

00:04:29.900 | You know, have three,

00:04:31.000 | maybe three different metrics of things that are important

00:04:33.200 | in your life.

00:04:33.700 | And just do that, do that for the next few months.

00:04:35.900 | Just track that every day.

00:04:37.200 | Some days you won't do them, some days you will,

00:04:38.800 | but every single day you write down,

00:04:40.300 | did I do this, did I not?

00:04:41.800 | And make one of those metrics be that

00:04:43.800 | SD hash mark one hash mark two.

00:04:46.700 | Just do that for a couple months.

00:04:48.300 | That will get you into the habit of,

00:04:50.800 | I feel much better.

00:04:52.800 | When I start my day officially,

00:04:55.400 | I make a plan and I shut it down when I'm done.

00:04:57.400 | And once you're there,

00:04:58.900 | and that becomes second nature,

00:05:00.500 | then dive into the deep end

00:05:02.900 | and say, let's get rock and rolling with full,

00:05:05.400 | multi-scale planning where my semester plan influences

00:05:08.500 | my weekly plan, which influences my daily time block plan

00:05:11.300 | and my capture systems are sophisticated

00:05:13.900 | and I'm trying to figure out these complex protocols

00:05:17.500 | for how I organize my communication with my colleagues

00:05:19.900 | and all of that type of stuff you can get to,

00:05:21.500 | but you're not there yet.

00:05:22.400 | So this is what I want to recommend you do.

00:05:23.900 | Metrics are the number one thing you start with.

00:05:26.300 | You got to commit to something at some point.

00:05:28.400 | This is the easiest thing you can,

00:05:29.700 | but it's going to be the seed on which I think a much more

00:05:32.500 | lower anxiety,

00:05:34.900 | intentional life can grow.

00:05:37.300 | [Music]

How Do I Convince Myself to Execute Plans?

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