All right, we have a question here from cplayer. cplayer says, "I often spend a lot of time on daily, weekly, and monthly plans, but I never follow through. I have this issue where I know what I should be doing, but I don't do it. I'm even mindful that I'm making a bad choice.

Help!" Then he or she elaborates, "I really admire you, David Allen, Jocko, and Ryan Holiday." By the way, that'd be a cool dinner party. It'd be a weird, interesting dinner party. I think we would, after one or two bottles of wine, Jocko would beat up David Allen while Ryan gave us a lecture on Epica Tetris, and I fell asleep because, you know, I don't get enough sleep because of my kids.

All right, going on with the elaboration, "You each have this great discipline and follow-through. I don't. I put all my effort in the plans. I'm great at planning, but I'm poor at doing the work." All right, so see, player, let's spend less time planning. Forget that for now. What I want you to commit to is a single thing, metrics.

You're going to have a notebook that every single day at the end of the day, you write down whatever the key metrics we're going to design for here in a second to track every day, you're going to write them down. You can use, like, my time block planner has a metric space.

If you're just tracking metrics, you can get, I like the Moleskine monthly planners, where it has a little bit of space for every day, and you have a whole week on one two-page spread. So it's a perfect amount of space if you're just tracking metrics. And this is the thing you want to commit to, is there's a small number of metrics I track every day, and I'm going to track them.

If they're good, if they're bad, I don't care, I write it down. So now you only have to do one thing. Am I the person that does this one thing or not? When you put all of your energy on just one thing, that is a much easier commitment to maintain than the amorphous, ambiguous demands of, I want a fully captured, organized, multi-scale planned productivity life.

That's a big complicated ask. Writing down three metrics for five seconds every night, and it's right there on your dresser, so you see it, that's something you can commit to, and you have to commit to something. At some point, you have to commit to something. This is what I want you to commit to.

Now, what metric should you put in there? I want you to start with a really basic productivity-related metric. And it really could be as simple as this. SD is what I do in mine. SD is an acronym for shutdown. And there's going to be two hash marks you can put by this.

So there's three options. It could be SD with no hash mark by it, SD with one hash mark, SD with two hash marks. Now, what are these going to correspond to? You get to write down that first hash mark next to SD if at the beginning of your day, you do the following things.

You take a notebook for jotting down loose ideas or tasks that things to come up to mind. You take that notebook, and you go through everything on it, and you put it on whatever your formal lists are that you keep track of on your computer. Two, you look at your computer calendar, what's on my schedule for today.

And three, you jot down some type of plan for the day, even if it's just, I have meetings today, do them. Or I'm going to go to the gym first thing and run some errands. That's it. You do those things, you get the first hash mark. At the end of the day, if you do a full shutdown, so you get everything out of your head, you process the things that you've captured, you look at your calendar, you look at your week, you kind of have a sense of what you want to do the next day, you get the second hash mark.

And that's it. That's your productivity metric. That is going to go a really long way. Because you don't want to put down no hashes. You feel good after a couple days putting down the both hashes and it doesn't take long. But now you're locked in, you're beginning your day, things aren't loose, the stuff that was captured loosely gets looked at, you look at your calendar, you have a plan, you shut down at the end of your day.

Now you are not running in an ungrounded mode. You know what's going on, you're not keeping track of things in your head, you're doing your best to keep plans. I don't care if you fail with your plans, we're not talking about that yet. You're just making a little plan.

At the end of the day, you're shutting down that plan. And then you should have a couple other metrics, maybe one about eating or fitness or exercise or one about, you know, if you're religious, did you do your prayers? Or if you're into meditation, did you do your meditation session?

You know, have three, maybe three different metrics of things that are important in your life. And just do that, do that for the next few months. Just track that every day. Some days you won't do them, some days you will, but every single day you write down, did I do this, did I not?

And make one of those metrics be that SD hash mark one hash mark two. Just do that for a couple months. That will get you into the habit of, I feel much better. When I start my day officially, I make a plan and I shut it down when I'm done.

And once you're there, and that becomes second nature, then dive into the deep end and say, let's get rock and rolling with full, multi-scale planning where my semester plan influences my weekly plan, which influences my daily time block plan and my capture systems are sophisticated and I'm trying to figure out these complex protocols for how I organize my communication with my colleagues and all of that type of stuff you can get to, but you're not there yet.

So this is what I want to recommend you do. Metrics are the number one thing you start with. You got to commit to something at some point. This is the easiest thing you can, but it's going to be the seed on which I think a much more lower anxiety, intentional life can grow.