What do we got next? Next question is from Marathon Sprinter. My company does a two week sprint starting in the middle of the week Thursday. Should I switch my weekly plan to a two week long sprint? We plan probably. Yes. So in my multiplayer, multi scale planning philosophy where you do quarterly semester plans, weekly plans and then daily plans.

The weekly has a little bit of give. You know, it is important to have a scale of planning where you can see multiple days in a row. That's what allows you to figure out how to move these bigger chess pieces around. That's what gives you the insight to move things, to open up bigger time.

That's what allows you to see, oh, early in the week, I need to really push on this because later in the week is worse. You need some sort of planning scale that looks at multiple days at a time. If you go all the way to just say, what do I want to do today?

You're missing some of this bigger structure to your available time and your available opportunities to get things done. Exactly one week isn't so critical. So if your company has a two week cycle, I think two weeks would be fine. Build it around the sprints. In fact, you should probably put some specific structure into your weekly plans that take into account.

This is sprint work. And then this is the non sprint administrative work. And I keep track of, OK, you know, these days I do the administrative work and then here's the sprint. And you could even have like a special format built around it. If you went much longer than two weeks, you're going to start to get into trouble.

I do know people who do monthly plans, monthly plans aren't that useful. It's not enough time to do the big picture quarterly semester planning. It's too much time to meaningfully like move around the appointments or think about when you're going to work is this too many days, two weeks fine.

Three weeks iffy, one month too much, one week fine. If you're doing just a couple of days at a time, not enough. So let's get like a one to two week window. That window of scales, I think. I think that would all be fine. But Jesse, you were telling me before the show, you had a a recent breakthrough in your weekly plans.

Yeah. So I think everything is iterative. And the more you know, you're just talking about, you know, once you're a convert, then you just hear the preaches. So I hear you talk about weekly plans a lot. And I was looking at mine and it was getting jumbled. And there was a lot of stuff in there that should have been over in Trello, for instance, just because there were stuff that I wasn't actually going to get to that particular week.

So then when I went to the plant, I see all this stuff. And I like for whatever. You're talking like tasks related or objectives related to a bigger project. Yeah. For like a certain job that I have. And were you carrying these over? Yeah. So you put a, you know, here's the six things this project needs done on your weekly plan.

Yeah. And maybe just one of those gets done. You just carry over. Yeah. And rewrite or copy and paste. As opposed to just sticking it over and Trello and then pulling it and then be like, oh, this week, I'm just going to do this. And then because then that kind of gets along with the slow productivity stuff that you're doing.

And then you're actually making some progress on like a certain job or a task or whatever it is that you have in that plan. Do you focus now each week on the I'm going to do one project or two projects like you hone in on exactly which projects are going to make progress on?

Yeah, well, I have it divided into different jobs. So then for like those whatever specific job, then it would be this one thing. Yeah, that I wanted to like make progress on, as opposed to like, for instance, to say job a I didn't want to like I would have three things in there and then.

Wouldn't necessarily make great progress, but now like with one thing in there doing a few things, it's like the slow productivity mindset and like getting some stuff done. And do you pull over? So you've identified a particular job you're working on this week. Do you pull in from Trello?

This is the one or two tasks I want to get done, or is it you're identifying this is a job I want to do as you work on it in the week. Keep pulling stuff from Trello. So what do you mean? I pulled in one in the beginning of the week.

And then if that gets done early, you might update the weekly plan. Yeah, usually it's something that's going to take. It hasn't gotten done early yet, so usually it will take the whole week based on my other schedule. So like a common experience people have, let's see if you had the same experience.

A common experience people have is let's say they have three or four major projects going on. They're really worried about the idea of just working on one per week because they think I can't look, I'm not going to get to this other project for another three weeks like it's impossible.

I need to make progress. But what they realize if they do that, they end up getting things done just as quickly as if they instead tried to sort of quixotically do a little bit of every project every week that when you slow down and do one thing at a time, it doesn't actually necessarily slow down completion times for each of these projects on average.

And it tends to raise quality. So was it was it stressful at first or a little anxiety producing to say, let me just choose one thing, because when you're making that plan, like I'm only putting one project on this and it feels was that anxiety producing at first? It was it reduced like anxiety, actually, after I looked at the weekly plan and had less stuff on there, I was like, oh, this is very doable.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. So and you've had no problem getting these things done. It's not like it's not like you were actually getting all these things done each week, you were just writing them down. Yeah. And it was carrying over and it was like making my weekly plan jumbled. Yeah.

So that's good. I like that. Clear and concise and better. Be realistic in your weekly plan. Yeah. Don't use your weekly plan to store things. It's actually exactly store, store things elsewhere. Weekly plans, what you actually want to get done and don't use it as a wish list. Mm hmm.

Because there is a little burst you get. This is like the such a devilish little burst of pleasure you get when you're making a weekly plan. If you put a bunch of stuff on it for 10 minutes, you get the little pleasure that comes from imagining, man, if I got all of these things done this week, wouldn't that be great?

Yeah. And then you trade that like 10 minutes of like enjoying this fantasy you created for five days of stressfully coming nowhere near close to actually getting it done. Yeah. So also so much planning. I don't make it a wish list. Don't make it a wish list. Yeah. The same with time block planning.

Early time block planners do this when they're planning their day. They first they plan the day, you know, the perfect day. It's if you'll excuse a nerdy reference. It's Harry Potter in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince when he takes the Felix Felicius potion. Jesse's looking at me like, what the hell are you talking about?

It's a it's a potion that it gives you good luck. Like everything goes just the best way possible when you take this potion. So if you take this potion and I think time block planning for a lot of people and this is the type of like really cool, gritty analogy that gets us like a really cool fan base, time block planning for a lot of people just becomes a productivity Felix Felicius potion where it's like, wouldn't this be great if this only took a half hour and then this 20 minutes between these two meetings?

I took this off my plate and then this hour I finished that memo. And you look at this plan, you're like, man, that would be awesome. And like nine minutes into your day, your laptop's on fire. The the company just went out of business. You know, your child just gave lice to your pediatrician who's now left the left the industry altogether.

And, you know, seven new projects just fell on your plate. And also you forgot you were supposed to be writing a book and it's due on Friday. Like it takes about nine minutes before this like miraculous plan you have where you're like, this is great. Everything will take 20 minutes and of all this energy.

So be realistic. Don't make a wish list. You'll feel better actually being able to get a reasonable plan done with time to spare. In the end, it's going to make you feel much better than that 10 minutes of like, oh, this would be great.