I really need to share this post by Helen Kara with you. She makes some excellent points that fit very well with my approach to planning. And she made me realise something:
There is a big difference between project planning and workload planning.
What I focus on here most of the time is workload planning, though I usually suggest that you do enough project planning to know what activities are going to move your projects forward. This might account for my general aversion to talking about deadlines.
In Helen’s post she notes that project plans don’t actually help you decide what to do today.
She makes the decision to call the workload planning “prioritising” and leave “planning” unmodified in the project planning sense.
Planning is, of course, essential. You need a plan before you can prioritise. So this post assumes you have a plan.
… I have a top-level to-do list of all my current projects: research work for clients, teaching and speaking engagements, writing and publishing projects. I use that to create a lower-level list of what I need to do each month, then use that list to figure out what I need to do this week, and refer to that list each day to write my daily to-do list.
This may sound like a cumbersome approach but in practice it takes just a few minutes each day. I write my weekly to-do list on a Friday evening for the following week, which helps me to put work down for the weekend in the knowledge that come Monday morning, I won’t have to think about what I need to do, I’ll only have to prioritise.
—Helen Kara, How to Prioritize, 4 May 2020
She then talks about importance, urgency, energy levels, blood sugar levels, and how all of that fits into your scheme for prioritising.
Related Posts:
Making Decisions: planning & scheduling
Prioritising meaningful work when you are feeling overwhelmed and powerless
Juggling, jigsaws, and navigating by the stars: making reasonable plans
This post has been lightly edited, Related Posts addeed and the title was changed, September 2023.
