Hey - It’s Michael.
Played chess with a dear friend yesterday - good for the soul! Enjoy the newsletter!
The Situation
The end of a project approaches: things break, parts are missing, the stress hits and your sleep suffers. You get anxious, nervous or shut down. You have to tell yet another person you will not deliver XYZ in time, or worse, you lose self respect because you promised yourself to do XYZ by that point on time but now that point in time is already 2 days ago.
Or it’s the end of the day and while you did a lot of work you’re asking yourself: “What have I really done? What have I really achieved? Nothing I did made a difference.”
I have come to learn that most of my unpleasant emotions regarding work that is fully under my control come from weak planning.
Whether it’s time pressure, procrastination, perfectionism or delayed deadlines - most of it can be reduced to almost zero with proper planning.
The System
If someone knows how to be productive, it’s David Allen. He modelled the natural planning framework - how your brain is already planning when things go well.
It follows the brain’s natural sequence of:
Why → What → How
Natural Planning consists of these 5 steps:
Purpose & Principles:
The purpose clarifies why you are doing this project / task in the first place. The principles are the guardrails that limit your thinking.
Answer:
Why am I doing this? What matters here?
Outcome:
The outcome clarifies what success looks like. Depending on the size & type of the work project / task, this step should be done with more or less detail.
Answer:
What does success look like? What does “done” look like?
Brainstorming
After clarifying Purpose, Principles & Outcome your brain will automatically generate a lot of ideas on how to achieve the outcome.
Answer:
What could be done to get there?
This is often a non-linear process: ideas come when they come. Capture everything without judgement.
Organizing
After noting all the things you could do, it’s time to find order and define:
Sequence
Priorities
Dependencies
Answer:
What belongs together? What comes first?
Next Actions
The moment you put order in the chaos of your planning, decide on the physical action to do. It must be
concrete
doable
physical
Answer:
What is the very next physical action?
In essence, natural planning leverages the fact that your brain is great at thinking, but terrible at holding unfinished loops. It forces you to get ideas out of your head, clarify intent before effort and reduces stress by closing mental loops.
Principle
Use the natural planning framework for any executional work you do.
There is of course work that requires wandering of the mind, however, it’s usually preceded by proper planning.
In case you are wondering what types of work there are, I’ll cover that in later issues.
I’ve adapted and optimized this process for virtually every part of my life. I use different levels of depth, question sets and aspects depending on the size & type of project & task. If you are curious - reach out! Or subscribe and read about it in one of the upcoming newsletters.
In Practice
Start using natural planning for the next simple task that is on your list.
Whether it’s writing that report, preparing that meeting or setting up that tool, it doesn’t really matter. It can even be the planning of a restaurant evening with your friends.
Be sure to assign time limits to your organized plans to finally keep deadlines.
Stop Rule:
Stop starting executional work without clarifying the purpose, principles and outcome of a project or task.
Once you get in the habit of clarifying Purpose, Principles & Outcome of any given project, you’ll notice its true power.
The mind gets calm and any action you do is clearly directed towards achieving a goal. If done correctly, work becomes manageable and stress evaporates.
A quote to ponder on:
“Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower
A question to reflect on:
Instead of what should I do, I ask myself: what do I want?
See you next week - Michael