Mastering Planning Vol 1: Hourly and Daily Planning

1. Introduction: welcome. And this course you're gonna learn about planning at the level of ours in days. And ultimately what this means is how do you manage your day? This is this course is gonna answer the question of how do you manage your day? How do you manage our to our and how do you make sure you're maintaining the flow? You're getting in a flow state as much as possible, and you're making a good use of your time. It's also going to show you, ah, where you're spending your time right now. So the innovative thing about this course is that it's not just going to show you how to plan out your days, but it's also going to give you strategies for measuring what's going on each day and doing metrics on that. And it's all based around this piece of paper right here. This one pager. This is all you need. Toe. Follow the system, and it's something that you print out at the beginning of the week, and then you just use it the entire week. You don't need to use the computer for this, and I actually advise that you don't do this on the computer because the way it works is on the left hand side of each day right here. You're gonna plan out what you're going to do when you write down what you're in to do. And then during that actual time block, you write out what you actually did during that time. What that allows you to do is metrics on how much time your spending each day. So we're gonna get more into the system. The color coding, how how the digital aspect of it works, how the physical aspect of it works, how you can fold it up and and bring it around with you. And if you're wondering what is crossed out here, this is actually my personal calendar for this week that I printed out. So I just covered over all the events. But you can see right here is one event that I didn't cover over. Um and you can see, uh, that's the first day of the month, First day of June and on the first day of June. You process all your information in boxes and physical in boxes from the previous month. So if you've seen my other courses on physical inboxes, digital inboxes, organizing your information and your objects. Uh, that's where this fits in. So this is a very powerful system for managing the hours, the 24 hours that you have each day and also the days that you have each week how to plan those how to manage those how day by day, the routines that you have at the beginning of the day, throughout the day at the end of the day. And the other huge thing that you're gonna learn about in this course is the principal of the Pamela model. And this is the planning model that you're gonna learn, and it stands for plan that measure and learn. So this is my unique framework for understanding what planning is what planning is all about. And this is something that you're gonna be able to apply at every stage of the planning process at every level. And what that means is not just at the day and the hour level, but also at the week at the month at the quarter at the year and then multiyear going all the way up to your entire life span and also planning for future generations. So This is the model that's going to be used for this course and for future courses where I get into how to do more long term planning, where you're at the week in the month level, when you're at the quarter in the year level and when you're doing multi year and you're really getting into the life stages, developmental cycles and stuff like that. So this is the first course in that course, Siri's and you're gonna learn this very important, very valuable model for planning that's based off of the foremost frontier research on artificial intelligence and machine learning. And the reason why that's important is number one, because it's having a huge effect on our economy right now. There's also a ton of innovation that's happened in computation that really has not been transferred over to how people manage and plan their days, how they schedule things. There's a lot of really, really interesting research that's and and techniques and algorithms that have been developed for how toe optimally schedule your your time, how toe manage tasks, how to think about it, and that really hasn't been transferred over to how people think about scheduling. It's mostly been in the fields of industrial planning when you have a huge factory or a machine shop or something like that, where a computer algorithm is organizing a bunch of people schedules at the same time. But for individuals using these algorithms thes strategies, it really hasn't happened. So that's what I've integrated into this course and into this model specifically. So you're going to get a lot more clarity then you've ever heard before in any other book or course on how planning works, how you should plan out your days, how you should think about it and at every level you're gonna notice improvements because once you have that, clarity makes a lot easier to plan things a lot faster, and you also get the sense that you're doing it optimally. So you're not just randomly throwing things onto your calendar or doing things in a random order. But you have, ah, really bulletproof strategy for doing it every time in knowing that it's the best you're going to be able to do it, and there isn't a better way to schedule it. So that's what you have to look forward into this course, and if you decide to enroll, I'll see on the other side 2. The PAMeLa Planning Model: in this video, we're gonna talk about the Pamela model, and it's lower case E and lower case A because thes two letters don't form the acronym. It's really just p a m and l that are theocracy. Um, and they stand for plan, act, measure and learn. So what does that mean? What that means is, first in the planning stage, what you're doing and the and the point of this is it may seem linear, but what it actually is is a circle. Okay, so planning happens here, then action happens here, Measure happens here and then learn happens here, and that's gonna inform your next plan. So you start off planning small things, but it's really a spiral where, okay, you start taking on more stuff and doing more things, and you keep on going around in the cycle over and over and over again. So this is more of a cycle than something that you do once. But, uh, we're gonna we're gonna just for organizations sake, we're gonna have it in this linear format. So the planning stage comes first, and this is where you take a bunch of ideas. This is really the least organized stage. It's where your brain storming. What do you want to dio? What are the different ideas? What are the different goals that you have? What are the different tasks that you have? What are those those big goals, ultimately, where you want to get? And then what are the individual things that are gonna come in along the way? And we're gonna We're gonna spend a whole section talking about planning. So I'm just giving you the broad strokes here. So you're bringing together all those tasks that you're going to do that are gonna that are gonna make up your plan. You're also, uh, getting all your constraints. So this is stuff like deadlines. So how much time do you have? How much money do you have? What sort of people do you have? Equipment that you need? Information, books, courses, check, quis, data, spreadsheets, all that sort of stuff. You may need to collect that information. You to buy that equipment, or maybe you already have it. But these are the major types of constraints you're gonna have. And depending on whatever field Iran, you may have additional constraints that are specific to the sort of problems that you're trying to solve. Ultimately planning is looking at what are the problems, And then what are the solutions? And those solutions are a bunch of tasks that you're going to dio. The next step is, once you have all these tasks and the constraints are going to tell you which tasks are gonna work, which ones aren't, then what you do is you prioritize. What's more important, what's less important? And that's what's gonna help you deal with some of these constraints because you don't have infinite time. You don't have infinite money. You don't have infinite people or could just be yourself. None of thes resource is our infinite. So you need a prioritize based on what's important to you. What's more important, what's less important? And then finally, you need to schedule this stuff, okay, and that's where it goes into here. That's when it becomes an actual schedule. And if it's ah, if it's a major project, you may have a separate schedule in addition, just for that project so that each week, you know, Okay, what are my milestones, or each month or even each year, depending on how big of a project it ISS, so you schedule it. And then there's one final piece, which is optional. But depending on where you are can be very important is to summarize slash visualize, and this is where you make it riel in your head. This is where you get clarity and you add emotional fuel to it. So visualization is important because it's gives you spaced repetitions on the state of the world that you're trying to get to or the state of the project that you're trying to get to . So seeing it in your mind very clearly cannot add a lot of power to that. So that's the planning stage now. Acting is just about how do you manage your time day to day? So this is where we're getting into. Once you have your schedule for the day, how do you implement that? And how do you avoid distractions and stay in the flow? And to a certain extent, this depends on the kind of job that you have. Some people have creative jobs where I spent a lot of time focused on one thing. Other people have times where there's a lot of distractions jobs for there's a lot of distractions or you're managing other people. There's more interruptions. So you're getting into the flow by just responding adeptly and deftly to each one of those things. But your goal was always stay in the flow because that's where you're gonna have maximum access to your mental resource is your physical resource is talking about your body. You're not good energy, and you're going to feel good and you're gonna enjoy what you're doing. So this is the goal and what we're working in the action phase were working around. How do we maximize that? So major things are routines. What are the routines that you have for each stage of the day? So we're gonna be talking more about that. What are the routines that you have? And then also, what do you do when you break routine? You wanna have a routine for what happens when you get aware that you're out of your routine, you're out of the flow. So once you get aware that you're not in a good routine or you're not in the flow, then what do you do? So that's very important, because you need to know how toe maintain flow, stay in the flow by avoiding distractions, avoiding notifications, avoiding inbound stuff. You need to have an awareness of that. And then you have have to have a routine for getting back into the flow. And so we're gonna be talking about that in the action section. The third section is measure. So what is measure all about? What measurement is about is making sure that you're aware of where your time is actually going. So as you're acting, you're going in here. And as I said on the left hand side, you're marking down what you planned on doing and then on the right hand side what you actually did. So that's a very easy way to measure. And that's something that where you're going to be doing it and measuring every single hour of your day. And it's actually really easy. Some of you may have tried this before, keeping track of what you do on your computer or without ever else, but basically just every half hour block. What were you do doing during that half hour? And the cool thing is, you go back at the end of the day and you can see exactly what you did, and it's not just what did I do on the computer? It's your entire day. So where did that time actually go? This allows you to do really powerful metrics on your entire week. How much How many of the hours you're spending each day. We're getting into the learn section here, but the value of the measurement, it really comes in the next phase when you're learning from it and there's two kinds of measurements, there's lead, and there's lag measurements. So lead measurements or what you're doing are things you can measure immediately that you have control over and then lag is no or partial control. Okay, so something you have control over is writing 1000 words a day. Where you may not have full control over is getting that on the best seller list or getting good reviews. That may be something where you have partial control. If you put out something that's high quality and you do all the right things, then you have a good chance of getting that. But it's not something that you can measure immediately, so you want to get yourself on. It's the whole idea of process versus outcome and most people know, especially if you've studying anything with parenting. It's better to reward your Children for putting in a lot of effort than rewarding them based on just the accomplishments, because the effort is what really leads to success, and this sort of same stuff is, and and I don't know who said it, but, um, a lot of success and being an adult is just being a good parent to yourself. So these sorts of things rewarding yourself for the process and the effort, as long as the effort is going to the right thing, then that's gonna be the best indicator you can get. And these you can call them KP eyes for key performance indicators. So those were gonna be metrics that you're using and measuring just where you're doing for each hour today is another type of metric other things. You're gonna be writing down our mistakes and the solutions if you have a solution. But just keeping track of your mistakes is huge, and also your accomplishments and the accomplish it accomplishments is especially important if you're out of phase, where you're still building your confidence and your still Um, and that's something that you really need to train for some of you. You may. It may not be that important to be keeping track of all those accomplishments because you've already got a sense inside you at a deep level of you're a successful person, you feel confident you've done a lot of things. You've you know, you have memories of that, so this may not be as important, but the mistakes are always important. So making sure you get thes down is also really important. And, uh, we'll get more in depth on this later on. But that's measure. Then we have learned. So learn is the process, for example, of going from mistakes to solutions. It's also about your time estimates. This is something that people are notoriously bad at is estimating how long something is going to take. The cool thing is, when you have this calendar, you can say, Wow, I planned an hour and then look, it actually took four hours or five hours, so one to three for five, so 5.5 hours. So you planned one hour, but it actually took 5.5 hours. So that's the sort of thing where you say? OK, well, now I know that that that sort of task actually takes a lot longer than I had planned, so that's something that's really valuable. Another thing is routines and systems and routines are part of a system. There are a list of things that you do all at once. At the same time, you can chunk it up into one thing. So routines are really important, and often times when you make a mistake or something bad happens, you'll find that the cause was actually not anything specifically what you did. But it's what you didn't do. It was negligence of systems. You didn't have good systems in place. That's why you made the mistake. That's why you failed. And so the solution isn't to do something specifically next time. It's a set up a system, so that problem never happens again to set up a routine or add to your existing routine something so that that problem doesn't come up again. So these are the sort of learning things and and, uh, related to routines or checklists, and you may be aware of the book, the checklist manifesto, where they found that just implementing very simple checklists in hospitals led to a huge, huge performance increase. Fewer people dying, fewer infections and hospitals, fewer mistakes being made, fewer incorrect medications. All these things improve just because of simple checklists. So you're gonna, uh you're gonna have this last stage where you learn and then all these learnings, then feed back into your next plan, your next iteration. So, uh, like, at the end of the day, for example, you have a routine toe Look at the next day, get ready for the next day and this sort of stuff scales up. So at the level at the end of the week at the end of the month at the end of the quarter, at the end of the year, you're gonna have processes those anything that's at the week, month, quarter, year and beyond. Those are all going to be in separate courses. This course is specifically on the panel model and your hourly and weekly okay, I mean, daily. So what do you what? Your habits at, You know, a minute to minute our to our level. That's the awareness. Making sure you're staying in the flow, rescheduling things as needed, and then your daily plans, which would involve AH, lot of routines, the routines you have each day to manage, going to work, coming from work, eating your meals, other things they have on a day in day out basis, managing those things and creating routines that you're using. The minimum amount of mental effort and energy, the minimum on a stress caused by those things. You really want to minimize those. That's what this course is going to be about. So this gives you an idea of the Pamela model, the four steps and how it's really a cycle. And it's something where the learnings you get at the end help you plan better in the future. So those things about time estimates that you learn those air gonna go in the systems that you develop the routines, you develop those air, gonna allow you to plan and act much more efficiently in the future. And these are things that you can also put into your information system. So all these systems, all these routines, all these mistakes that you make and and the various metrics that your collecting all of those can go into your information system where you can be keeping track of those on longer timescales as well. And what's really cool is at the end of each week, this thing is gonna be completely full, and you can go back to previous weeks and literally see exactly where you spend all your time. It's a really powerful thing toe get a sense of what do you actually doing with your time? And if you don't keep track of it, you'll find that you get very, very skewed views of where you're actually spending your time, or you'll find that you're minimizing certain things and Overblowing other things, and your your time is not well balanced. So there's a lot of power here, and we're gonna be getting into each of these and a lot more depth, as because each of these is gonna be an individual section. 3. The 3 Big Ideas to Remember When Planning: in this video, we're gonna talk about big ideas, and these are the ideas that are gonna influence your the big the big picture of philosophy of this course of the Pamela model, but also at the granular level of what's going on each hour of your day, where you spending those hours where you spending your days and these are the things that should always be in the back of your head. So the first thing is flow. And I already talked about this briefly in the previous video. But what is flow flow is the difficulty of a task matched with your skill. Okay, and there's I like to add 1/3 dimension, which is your interest, um, slash motivation. But that's not part of the classical model. The classical model is just these two dimensions. And so the idea is, the idea is for something to be within the flow, it has to be in this range. Okay, so it has to be roughly a good match of the difficulty. Say, that's a 10. That zero really difficult would be here really high skill level really hard. Okay, so something that's really difficult. Um, and you don't have a lot of skill. That's not gonna be good. You're not gonna enjoy something like that, something that is really easy. And you happen to have a lot of skill. It's gonna be boring. Okay, okay, up here. It's overwhelming cause it's really hard to do, and you just don't have the skills for you have you have really low skills, but it's a really difficult challenge. So it's a 10 in terms of challenge and you're still out of two, so you can't handle that. You get overwhelmed when it's a two difficulty. It's really easy for you, and you have tons of skill. You're a master, so it's just boring. It's boring to do that sort of stuff. So stuff up right up here, that's your $1000 our work. And I'm just these air just rough, very rough numbers. Stuff here is your $100 an hour work stuff down here is $10 an hour work, so, and to a certain extent there's even $1 an hour work a lot of somebody who's in a factory making tube socks, for example, in India or China or something, they literally do make $1 an hour or less, especially if they don't speak English. They may be making 20 cents. 30 cents, 50 cents an hour. Um, and that's 2016 numbers. I read that in the Wall Street Journal. I think, um and obviously this number could be even higher. So part of what we're gonna be focusing on and this is actually the second piece is the value of your time. What is the value of your time and what do you want? What is it now? And what do you want? Get to be okay. So present future And maybe even where was it? What did it used to be? So the reason why this is important is because you should not be doing this stuff. You should be doing this stuff in this stuff, and a lot of people don't have a good sense of how much their time is worth. And they don't even think about the idea that they could be outsourcing stuff to other people or delegating it to other people, finding other people who could do it at a much cheaper rate and where you could spend more of your time. So what happens with most people is there's a $1000 an hour work, okay, and this is their day. This is 9 a.m. Noon se three. That was That was a great way to organize this nine. Let's say 12. Okay, and then there's certain spikes where their time is actually being well used. But for the most part, they're doing this really low skill work. And where you get the benefit is when you start delegating and your mawr like that and you're spending most. And this is where you're also in the flow. Okay, All this extra time. It's not really extra time, but it's extra money. And with money you can buy time, you can get additional time. So all this stuff where you're doing low skill stuff, you're wasting your time right there. And there's certain, uh so it's really about maximizing the value of your time and just getting aware of where you're spending your time, and then what? That, uh, task is worth to you. So getting an idea of how much is this project worth? How much would it cost somebody else to do it? And, uh, how can you increase where you're spending your time, so the value of your time is very important. And as you're developing your skills and this is really what a lot of my teaching is about is if you can learn faster, you can get your skills up faster, okay? And when your skills are a fat up higher, then you can take on def more difficult stuff. And you're gonna make more money when you're solving more difficult problems. Obviously, there's supply and demand affects that. But, uh, in large part, it's about how difficult are those problems? And how long does it take you to be able to solve those problems? Okay. And then the third thing, the third thing for in terms of big ideas is where are your roles? What are the roles in your life on these air? More long term things that this is kind of getting into the longest stage course that I'm gonna be teaching on planning, which is your life span. And this is from when you're born toe when you die, and then Ethan future generations and at each stage of life, they're certain roles that you play. So when you're younger, you would be a son or a daughter. Whereas up here you may be a husband. Your wife? Uh, mother Father. Grandparent's. Okay, Uncle aren't so at various stages of life. You're gonna have different roles. You're also gonna have different business roles. Okay, As you get older, you're gonna have different roles with your health. Okay, so the four areas of your life, you're gonna have certain roles that you play, and with each beneath, within each role, you're gonna have projects, and those projects are going to turn into are going to be made up of individual tasks. In those tasks are what gets scheduled. And sometimes you can actually just schedule time to work on a certain project and then go to that project and look at what the task is and the way that I organized projects. And this is also gonna be in a separate course. But to give you a basic idea is there's a one page document where you manage each project and these air held in your note taking system. Either one note or ever note. And these are all kept in it in one large system called all major projects, and they're linked. So There's a link between every single one of these, and they're organized by the areas of your life business, personal relationship and health, and then their sub cat sub points for each of the major projects and those air linked. Okay, so you just click on them. So this allows you to really efficiently and easily organize all your projects and also take, uh, take some time to focus on those seemingly minor projects. Those household projects are improving high organized things or systems those things that just chip away at your energy and cause you a little bit of stress every single day, every single week or just at random times. But it's fairly consistent. It allows you to manage all those things. So number one is flow staying in the flow. Number two is really getting a better sense of what is the value of your time. What is the value of projects? And these are things that are often pretty hard? Teoh. Actually, no, um, what the real value is, but that doesn't mean it's not a good idea to estimate it still is a very good idea to estimate, and I'll be talking about later in the course, how you actually can do that. And then number three is getting clarity on big picture. What? What's the organizing principle of all these tasks? Okay, the organizing principle is exists at three levels. Okay, The top level is the various roles. This is you, okay? And you have various hats that you wear, Okay, You're a different person or not necessarily different person, but you have a different role in different situations. Okay, so you have four different hats for the four different areas of your life, and then you actually have sub roles kind of within. So in your relationships, you would be a friend to some people, a mentor, a father, mother, a son, daughter, grand parent, aunt or uncle. So each one of those would be a role. And then under each one of these, you have a project or multiple projects, and each of those is on a single piece of paper, and that's actually gonna From most part, they should be stored digitally in one Notre Evernote. And within each of these projects, you're gonna break it down into tasks. Okay, so these year rolls is your tasks, and then these are your projects. Those are the three levels of organization that you're gonna be using Really simple, really easy to remember. And it just gives you so much clarity over your life and what's going on, what stage of progress you are in each of these different things, so that you can eventually go from where you are right now, which is being overwhelmed with stuff. Or you may not feel like you're overwhelmed, but you may just you may only be focusing on a few of thes rolls. You may be doing great in some of these roles, but you may be really week in a lot of these other roles, and you may have never really spent time there because you just had too much going on. You didn't have the band with. So what this allows you to do is increase your band with, take on more stuff or keep your current band with, but be a a lot more efficient with what you're doing and eventually work things out so you can free up more your time. You can spend more your time on these really high value activities and then use your that extra money that you bring in to outsource and delegate a lot of the other stuff that you don't enjoy doing in what that ultimately means is that you're going to spend more time in the flow. That's really what it's all about. So ultimately we're always looking at How can we optimize this? How can we optimize this experience? And I'll just briefly go back to this third dimension of your interest in motivation? Okay, so this is a negative. What's negative? 10. And this right here would be a positive 10 for the interest of motivation. Remember, this is in the third dimension. Okay, so when you're getting very interested, that's out out here. When you're a little bit interested, you're here. And then when you actively don't like something, you're here. And if you really don't like something, you're out here in negative 10. So it's not just We all have things that were good at that. We don't necessarily love to dio. We may have loved to do it in the past, but we don't anymore. Um, and there's maybe certain things that are really difficult. But even though they're difficult, we still really enjoy doing it. And sometimes We even love to do things that are a real challenge. We love going against really big challenges that our toe in other situations we would feel as overwhelming. But even if we don't have the skill, we still love doing it. We love, you know, banging against that brick wall because we love that that activity so much, and we have a lot of interest in motivation for it. So that's the three dimensional model that you use for flow, understanding why you would be in the flow or why you wouldn't be. You just look at will, according to these three metrics, have difficult. Is the task. How much skill do I have to solve that problem or complete that task? And then how much interest in motivation do I have in that? And that's this is always your North star that's guiding you towards. What should I be doing right now? And if I'm not in the flow right now, how can I get back in there either by doing it differently, changing your interest or delegating it to somebody else and freeing up your time or ah, setting up some projects, setting up some systems so that you can do that more efficiently and more strategically 4. Applying the Advances in AI to Planning Part 1: in this video, we're gonna talk about artificial intelligence and what sort of innovations have come from the world of AI and computational scheduling that we can apply to our daily lives and how we plan our schedule, how we plan our days and the most valuable thing I can give you is first vocabulary, a new vocabulary to use. This is the vocabulary that's used in artificial intelligence to describe planning situations. And planning is something that's really, really, really important for artificial intelligence. And when I say artificial intelligence, really, what that is is just software, Okay, so, like when you get a CD or a DVD, um, with, let's say, Microsoft Office on it, that's software. Okay, that's like the brain of the computer or what's running on the brain. That's not the hardware. And any time you see a robot, that's just a machine that's hooked up to basically running and it right that it's running . It's got an agent inside. It is running software in its brain. Okay, so when it's moving around when it's, you know, waving at you, that's because its brain, its software is telling it to do that. The artificial intelligence is what's helping it make decisions and helping it do anything . So processing what it hears, processing what it sees and then saying stuff. So these are the inputs saying stuff moving its hands, moving around, Um, those are the outputs showing something on a screen that would be another output. So this planning stuff for the robot to move or to decide what it's going to say in a conversation that is planning and humans do this too. They just do it unconsciously. So even things like what you're going to say next. That technically, is something that you plan to do and people that study linguistics. They look into just the sort of thumbs and Oz and hesitations and other things to understand how people plan out the sentences. They're going to say This is something that you would tend to do more consciously if you're learning a foreign language. But once you get fluent, you no longer doing as much of that planning, it's it happens more unconsciously, but it's still happening. That's the point. So in this video, I'm gonna take you through that vocabulary for how to describe this stuff and what this is going to mean for you is from now on, you're gonna have a very exact way of thinking about planning and understanding what it's really all about so that you don't have that feeling of CLOUDINESS or that feeling of I still don't really get. I don't really get what's going on here. I get how you know the practical side of what you're actually doing when you have a calendar like this. But what is it really all about? At the deepest level, If you want to get really exact and precise about it, that's what this is all about. So the first thing we're gonna talk about is states, and you may have heard things before about like, an emotional state referred to as state or, um, status. What is the status of something that's, you know, those have the same root word. So, uh, basically what status means is the situation. What is the situation? Um, at a very basic level. And you'll see this in a lot of AI textbooks is they'll talk about a computer that complaint checkers or chess. All right, so you have eight by eight. She have 64 squares, weaken just number those squares. 123456789 10 11 12 etcetera. And we can describe the state of each one of the pieces by just giving it a number. So that pond is on nine, and that describes the state, and that black pond is on nine. So you would use that to describe all the various pieces, and that would give you a complete understanding of the state of the world, at least in this this little chess universe. Now, how do you expand that Really life? Well, the way you expanded to real life is you think about a video game. So there's certain video games. Grand Theft Auto is one that a lot of people are at least familiar with. Sims is another one where you have a video game that basically has an entire world inside it. And so what I want you to think about is when you hit the pause button on that video game controller, what happens? The entire world freezes, and, uh, and you can just look around or if pauses with a screen that just stays the same. But the point is that exact situation is frozen in time until you press the start button, um, and a NPAs the game. So when it's frozen, that state of the world, that description of the world is frozen in time and another way of thinking about it is in certain games you can freeze the game. You can move around the camera, but everything stays exactly where it is. An example. This is any sports game, like mad playing Madden football or soccer or anything else where you can do a replay camera and you can replay from any angle that state of the world. And we're even seeing this in TV now watching the N B A finals. And they have a bunch of different cameras set up at different points in the around the court and so they can switch. They can pot, freeze time and then show you different perspectives. So, like a guy is dunking the ball and they have a camera here and here and here and here and here and here and so they can give you that perspective as he's frozen about to dunk the ball. The camera goes around like that. They're stitching together all those frames of video, so that's what a state ISS and this this can get kind of confusing. Um, because it's it's such an abstract idea, but it ultimately comes down to just describing the world, and you can do that with numbers. So the point is with code and with a video game, for example, we all know that ultimately the position of all those characters and the trees and the field on the ball and whatever those are all just described by code and by numbers, you can describe with numbers where each thing is located. You can describe colors with numbers. You can describe shapes with numbers, so ultimately it can all be described with code. That's the point is inside your head inside the computers head. It has a way of representing the state of the world. The situation may not be 100% accurate, but it's close enough to allow it to do whatever it needs to do. Second thing is what is a goal. The goal is just a type of state. It's just, um, or a certain thing that is true within a state. So what say your goal is you want to make $1000 your 1st $1000 with your business. Okay, so there can be several different businesses that you can open up. You could open up a lemonade stand, or you could, um you could start a blawg and, uh, maybe write a book. Okay, so those are two different ways of making your 1st $1000 as an entrepreneur. And the way that you would measure it is you would have a bank account, and when you check it, it would say at least $1000. So what this is called is a goal is really a test. It's a way of testing a situation or estate to see if something is true or false. That's up to you. Whether it's, um, you know, you can language most things so that it would either be true or not true or not false. But the point with a goal is, uh, you're testing a state to see if something is true within that state. If it's true that with your lemonade stand business you've made over $1000 then you've achieved your goal. So that's called a gold test, and sometimes it can be helpful to not just have a goal, but visualize a specific goal state where you're not just visual like this right here. You could describe it as the state of your bank account, in the same way as this describes the state of the checkerboard so you can have a very simplified state where you're just describing one thing. But for the human mind in the human brain to get motivated, it often helps to have a really clear picture of what you're going for. And so that's when you can come up with a goal state. And really, just what it comes down to is how specific do you want to be about your goal? In one situation, we can describe the state very simply. It's just the state of of the bank account. Okay, so that's a very simple state. You could represent that as just a single number. All right. As long as it's that number or more, then you've completed your goal. For a more complex situation, you might have multiple things. So, um, like for this chessboard, you may represent each each position Well, you you would have up to 30. Let's see how many or how many pieces are there 16 pieces for each side. So there's 32 pieces. So you need to have a number for each of those 32 pieces. And we could have zero for if it's off the board. Okay. So to represent the full state of the board, you would have toe have 32 different numbers, and we could, um what say you were just playing with? Ah, a king, a queen, a king and a queen on each side. What say? That was a simplified version of chess. So this would represent the position of the Black Queen, King and queen. And this would represent the position of the White Queen and King. This right here would represent the entire state. So let's say, um this is the king. This is the queen. This is the king. This is the queen. Um What say the king is that four? The queen is off the board. And then what? Say the king over on this side is that 60 and the queen is off the board. So this would represent the entire state of the world on this chessboard. We have one of our kings here. You have a black king here of your white king over here. And the two queens are off the board, and that describes the entire situation of that game. So you can see it just gets more and more complex. But ultimately, you can represent this with just four numbers you can represent. That situation is so you're just making this sort of thing more more complicated. So you have states, you have goals and you have a solution. What is a solution? Well, a solution is the path that you take between What's call this box? You're starting state, some sort of convoluted process or path. You get to your final where you want to be. Okay. So what is this right here? What is this path? That's what the solution is, is how do you do it? What steps do you take? This is your solution. Okay? This is not your solution. This right here is your goal state, and you do a test. You test this to see, Have I reached my goal? So a test is just a question. All right. You're asking a question about this state, and depending on the answer, that tells you whether you got to the goal or not. The solution is the path, and the problem is described by the current state. And then what are all the different? Uh, the current state, the gold state. So I see a problem. Okay, It's gonna be the starting point, the ending point or the gold test. I just have to know where you're going or what you're looking for. At least, um, And then you have to know the actions that you can take and also any restrictions. So when we said constraints, earlier restrictions are a type of constraint. So, like, you can't do this at this point in time, you can't do that or you only have this much. And, uh and what this will do is this whole, uh, this will tell you how to get a solution, but to get the best solution is a little bit different. You have to have a cost function. So that would mean, for example, in chess a cost function would be okay. You want to win the game. But how long do you want to take? So somebody who can beat you in five minutes would be better than somebody who can beat you in two hours, for example. So how long does it take you to get there? Same thing is with making $1000. So the cost function? Maybe. How long will it take me to make my 1st $1000 with lemonade stand? It might take me three months with the block and writing a book and might take me two years . So what is thecornerscores function? To get to your goal so you could take different steps thes air. Two different solutions to making your 1st $1000 But what is the cost? And that cost can be one thing or could be multiple thing, but a function is just a way of taking an input in generating an output. So if you do certain things, how long is that going to take? How much money is it gonna cost you? What other sorts of costs are involved and then actions? This is really interesting. So for actions for in chest, it's really simple. There's only a few things you can do. The king can only move 11 box or 11 place from where he is. The queen can move any diagonally or forwards and backwards, side to side any number of steps it wants to, but it can't jump over things on Lee. There's only one piece that can actually jump over in most situations. So, um so those air sort of restrictions. But they also delineate the actions that you can take in each situation. And those actions for starting a business might be filing for a license or doing some, you know, creating a marketing thing, and it can get really granular. So can inaction could literally be. Move your your mouse pointer up 20 pixels or move your picks. Move your mouse cursor up one pixel, moving up another pixel. Move it to the left, one pixel moving to the left, one pixel so it can really get that granular. Or it could be like if you ever see a Disney movie, how they animate things like twist the hand like that and you have key frames. So, like in a cartoon, you have frame one frame to frame three, and there's an action that happens in between each one of those frames. So those are the actions that you can take, and this this gives you an idea of exactly when you're planning something exactly what's going on. You have thes actions that you're going to take, and you have different cost functions. Now the thing I'll leave you with with artificial intelligence that can be a little bit disheartening. Is that for somewhere between 80 and 90% of scheduling problems there, what's called intractable? Which means that it's just no matter how much computing power you had. Unless you have basically infinite computing power, it's and you can calculate every single possible path you could take. Um, which, for anything that has any significant number of steps, like starting a blog's starting a business where you're talking literally about thousands and thousands of steps it would just take. It would be infinitely. You would spend the rest your life just planning out a very simple thing, just because of how numbers and multiply and get very big, very quickly. So most planning situations it's impossible to get a perfect plan. You have to settle for something that's good enough. So what you're gonna be learning through the rest of this course is that in most situations and really almost every situation, you're not gonna be able to develop a perfect plan. It's good to know that this is how you can represent things. But ultimately it comes that down to making quick decisions, trusting your gut and having a few heuristics or rules of thumb that can inform your decision making. 5. Applying the Advances in AI to Planning Part 2: in this video. I'm just going to give you a little part two of what planning actually means when you take into account all the vocabulary that we learned in the previous section. So let's say, uh and I need to keep this simple and a little bit boring just because when you scale it up , you'll see it just becomes mathematically. Wait, you can't even really show it in a visual. But you have a king peace, right? And, uh, and what can it do in a certain situation? It's on the chess board. And what are its options? Well, it can move up, down left, right, or any one of the diagonals, so that gives it eight options. So the way we would represent that is this is Theis State. It's in right now. And let's say it's in square number 33. This is square number 33 so it can move to any one of eight positions. 123 45678 Okay. And that's just a single step. Step zero. Step one. Step two. Step three. Okay, Now, from each one of these positions, it can also go to eight. Okay, so a he a a a and each of these a options, and we're assuming it's not near the edge of the board. Obviously, each of these eight options can also each will have eight options out of it. Okay, So 64 total from each of these. So you can already see just to make three steps into the future If you're going to do it, Algorithmic, we like this and really, uh, methodically plan out every single step and what the options are, Then you're just, you know, the possibility of wasting time is just huge. So how we make this a real life example? Well, let's say you're putting together your blawg and you've got three steps that you want to take. Number one has come up with a title number two is you want to come up with a subtitle and number three is You want to choose a color. So the question is, which one is she? Did you first? 2nd 3rd? This one seems kind of obvious. But how many different options you have for a blawg title? Basically infinite options. Same with subtitle with color. What say you wanted to choose between 100 powers. And what say there were just 10 options for each of these. Okay, just to make it simple. So first, you don't know which order urine to do these in. And then even if you decide the order, you're talking about 10 times, 10 times 100. So you're talking about, um, 1000 different potential solutions or paths? Remember, a solution is just a path through these states. Okay, so one solution would be OK. You're gonna move here, and then you're gonna move here, and then you're gonna move here, you're gonna move to box 32 you're gonna move to box 31 then you're gonna move to box 30. Okay, that's one path amongst the hundreds and hundreds of paths that you could take. So this is one solution. Possible solution. And you're talking about thinking about planning just hundreds of looking at hundreds of different solutions just to get it on idea of what you should do for an extremely simple task. So the point I'm trying to make here is that computational Lee There's what are called search algorithms that have different methods of finding solutions to these sorts of problems. and the way you when you do basically is either you know what the solution looks like or you don't. But either way, you have a goal test that tells you okay, is getting here. Um, I now, at my goal or not is 30. My goal or not. If 30 is your goal, then good. You have your first solution, but there may be other paths you could take to get to 30. So then the question is, if you have three different ways of doing the same thing, remember like our example getting your blood set up or making your 1st $1000 Let's say you have three different solutions. How do you compare these? You're not just going to do all of them. You have to pick one of them. So then that's where your cost function comes in. So what? Let's just think about okay. You want to make your 1st $1000 with a business, and, uh, you know, you still want to stay with your job, but you want to see if you can make $1000 in a business and get your feet wet so you have three different options. You have a lemonade stand. You have consulting and you have write a book with the block. Okay, So those your three options and the question is, Well, how do you decide between these three? You have to come up with some sort of metrics that you can use to measure. All right, So one of them might be How long will it take? Time. Okay, another much metric might be. How much money is it gonna cost? Justo get it set up and to do it. How much money is it going to cost? Another one might be energy. Is this gonna be just taking a lot of my energy and sapping away my energy? Another one might be. How much do I enjoy it, or how much time? What percentage of the time I in the flow? Okay. Is it fulfilling work? So these air different metrics and what you would do is you give all of these weights. All right, so you say OK, you start with 100%. How much of the weight do you want to give to time? Well, let's say let's say time is really important. So 50% of the importance goes to time. Let's say money's also important, so we'll give that 30% and we've got 20% left over. Will say 10% goes to energy in 10% goes to enjoyment. Now somebody else may say, Well, fulfillment is really what gets me. So 80% is fulfillment and energy. I have lots of energies. I'll say that's 5% and I don't Money will be 1% and then 4% here or no, that's, uh, night. That would be 90%. So what say this is 14% is time, Okay, So two different people could weigh thes solutions differently and decide which one would be optimal for them. So the optimal decision for one person may not be the optimal decision for another person. So you have to weigh each of these things. And then what you do is you multiply them by the metrics. So what say And so the way you would would store that is as a collection of four numbers. Okay, so you just come up with a number for each one of these. So let's say two for 37 and then this is one 11 a five and writing a book is seven 15 for three. So what you would do is you multiply. Let's say we're gonna go with this person right here, and I'm just going to do this example for one solution. But, um, you would to analyze the lemonade stand. You do do work up here. So the wait for the first number would be 50% or 0.5 times to plus 0.3 times four plus 0.1 times three plus 0.1 times seven. Okay, So these matchup to these four numbers as well as these four numbers thes with weights and you would multiply this together and that would give you how a total like a single number that would represent option a. Then you have a number for being for C. Okay, so what's just say A comes out to 5.4 b comes out to 3.9 c, comes out to 7.2. That's your top score. So you're gonna go with this option here to go with Option C? Okay, so that's how in in a in the ideal world, if you had good numbers for everything, that's how you would make decisions, and you can still use this. You just have to sometimes estimate what these numbers are for each one year options. But this gives you a way to, uh, two parcel things out and where you feel sure about something or or not. You can come up with some sort of number. That's your best guess. And then you can compare things along all these metrics and decide how much each of these are worth. So this allows you to make complex decisions. And once you make the decision, you can feel good about it. You can you can tell yourself. Okay, I went through this process. It makes sense. I did my best guess based on the best information I could get for each one of these. And this is the final solution. You have a number that you can look at and you can just move on from there. So what I want you to get from this video is that you're never going to be able to do this sort of process. For every single thing that you're planning, it's just computational e impossible. Even a computer can do it, and there's different sort of search algorithms that computers use. So one type of search algorithm is depth. First search. So it'll go through all it will go through all the depth and it'll go all the way to the end. And then it'll say, Okay. How much did that path cost? What was the cost? Okay, Was three point now, nine. What did this path cost? Oh, that was 7.2. What was this path? Oh, that path was 5.4. And it will continue doing that for a certain amount of time. And you can tell the algorithm, for example, if you find anything over seven, stop the algorithm and just choose that one. So it could, you know, if it had kept on going and might have find found in nine appear. But if you tell it, stop it a seven. It'll stop it a seven. Otherwise, it'll go infinitely. And, uh, you'll, you know, you make it a nine, you get my get a 9.1. Here, you might get a nine point 0.1 point two or a 9.12 But you're getting diminishing returns, and you're spending a lot more time to continually search. That's a depth first search. Another type of search is breath first. So you start here. You do this one. You see the cost of going there. You see the cost of going here. You see the cost to going here. See the cost going here, you compare them. Maybe you cut off the ones that are the worst producers. So you cut off that whole side of the tree. You cut off that one to cut off that one, and you cut off that one. And now you're just searching what are on these branches, What are on these branches and what are on these branches and you're not even exploring these. So this is what's called a search tree. And the way you visualize it is this is where you start right here. This is your starting state right here. And then these air, the various first step actions that you could take. These are the various second step options you can make. Okay. And that's why I look, it's called a tree. And let's say your search album is doing breath first, it goes here than it goes here than it goes here. Finds out. Okay, this is not a good This is not good. So just cut off that whole part of the tree and then it starts going here, Here, here, here, here, here, here Decides to cut those off, decides to cut these off. So now it can search. So you're cutting off a lot of the possibilities and you're obviously this isn't perfect. And it'll make mistakes sometimes, but just different mathematical algorithms to search a potentially infinite tree with just all these different steps and often times, you don't need to find one little hidden thing. That's only at one of these endings. You just have to find something that's good enough. So there may be solutions at three or four different leafs on these different branches. You don't need to find all of them. And which one is the optimal one? You just need to find the best one, or you just need to find the 1st 1 or compare the 1st 3 that you find. So that's how these algorithm works. Algorithms work. They actually get very complex eso We're just scratching the surface here. But the point of all this is to show you the amount of complexity that's involved in planning Israel. It's it's huge. And so don't beat yourself up if it seems too complex or it seems too hard, the only way to really solve problems like this is to try. If you come up with a couple or you know three different plans 23 different plans, sketch them out and then compare them. See which one seem best, and you have to go with your instinct a lot of time or go with. That's why modeling is so important because you can see what path somebody else took, or paths that two or three other people took. And you can compare those and then follow that person's path or that person's path for that person's path, and it makes it a lot more efficient to do. You're planning that way to just copy somebody else's path rather than to search basically an infinite tree on your own. So a lot of thes things. You have to have those creative constraints to allow you to do this sort of stuff, and at the end of the day, you do have to trust your intuition. You have to make decisions pretty quickly, and you have to understand most of your decisions, you're never gonna be able to verify whether it was the right decision or not, because you're never going to be able to go down those other paths. You know, you're never gonna be able to go in a time machine and c o What would have happened if I took a left at the fork instead of her right stuff like that? So, um, you have to get comfortable with just being sure enough and confident enough and make decisions quickly without getting bogged down in too much detail. And obviously, that's a gray area where it's not always easy to find a middle ground. But what I suggest you do in any project is spend about 10% of your time on planning. So your cost function is ultimately, I'm giving myself 10 minutes to search this tree, and I'm gonna go down. However many options Aiken do in that period of time, once I get to that period of time, I compare them. I pick the best one and then I move forward and I'll come back in a week's time, in a month's time in a year's time and make adjustments as necessary. But just by using time, and you can also, you know, add resource is delegate and say I'm gonna spend a certain percentage of my income, um, on planning as well, or something else like that. But really the easiest ways. Just saying I'm gonna spend this amount of time planning and that's how much time I'm going to give myself to search the tree of options. Pick the best solution, which is just a path, and then that's it. 6. Introduction to Hourly and Daily Planning: in this video, we're going to talk about how to organize on the daily and hourly levels so hourly and day we And what that means is, on a day we level you're planning out your day, the night before and or the morning right before you start. And hourly means that Do you hit something on time? If you plan an hour for something and it takes longer than an hour or less than an hour, what do you do with that? So how do you adjust during the day once you've planned out your day and maybe the day ahead, and the course that comes after this covers your weekly in your monthly planning. So some of the stuff you're going to see in this course were taking notes of things were measuring things. But we're not necessarily analyzing or learning those things. Learning from those on the level of individual day, you're usually not gonna learn enough at a systematic level where it makes sense to do a learning process at the end of every single day. That's better to do on a weekly basis or even a monthly basis. So in terms of measuring things, you need to measure them immediately or as soon as possible, because otherwise you'll forget. So you need to get it down on paper or you need to get it into the computer. So you're recording things in measuring things on that daily or even hourly level. So going back to our calendar here, you're met your planning things out on the hourly level at the resolution of every half hour. Or you can go in between the lines and do 50 ad in 15 minute resolution. But you're mostly about the hours and 1/2 hours and measuring how long things take and then also noting down your especially your mistakes and or your accomplishments. Those are the two biggest things you want to take down and any solutions also, that you would come up with, because those are things that you're gonna look at at the end of the week, when you're doing your weekly planning and your weekly learning, and that's where you do you batch process this stuff so you want to do the minimum on a stuff on a daily basis and process it once. At the end of the week. The great thing about doing it at the end of the week is that you can combine that with planning out your next week, and you can also notice patterns. So a lot of times you're going to see the same problem crop up more than once. It's gonna happen multiple times during the week, and you can see that pattern. And what that pattern tells you is that this is really important to solve because you'll see how much time you lost, how much efficiency lost by not doing it the proper way. So what we're gonna get into in this video is how to actually go about planning at the hourly level and the day we level so at the and this will get a bit into what you're doing at the weekly level. At the weekly level. You do want to plan out your entire week and look at your to do list. Look at what your what? You have to get done that week and plan out as much as possible. Now, the mistake a lot of people make is that they plan out every single block of time. So what say we're planning out Monday, they'll fill up this entire left hand side. And I'm just writing this in, uh, for the purposes of this video. But you would not write this in here. Um, they'll plan out every single minute. And the problem with that is it doesn't give you any elasticity. So what I recommend is, ideally, you would have a certain time when you wake up, maybe at 7 a.m. Maybe that's 8 a.m. And you get started, maybe at 9 a.m. So that's when you would start planning things out. You're also gonna have routines, which will be talking about later in this course. Those are the things like when you wake up, what is your routine on the way to work? What is your routine? What is your routine for lunch for meals at the end of the day of work and also when you get home and before you go to sleep, those are all routines. And in large part, those routines should be fairly similar from day today, today, today. So, uh, creating those routines is huge. And then you can just put in a box. Okay. Morning routine. M root. That's what I put in for morning routine for example. So then what's he got to work? And this would be travel or commute, and you might listen to something on the way to work. But you get in here, and maybe you have a routine for morning office routine that might be looking at what you have planned for the whole day. Could be checking email. UH, is that that would be part of routine. It could be half on our could be an hour, and then you might plan out a few blocks of stuff. You might have lunch here. You might take an hour for lunch, and then what a lot of people do is they'll just continual toe schedule stuff for all this time and anything that's colored in. That's something that's planned ahead of time, and that is usually things where you're meeting with somebody else. And so it's something that has to get done. There can also be regular events, right? Your things that need to get done every single week at a certain time or you have a certain time, for example, when you do your weekly planning and so you could block out of time for that or a weekly meeting or certain things that you want to get done on the same day of the week every single week. And we'll be getting into that also in the weekly and monthly planning, where you take care of different areas of your life on a certain day of each week and just give you a sneak peek of that. Monday is business Tuesday as personal Wednesday's relationships There's days health and Friday systems and then Saturday creativity. Sunday creativity. Arrest those. You can figure that out, what theme you want to give to those and then your your routine. Like if you had a certain systems level thing that you wanted to do once a week, then that would happen on Friday and you had scheduled time for that. So at the hourly level, you want to give yourself buffer time. So if any of these things go overboard, you can finish them here and still stay on schedule, because what you want to avoid doing is this thing Text this Ah, I'll just give these letters so we can start Teoh de he. So what you don't want to happen is a takes up an hour instead of half a Knauer, and then everything has shifted down and you're just pushing everything down. Instead, what you want to do is have a stopgap this buffer right here so that you can you can get back on schedule. So let's say maybe D takes an hour and 1/2 instead of an hour. You're still on schedule to get you done, and then you'll be right on time for your meeting from 4 to 6 p.m. So you can put push your lunch off, But you don't. It doesn't mess up your entire day. You can get back on track pretty quickly if you have that buffer time. So the way you should think about this is when you're starting out, give yourself one or two hours of buffer every single day and start out with that, See if that's enough, and if it's too much, then you can start to whittle away and and have less and less buffer time each day. What you're going to get from this system is you look at this at the end of the week and you start to notice. Okay? I planned out this much work. Um, not counting the routines just half a Knauer an hour and 1/2. 2.5. 3.5. 4.5. 5.5. 6.5. So you plan 6.5 hours to get done. During what? Say that eight hour day. So, uh, did all that stuff actually get done? If it didn't what Say you didn't get to D and instead you just continued be. Then you say OK out of the scheduled one 1/2. 1.5. 2.5. 3.5. You planned to get, uh, 4.5 done. But you only got 3.5. So you were off by an hour, so that buffer will cover it. But this thing went way over this thing when? 1.5 hours over. So you're going to start toe, learn over time, how much things, how much time things take and start to get better at estimating things. And the better you get it estimating the fewer buffers that you need. So the idea for planning out an individual day is to start out giving yourself to buffers a day and then on you could give yourself that second buffer, for example, Could come between eight and 9 p.m. So if you have certain things planned, maybe have dinner planned here and, uh, commute. So maybe maybe you really need to get d done. De can happen. Hop on your laptop and get that done. And then, um, you know, get to sleep at a certain time and then go on to the next day. Um, one question some people have is what if this doesn't cover the full like this doesn't cover the full 24 hours. So if you stay up really late past midnight, what you can do is just change this to ah, 12 a.m. And this toe one I am. This is to 2 a.m. And this is to 3 a.m. and then you just draw a colored line across. So this is, um, you draw line every three hours and that helps you know what time it is as you're moving across this schedule. So you do just to this all the way down 3 p.m. 6 p.m. You can even do alternating colors if you want to. So that's at the hourly level. You're just you can adjust things as time goes on. The next level is the day we level and we'll cover that in the next video. 7. Daily Planning: in this video, we're gonna cover day, we planning. So for the most part, your entire week should be planned out at during your weekly planning, which I suggest you do on Sunday between three. And four PM And give yourself a good hour for that. When you're just getting started, it can often take more than an hour, so you may want toe add in an extra hour of buffer time right after that, just in case. Um, remember that buffer time. If that's free and you don't need time for this, you could check out your to do list and just see. Okay, What some might to do was, what can I bang out really easily? Take five or 10 minutes or go into your inbox? Is there anything that you can process really quickly and just get that stuff done during buffer time? Maybe clean off your desk. Eso used that buffer time to take care of miss other miscellaneous stuff at the at the level of planning days. One thing that can happen is you may not know how, how much time certain major tasks are going to take. So what you would do is during your weekly planning. You may only planet things out for, um for like, the 1st 2 or three days of the week, and then you would leave the last two days open and then just wait until you start to see how long these tasks actually take and then add more time to them later on in block off additional sections on Thursday on Friday to take over some of these things. An example of how I do that is, let's say I have a new project that I want to get started with, and I just need to restart researching it and put together a one page plan. So the way I do that is ah, block off an hour, maybe two hours to come up with that one page plan to just give give myself a rough idea of what do I even want to do? Get some research done, get some things down on paper, create that one pager in one note, and then that will give me an idea of what are the next steps? How many weeks? How many months is that gonna take? And then I can start thinking about OK, what is the next step that I want to get finished by the end of this week and start setting some milestones. That stuff is really I'll get more into that in my course on project management. But the idea is, as I said in that previous video is you wanna have a project, you won't have a one pager for each project. You want to break that down into tasks and you want to have milestones. So you have a rough idea of the progress you want to make. And so leaving time open allows you to take on more open ended projects. The more open ended the project is, the less you're gonna be able to estimate the exact amount of time. And one of the worst things that can happen is if you plan out the entire week, Philip, all your hours and then certain things just like you get to Thursday and half of the stuff on Wednesday didn't get done. And it's really hard to shift things over. So based on the type of work that you do, you're gonna have a pretty good idea of how accurately you're currently able toe estimate the time cost of things and people tend to be optimistic, so they tend to estimate the amount of time that would be the lower bound, so it would take 3 to 5 hours. They'll usually estimate three hours or 3.5 hours, and because of that optimism, they tend to push things off. So when you're planning out your days, The'keeper's here is toe like It's OK to have have a fully planned schedule from morning until lunch, but the idea is after lunch. Make sure that you're leaving free time, especially on Thursday and Friday. Say you can get everything done by the end of the week. And if you if you come to Thursday or it's Wednesday afternoon and you realize you're totally on schedule, that's when you can start looking at okay, what's what's going on next week or what are some projects where I could spend more time? So the truth of this system is, for the most part, you're not planning out individual days at the beginning of the day. That stuff is usually planned out at the weekly level, and so all you're doing is leaving strategically, leaving time blocks open and not filling them in for example, on Thursday and Friday. Or you could have Wednesday where there's a lot of buffer and Friday where the afternoon is mostly free and so you can take anything that wasn't finished and do it later. And let me also show you how to keep track of what, uh, which tasks are done and which ones aren't. So what you want to do is take a different colored pen and circle anything. And if you only have one color pen, you can you can still do with that one color. But anything that hasn't been finished or you had to skip you would circle that. Okay, So if so, what this would mean right here is that you did spend a full hour on E. But you didn't finish it, okay? And so you would cross this out anything that, um, that's scheduled that you at least started. You would cross that out because you don't want to have any duplicates. So for B b would be done so we can cross. We can cross out B and cross out be It took extra time, but it's still got done. And what you want to do is is at the end of the day, go cross. And actually the crossing out should be in the black because you only wanna have that extra color involved when it's something that you want to pay attention to. So you're going through. And as long as that stuff happened and you you, uh, you've taken care of it, then you cross it out. And when you finish the entire day, at the end of the day, you do that as long as everything has been taken care of. And you also want to cross out anything that where you completed that task. So he is the only thing, Um, so when dinner actually happens and a lot of times will happen is you'll at the end of the workday, you'll go back and you look at all this stuff and you'll process it. You'll write in the actual time blocks and then when you get home, maybe when you're about to fall asleep before you go to sleep, you fill in all this time with what you actually did during that time. Then, uh, you use this vert vertical cross out system to make sure that Aziz Muchas possible everything is being taken care of. So, for example, with E, you might decide. Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna use, um time tomorrow at the end of the day to do e. Once you do that, then you can cross out e. And then this vert you can use that vertical line, which means that I have taken care of everything on this day. So what happens is you process everything. This is your plan is what actually happens. And if something didn't get finished or you need more time on it, then you're going to create a new block for when you can spend some more time on it and then cross it out. But until you move things over, you just circle it like that and that, um that insurers that you never lose track of something. The other thing that I haven't talked about yes yet is it to do list and how you integrate your to do list with this? So let's go back to this piece of paper right here. How does your to do list get integrated? Well, your to do was to something that you keep separate, but as soon as possible, you want to turn that into something that you schedule. Because once you schedule something, there's a lot more likelihood that it's actually going to get done. And if you don't feel like doing it right now and it doesn't need to get done right now, then you can schedule it for weeks from now. But the point is to just keep this is empty as possible. And for the most part, this is gonna happen at the end of the week. So at the end of the week, when you're doing your weekly planning right here, you're gonna process everything. And I'm gonna make a short video right after this on how that process works of getting things What what exactly or should to do list should look like and how that would get integrated here. But that's really something that you're gonna be doing at the weekly level. Uh, however, the ideal way to do it is if it to do, comes up what's and it's Tuesday. Just look at Wen's. Your next block of free time added directly into here, and you never have to put it on a separate to do list. Another thing you can do is you can keep your to do list on the back of this piece of paper , and you'll actually you can actually keep a lot of stuff just on the back of this piece of paper. Little notes to yourself. Mistakes, accomplishments. We'll get more into that later. But the back of this P paste paper can also be really useful. And you obviously you won't have these marks here, so it's very easy to manage it, so we'll get into that next. The last thing, yes, so I'll have a separate video for that. 8. Managing Your To Do List: Now let's talk about managing your to do list. What should it look like? Uh, basically, it's just a list, and what I do is I keep it in my phone just in a text file, because that's the easiest way to keep it. And I suggest not using separate APS or using an app to Vermont give you reminders or stuff like that, cause all that should be done in your schedule. So if you need a reminder for something, what you do is at the beginning of the day, you set an alarm in your phone to give you a reminder of that, and you just have it on here. But the easiest way to do it is just her, said it reminder for yourself the night before or the morning off. And the way your to do list your work is just urgent, which means it needs to be done today, this week, month, then sometime just kind of long term stuff. And then there's also a section for delegate. So something that is long term is a sometime thing. It could also be a week thing, cause you're gonna be, at minimum, processing this entire list looking at it once a week and just ideas for things that you can delegate. And this is something that you wanna be checking in at least once a day at this would be part of your morning routine is to look at this and see if there's anything here. Um, but you want to get stuff out of here, so this should not be a huge list in your phone. This is something that you process at the end of the week, and you get as much if not every single thing out of here and into, and you just put on you just put one thing on each line and you just get this stuff into your schedule so your goal should be getting things. Your schedule your schedule as quickly as possible, and it's not. And don't don't let this become a monster. So this should be something that's part of your morning routine. We'll be talking more about morning routines in in the section on taking action, which is the A and Pam in the Pamela model. But your to do list all it really is is a holding bay, uh, that usually going to be processing once a week. But anything that's urgent, uh, and you just need to write it down and take care of it. The next day you would put in here, and then you're going to check this to do list at the beginning of the day, so that could be part of either your morning routine when you wake up or could be something that you do, um, in your routine. One. Once you get to the office or once you get to work, so one of those two places is where it should be. You could also add it to your evening routine before you go to sleep or at the end of the day of work, so that you can also process because you want to keep this as empty as possible. Don't let it become a monster. 9. Tips for Using Your One Page Calendar: the last thing I'm gonna show you. What This is how to keep get this into a pocket size. So all you do is folded. So the first thing is, you fold in half like this, then you fold it again. So it looks like this, and then you fold it in half like that. And then it's something that's really easy to keep in your pocket or your purse or whatever it is. And what you do is any time you sit down, you just take this out and you have it laying there as you're doing your other work and you're writing stuff down or next to the computer. And then it's always there, reminding you. Okay, make sure you're looking at your plan and make sure you're recording what's actually happening. And the reason why it's so valuable to have this as a physical thing is you don't have to remember open that app or go to that website. It's It's something where it's always gonna be right next to your keyboard right next to your mouse. So that or right next to you when you're reading something, it's and it's something that's not going to get lost in all that digital clutter. The other thing is having duplicate events in your Google. You could do this in Google calendar by just creating a second event, and they would show up side by side. It's not gonna look is great, and it's just harder to remember to do it. So this is a system that's really about making sure that you do it and you do it consistently and you're getting those metrics. So you really know where you're spending your time, because as you're going to see in the other, the next course that comes after this on weekly planning and doing your metrics is you learn a ton about yourself by just doing this for a week, a couple weeks a month, and it's super easy to say, consistent and actually do it, because as long as you're, you have this next to all the time and you just don't keep it in your pocket. Uh, at the end of the day or every few hours, you just go in here and you write down what you what you did, and you're using it as your plan for the day. So you know what you should be doing with each block of time. The other really important thing is to make sure you're not. You're not a slave to distraction, so I have a course on how to exhaustive. We go through and and make sure you you are avoiding distractions at all costs. But the biggest thing you can do, the number one thing you can dio is turn off notifications. And the easiest way to do that is to just put your phone on airplane mode. So if there's one tip that would give you that would solve 80% your problems is just put your phone on airplane mode when you're when you have work blocks. It's fine if you wanna have it open before work during lunch and when you get home. But during these blocks of time, that should go on airplane mode, and we'll be talking again about routines where you need to have a routine for for these sorts of of situate situations that happen every day like lunch. So what is your routine when you finish your work and you leave the office to have lunch or you just kind of switch gears anytime you're switching gears you wanna have a routine for that? So part of the routine is put taking it off airplane mode. And then at the end of the lunch, when you sit back down at your desk, you're going back into airplane mode, and that's that's what gives you that ability to focus and get deep and actually get stuff done consistently. So that's the number one tip. But basically what you're doing is just This is this is your secret weapon that you have with you at all times just in your pocket and you can see exactly it folds right, right around noon. So your morning is here and your evening, your afternoon. Your evening is here and for these days, for the hump days or the full days, like Tuesday, Thursday, a little bit of Saturday. What you can do is change the folding. So you look at okay, what days do I want to see? And the best way to do it is once you get to Tuesday, you want to see Tuesday and Wednesday and then on Thursday, you want to see Thursday and Friday. So what you do is you take it apart and you see OK, where do I want the first fold to be? You wanted to be along this line right here, and I'll actually show you another hack, which makes it easier to read as you take a Sharpie and you put it along the edge of each day. So this is just a regular Sharpie and you go down each day, and that keeps them separated, and it makes this a lot easier to read. The other thing is, I like to mark off the days so Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and it also makes the folding is here. So we want to fold here and we want to fold here, and it will make a tad bit wider. But that's not a big problem. It'll still easily fit in your pocket. It's about this size of an iPhone. Hold it again, fold that in. And now you have Wednesday and Thursday. Just fold it over and you're good to go. So you see the morning and the evening. So, uh, then you can open it any time and look at okay, What's going on for the rest of the week have I've been spending my time, but that's this is what it looks like so it can get, um, it can get somewhat. It can seem somewhat messy on the surface, but, uh, this is actually an extremely efficient way to do things, and you can get a ton of metrics just spending 10 or 15 minutes looking at where you're spending your time. And the great thing about this is with APS with stuff on your phone or on the computer or measuring your computer time. First of all, it doesn't measure everything. Um, and most people, for most people, they just don't actually do it. They can't. They just forget to do it because it's it's just one of the hundreds of things going on in their digital universe. So what you do is you make this party or physical universe where you can't ignore it, where it's always right there looking at you and it gets done. So that's the great thing about this is whenever you take a course, you read a book and they suggest doing something like this. You always air asking yourself, Well, am I actually going to do that? Am I gonna really do this every single day and I can tell you this is something that works really, really well, and there's no reason why you can't start today. Just take a screenshot of your Google calendar at the week view. Print this out, get it going and start using this today. So, like even if it's a Thursday right now or Friday, you just print it out and maybe print out the one for next week. So it's all lined up and ready to go, and, uh, and that's it. So one final thing I should tell you is when. When there's additional things you want to add to your calendar, you have the option of if it's if it's happening during the current week. So let's say it's Tuesday and you decide of a meeting with somebody on Thursday. You don't want to add that in as a digital event unless there's some reason like you want, have a Google hang out or something like that, where it needs to be digital. Or maybe they want that. But either way, your primary tool is toe. Add that scheduled call in on the piece of paper, and it's not important or necessary, Toe added. In the digital version. So your primary place to be doing things is the physical manifestation of the calendar, and the digital is optional, except for special situations that require doing it both ways. 10. Introduction to PAMeLa Part 1 - Plan: in this section, you're gonna learn how to plan. And this is the first part of the Pamela model. It's the P. And that should be lower case of of the four parts. And remember, this is not a linear process. This is a cycle. So its plan act measure learn, and you keep on going around and around. All right, so this section is going to go through constraints. It's going to go through brainstorming and coming up with the tasks it's going to go through prioritization, and it's going to go through scheduling and then the last step, which is the summary and visualization. So we're gonna cover each of these in a separate video in this section. 11. Constraints in Planning: let's talk about constraints. The what are constraints. These are the things that allow you to decide what is the box within which you're gonna work. And the constraints come down to things like time, money, start your budget, the amount of energy you want to put into it. And money also links to the people you can hire information you can gather and equipment that you can buy. So the purpose of constraints is to figure out roughly what, how much how much resource is do I want to put into this project. And if you don't know that, that it really makes it impossible to plan because you could just spend infinite time on a single project. And when you have no idea, just think about orders of magnitude. This is something I want to spend one hour on, 10 hours on 100 hours on 1000 hours on, and sometimes you're still not even sure about that. So what's the next step? Will. The next step is to think about well, what percentage of my time do I want to spend on this? So you go back to your calendar. Your look at what is how much of my time is spoken for with other things. So you have your morning routine and you would start out with thinking about, for example, How much sleep do I need? This is your 24 hour day. How much sleep do I need? Let's just say eight hours. So you have 12 hours. I mean, you have 16 hours left, and the simplified version I like to use is you have eight hours for sleep. You have eight hours for business related stuff. And often that times that turns into more like 10 when you take into commute and other things. And then, uh, the rest of time is you balance between your personal, your relationships and your health. Meaning this is like managing your household, your finances, all this stuff that I talk about in other courses on how to manage your information, your property, um, and relationships spending time with other people, your family friends, Uh, and then your health. So exercising the food that you eat stuff like that. Okay, so you have This is this is a basic idea of where your time is going. And so you think about Well, how much time do I have. If this is a project related to business, Well, let's say you have eight hours a day and 40 hours a week and times 50 weeks a year. You have 2000 hours. So where's where's your time going already? Out of those 2000 hours. And how much of that is is really Frito work on new stuff. So I got Google. They give you one day a week. Okay, So you would get Ah, fifth of this would be 400 hours a year. So if you wanted to give yourself for example, a 50 year time or you could find that started time, what could you get done in 400 hours? So this is a way to Teoh work backwards and think about will. What is time? Really? How much time do I have available? And what sort of constraints should I set on this project? So you may. This is a really easy way to do it and often times thinking somewhere in between 10 hours and 100 hours for a lot of projects and just set up an estimate. So what you're really trying to do when you start using this sort of thinking is not to try to be perfect or instantly become this great planner, because the truth is a lot of this stuff you just don't know and you're gonna make a guess , and you're gonna be wrong. And that's not the problem. The problem is, if you're not steadily improving, so the when you're first implementing this course, all you're really doing is setting some baselines. Okay, so you're going to the gym for the first time. You're you're figuring out OK, How How long? Um, can I run? How? How much time or how many miles? How much can I lift with this exercise or that exercise? How much can I stretch? Can I touch my toes or not? How many inches away in my so getting some baselines for where you starting and usually at the beginning? What happens is once you set that baseline, once you start working to improve it, you start to see that sort of beginner's luck. Or, as a beginner, you start to improve very quickly. Eventually you'll hit a plateau and you'll your your progress will start to even out. But usually at the beginning, there's a period of quick progress where you get a lot better, Really quickly. Um and so your first step is just setting the baseline. And you should be thinking for the first couple weeks, probably the first month. It's really just about setting the baseline and and figuring out, OK, what are some really numbers for where I'm spending my time and then you're going to get better as you get better at estimating. So any time you set up a project or just a specific task, you want to give yourself an idea of how long you want to spend on that and sometimes the task is just gonna figure out OK, I want to get a basic estimate for what are the constraints of this project? Same thing with money now with money and with budget and in a sense, also a time with this. You also want to get a dollar figure on what is your time worth per hour. And so, uh, what Sayer time is worth $50 an hour, which means you're making roughly 100,000 year before taxes. If that's true, then that gives you an idea of how much money your what your budget is now with the time element, you're not just thinking about how much time will take total, but also deadline. So the time cost and the deadline are the two major things for time. With money you're looking at. Sometimes it's easy to get people information equipment with money. Sometimes it's much more complicated than that. But you do want to get a sense of how much money you want to spend on this. And ultimately, you can convert those time constraints into money so you can figure out well with any project tryto or task. You want to figure out well about how much money is this worth now. Sometimes there's something that just has to get done and you don't really know or it's been assigned to you. And so it does. This stuff doesn't really matter as much. Its just about okay, what is the time cost? What is the deadline and you're not investing any money or budget or any of your own resource is into things. The last piece that's interesting is energy and energy has to do with during your day during those 24 hours of your day. Your energy. It's not like your zero around zero energy. Then you wake up and you're instantly full energy for the rest of the day and then you go to sleep. That's not what the graph looks like. Instead, the graph looks like usually you're tired at the beginning. Then you come up, you have some pretty good energy. At the beginning of day, you have lunch, and then it starts to go down, and, uh and then you go back to sleep. So this time is in this time right here should be used for different things than what you're using here. So this is Hi, this is high. Maybe this is medium and this is low, but it's it's really better to just think about in terms of high energy and low energy or good energy and bad energy. And what that means is that certain projects you can do while on leave when you're really operating at 100% other projects, other tasks you can do even if your energy isn't great. So counterintuitively exercise or or chores around the house. You can do those, even if you don't have a lot of mental energy or mental power available toe work on things , and part of this also depends on what sort of work you're doing. So is that work pra Meyer primarily manual labor? Is it emotional work or is it intellectual work? Which of these three and it's it's different kinds of energy, and I know that is of that's a vague way of using energy that just means, like, how awake are you? How alert are you? Um, how fatigued are you? And being burnt out, emotionally or intellectually, feels a little bit different from being physically worn out, and being physically worn out could make it so that you're really not ready to do this sort of stuff. But on the flip side, you could come home from a really strenuous workout or working outside all day, and you could still listen to an audiobook or watch some videos, but you'd be lying in bed completely tired. So there are. You just want to think about Is this something that is high energy required or low energy? And that right there is gonna help you set the constraints for your project for your task. And this sort of this sort of thinking does not. You don't want to spend a lot of time on this. If you're just planning something very minor, this is when you're making bigger plans. That's a project or multiple projects or an area of your life or your entire life. These are the sort of things you want to be thinking about. In the next video. We'll talk about coming up with an idea of what are the tasks that you want to get done, brainstorming those grouping them together and also looking at dependencies. 12. Brainstorming Tasks During Planning: what's talk about tasks and brainstorming, and there's really three steps. The first step is brainstorming, then grouping and three looking for dependencies. And what dependencies means is there may be a certain task where you've grouped them together, but you have to do the first thing before you do the second thing, so you can't put the cookies in the oven until you've actually mixed up the batter and it's already to go. That's a dependency where there's certain things that you can have going at the same time. So what's your cooking Thanksgiving dinner? You can have one dish going on one part of the stove and another thing on another part. And then the third thing, the turkey is in the oven. Okay, so, um, those are things you can do in parallel and dependencies of things that need to happen serially so parallel and those air computer those are words. Are vocabulary used in computers? A lot artificial intelligence. Also, any time you hear multi threading multiple core processor, that's what it's about is if you can do things in parallel, you can get him done a lot faster with our human brains and the whole idea of multitasking and the myth of multitasking is people think they can do things in parallel. But the reality is they really can't. So, OK, so number one is brainstorming. So this is when you're coming up with a to do list or you're taking things from your to do list and you're just writing out a bunch of tasks and you're just trying to get every all the ideas out of your head. And when you're coming up with a project, often the first thing you want to do is just write down ideas and start coming up with all the ideas that you have and some of them can be actions you're going to do. Some of them could just be ideas or principles. Things you heard something somebody said a website, a tool or resource of book that would be useful. You just collect those all in one place, but you ultimately want to turn each of those into something that's actionable, and those get turned into dues. All right, so once you have this list of tasks, the next thing to do and you've brainstormed. The second thing is to group them together. Some things you'll realize will fall under other things you may realize, OK, Uh, A and B actually are sub items under J. That doesn't necessarily mean there dependencies. But if you wrote down for J, it's like make chocolate chip cookies and a M B R by, ah, flower by sugar, though, should really be organized underneath this project. They don't make sense to be separate. So that's one level of grouping is just anything that would make sense is part of it to do that's actually a project is different, and and this is something that can often be confusing is what is the difference between a task and a project will. There is no like clear cut way toe ever separate an individual action or a discreet step from a larger task or a project. So it's something that you just have to have an intuition for. A project is something that you're usually gonna work on over several days, weeks or months, So you're gonna have multiple time blocks to take on that project where you're working on the same project you're working on Project A, and this is your blocking off different blocks of time on different days. A task is, ideally something that you can knock off in a certain block of time. Not necessarily, but usually it should be something that's pretty cut and dry. You can say, OK, it will take about an hour to do that and you're pretty certain so like, for example, research would be a task. And you could say, OK, I'm gonna spend three hours on research and you should be able to get your research done within that. And it's fairly easy to what you can give somebody pretty clear instructions. It's Ah, single task doesn't take a ton of different skill sets, takes one skill set, so that would be a task, whereas the projects could incorporate a bunch of different skill sets that might be done by different people. Or you just may have multiple skill sets that are needed. But as I said before, it's really impossible to separate out to the end degree. What is a separate task? So, um, at the at the minimum level, even somebody just moving their mouse cursor up three pixels, you could consider that Anak Shin or you could say, Well, that's really three separate actions. Each action is moving at one pixel. Okay, so, um, it's really it's impossible. Teoh, get a, uh, unless you want to go to this really micro level, which is isn't practical. There's really no way to measure this sort of stuff. So you just have to eyeball it and make it something where it's, ah, where it's like this and make sense like a project versus a task and versus a role. Remember those three levels I talked about earlier? A role is a certain area of your life. Like your health. You have a role like chef, and then you would have projects like cooking your cookies, and then you'd have a task like by flower, Okay. And these would be things. What you can think about is if you had a checklist thes air, things that are easy to just check off and they don't take a bunch of time. All right, so those were three levels, roles, projects and tasks. So a role would be what is the occupation of somebody who does this for a living? The project would be something that takes a good amount of time. Could be, uh, uh, something that you do over multiple weeks or months or even years, or could be something like cookies were maybe just takes a Knauer so and the tasks air fairly discreet, so a task could be like a step in the recipe. All right, So, um, that's all you really need That's gonna work for you all the time. So brainstorming what brainstorming means is, once you've got things organized like this into projects or or tasks that makes sense is the next step is organized them by the area of your life. All right, so those are business slash career slash professional use. Whichever label makes most sense to you based on what you do for a living, then you have personal. So managing your home, your finances, legal stuff, all that, um, relationships and your role index all your contacts. Spending time with other people, your family, friends, mentors, mentees, your health, and then the 5th 1 which his systems. That's sort of a minor planet. Um, you want to organize your projects into these categories because each of these has a role or multiple roles within them. For example, you might be a mother, sister, the daughter. You might even be a grandmother, okay? And you might be an aunt. So all these are different roles that you play, and that project could exist under one of these roles specifically, but it's used unless you have a just a ton of projects is usually useful to just organize them around these areas of your life. So you have these five areas of your life, and you want to separate out your projects into each of those. And I said this before you're gonna learn more about this in the weekly planning. But basically each day has a theme. So with that extra time that you have each day, either after work or during work, you're gonna, um, that's when you use you set aside an hour to to take care of some of these to do's that that don't really There's never a perfect time to do them so on Monday. Yet that extra time you have you spend it on your career. It could be your in a job, and you're you want improve your resume, maybe start looking for something else, or you may want to take on more responsibility, become a better speakers you can present in company meetings better. Maybe you're working on a side project that would something where you're the non negotiable extra time you would spend on. That would be on Monday. You could do it every day of the week, but the non negotiable hour or two would be on Monday. Personal stuff that you have to take care of tax stuff, whatever it is. Financial stuff. You would take care of that on Tuesday. Fixing up. Maybe you want to improve Remodel your kitchen. That will be something would handle on Tuesday. Coming up with the plan for that. Or, you know, putting all your receipts together or adding things up or creating a budget. Wednesday you would especially focus on your health, so meal planning, or maybe you want to try. You need to find a new recipe for something, or you need to buy a blender, and you need to do research on that. Compare a few different ones. Talk to people. Take care of that note. Sorry, that's on Thursday, Wednesday's relationship. So you want to plan out what you're going to do over the weekend or people you want to spend time with or writing out some holiday cards or birthday cards or whatever else managing those just miscellaneous two DUIs that fall under relationships. Health is Thursday, and then systems is on Friday, and the great thing about doing that on Friday is you kind of wrap up everything. That's, uh, for example, organizing your desk, organizing your office or your bedroom, or you just your house going around getting everything cleaned up that allows you enjoy everything over the weekend and also come back to work on Monday on Everything is kind of you start with a clean slate. So Friday is really about cleaning things up, getting everything in order, maintaining your systems. So that's the second group. Step is your grouping things into these categories and that allows you to figure out when you're going to do them. It also allows you to any new projects your to come up with those get organized in your master, uh, Project page, and I'm gonna cover that more in depth in my project management course. But basically you have top level headings for your career, personal relationships, health and also systems and then as sub points, you have the major projects and then, as the final sub point, it'll be miscellaneous or minor projects. And then sub points of that will be all the minor projects that are either long term. You don't want to think about him right now or they're just small things. But you can go to the single place and all your projects are gonna be organized there. And you want to keep on Lee 3 to 5 as major projects, bring the rest of them down to minor. And, uh, and if you really have a ton of projects, you can also organize those by rolls and so at the same levels as you have minor, you could have a specific role and then the projects that exist under that role. So, um, that's grouping, and then the last one is dependencies. So a lot of projects you're not gonna have a ton of dependencies or you can handle those at the project level. So when you're coming up with the idea for the project, you're setting milestones, deadlines for certain things on a weekly monthly basis, which you don't have to necessarily be. If you're somebody who doesn't like setting deadlines, they cause you stress. Basically, these air just ways to clarify your thinking. You don't actually have to stick to them, but they're things that give you a rough way of estimating how long something is gonna take . And they're really the best way to think about them. Is there a learning tool for most of your projects for your career stuff? Obviously, those deadlines are often hard deadlines. But for the rest of these things, oftentimes they're soft deadlines. So the point of it is you want to get better and better at estimating how long stuff takes How, um, both in time, but also in when things are gonna happen, setting deadlines, getting better and better. As a long term thinker, being able to predict and plan is a large part of what makes you a great long term thinker . So when you set these deadlines, what you're really doing is you're predicting or guessing or forecasting how long something is going to take, how much interest you have, how much of a priority it is in overtime. You're going to get better at setting those deadlines and and you're gonna get more accurate as a forecaster. So that's what this is really about. Remember at the beginning stage the first few weeks. The first month, It's all about setting baselines. And once those bait, once you have a good idea of the baseline, you get better at predicting things. Then you can start to make more powerful predictions about your life, where things airheaded how long things are gonna take, when, when you're gonna hit certain milestones because you've become a better predictor. All right, so for the most part, dependencies, you can handle those on a nen visual basis inside the project plan when you're setting those those deadlines. But it's something you do want to be aware of. And if you're still trying to get an idea of what this means, uh, check out the Gant chart, and basically, how again chart works is you have a bunch of different tasks A, B, C D, and you estimate how long and when you're gonna be getting each of these things done, how long it's going to take. And, uh, each of these might be week one week, 2345 So this is a five week project, and this tells you, okay, task A you're gonna be working on from week one. Yeah, that shouldn't be there. So this is week 12 and three. This is we. 123 and four. This is 34 and five, and certain. This thing might be dependent on sea. So until C is done or we're almost done, you can't start with D. So you would recognize that as a dependency, Have an arrow in it like that. Um, Because if this goes overboard, let's say this doesn't get to the right point until week four. Now, this Now d sudden, we will push the project over. So, like what? Say you're outsourcing or delegating? See, it takes four weeks instead of three. Okay, well, you can't start to week four and you're gonna end up being a week over. So that's what a dependency is, is just It's good to be aware those with small to medium size projects personal projects does tend not to be a huge issue. But it is something you should be at least thinking about. An aware of 13. Establishing Priorities When Planning: in this video, we're gonna talk about priorities. How do you prioritize things? How do you figure out what's more important than other things? What it really comes down to is when you value and one thing could be getting certain things done by a certain deadline. Nothing could be cost benefit. So how long deadline is one thing, but it's also length of time. So at this stage of your life, at this stage of your current level, resource is are you interested in making short term bets long term bets? Medium term, Um, maybe you want to do something with risk? Is that high risk? Low risk? Are you at a stage where you want to be taking high risk and go for that high reward? Something more in the middle, Something lower? Um, lower risk, lower reward. How do you balance all these things? Ultimately, what you want to do is come up with a matrix and that this is not something you need to do for most situations. This is something that you only need to do when you're doing usually long term planning when you're making big decisions. But it's also something that you want to keep in the back of your head so that even when you're making small decisions, you're you can run these at a very quick level. We develop a better intuition. So what you do is you give your options A B and C, and then you based on what's most important, you create the call. So how long will take? What's the cost? What's the risk? And then you just decide. Okay, I'm in a raid each of the zone from 1 to 10. Three one to So all right. And then you just And then the next thing is, you decide. Well, how important are each of these three things you need to give a weight to each of them and they're So what you do is you just say OK out of 10. How much, Mitt? Wait till I want to give each of these. Well, how long it takes is really important. So I'll say five out of 10. It's about that cost versus risk. I guess. I'll say cost is a little bit more important than risk. So you multiply these numbers so that this would be 15. 24 to 25 12 10 50 to be six. This would be 14 and then you figure out Well, okay, um, now that you've waited each of these, that gives you a real sense of what's going on here. So risk, um, is right here. You have cost. You have how long it's going to take. And then you figure out well, what makes sense as a formula, Which one of these, for each of these things, what's positive and what's a negative. So that tells you whether you should add or subtract, so anything that's positive would be. In addition, anything that's negative would be a subtraction. So high cost is bad. Low cost good. High risk is bad. Low risk is good. Uh, taking a short amount of time is good. Long time is bad. So for each of these, a smaller number is better. All right. So, um, we can just add these up in whichever is the, uh, smallest amount is what we're gonna want to go for. So 15 to 24. That be 39. 41 to 25. 37 47 50 60 70. All right, so this is the best option. So this is a sort of thing that you can put together and, uh, and help you decide on your priorities when you're making it a tough decision on. And this is how computers make decisions is with this sort of you have two weights and then you ever values. And then you just add and subtract based on on whatever makes the most sense based on, uh, like do you want high cost? You want low cost, Um, and that's all there really is to it. So you need to figure out what your values are, and then you need to prioritize your values. So not everything has exactly the same value. So you have to figure out, OK, time is is important time, cost, money, cost, and in risk are the three things are most important. And then you have to put those in order of priority. So right now, these air in order of priority, and then once you do that, um, you portion them out so they all add up to 10 or 100 or whatever, and then that allows you to give weights to each of these things and come up with a calculation. So in most situations, what you're going to do is a lot simpler. You just need to figure out what are the top two or three things focus on those because you really don't have a lot of band with. So for each area of your life, it's good toe have come to know what the most important things are. And the way you do that is you have that master project page and you have your professional projects. You have your personal have your relationship projects. Um, systems would go here, um, and then help. So you have you obviously of your minor ones, But then you have your top two or three. So a, B and C A would be your number one personal project right now, and keeping them in order here will show you what your priorities are. So any time you're planning to do new stuff, you always have to think about well is how is this gonna displace what I'm already doing? So if you're already at maximum utilisation, that means you have no free time. And that means that you really don't have any free time to be doing new stuff. And a lot of times we forget all the projects we have going, and so we think that we have time for a bunch of new stuff. But the reality is we need to say no a lot more and keep on saying no until you have a certain amount of free time consistently. So that might be two hours a day free. And then, you know, Okay, now I can stop saying no and start saying yes against. You need to have a way of testing when you should stop knowing when you should stop. But for most of you, you have way too much going on. You're overwhelmed. It's not even organized. And this is something you don't even need. Take my course to just set something up basic like this. But if you do really want to get a handle on, I suggest you take this course because it's going to totally transform how powerful your information organization is keeping track your projects, keeping him prioritized. And that's actually part of the weekly planning model is you go through when you look at this and you figure out OK, what do I already have going? And then which one of these take priority over other ones. So when you're planning out your schedule for the week, you know OK, what really needs to get scheduled? What can what can or should or do I need to really put off until a later date, cause it's just not as important. But they're also there is a value to just getting rid of a bunch of small things. Okay, cause each of those things could stress you out, could cause little pieces of friction. Eso Sometimes there is a value to just blocking off two hours and taking care of five or six small little things and just getting them all done. So they're off your plate and they're no longer distracting you. And you can really focus on those top two or three things. So wait, when you're not sure how to prioritize or how much is going on, what is too much? Think about these are the four main areas of my life professional personal relationship, health. And then obviously you're systems. But, uh, those those air pretty consistent. You're not going to get a lot of new stuff there. So it's really about these four and think about what are the top two or three in each of these areas, and, uh, and then really keep your eye on the ball. And what's the number one in each of these? And you do that by just keeping them in order here and consistently looking at this every single week, and even you can look at it on a daily basis. If you're wondering, OK, where am I? What are the priorities? And it's just a really easy way to keep track of a ton of different projects. But keep them prioritised and everything that's really low priority goes in that minor section. So you're not. You don't even have to look at it. And unless you're really specifically taking a look of that area of your life, you don't even pay attention to it, and you don't waste your time thinking about it. So that's prioritization. Prioritization is really important, and you can Onley really do prioritization. Prioritization is just sorting, okay, And to sort properly, you have to know what are all the different things you're sorting and sort. The other thing about prioritization is it. If you have 20 things to sort, it doesn't really matter. This stuff here does it really matter. This stuff kind of matters. This is what really matters. This is what you have to keep your eye on and and focus on this. So with prioritization, it's not as important to get these things in perfect order. You can just put these under minor. You can actually put these under minor also and just keep focused on these top few things. And Onley comes back to these very infrequently, like on a monthly or quarterly basis, and often they can be knocked out pretty quickly in one or two sessions. Um, and if, like something comes up in your life, where it makes sense to work on this right now, that's when you would bang it out. But it's not important to sort all these things and get a perfect algorithmic level of sorting on all of these. All that really matters is usually sorting the top two or three things that you have in each area of your life. So at the end of the day, don't get too obsessed with being perfect about prioritizing everything. Just make sure you're picking the most important two or three things. Get clarity on that, and then get real clear on what is the one most important thing in each area of your life. So don't don't. It's easy to get sucked into prioritization, get obsessed with it and and feel like it has to be perfect. It really doesn't have to be perfect at the end of the day. Mostly, it's just about figuring out what's that single most important thing in each area of your life and make sure you're consistently spending time on those projects every single at least one day every single week. 14. The Scheduling Phase of Planning: Now we're at the stage of talking about scheduling. So what are the important things with scheduling? Well, we already talked a lot about scheduling, and you're gonna be doing this at multiple levels. So at the week level and then also at the month, the quarter of the year, all the way up to life span. All right, Which you could think about a C for century, which is the Roman numeral for 100. Um, so we've already talked a lot about scheduling. One of the most important things to know is that there's no optimal way for most scheduling problems. So it's really just about being good enough. And the most important thing is to constantly be aware of your priorities, what are the most important things, and then do those first. That's really all you need to know. Um, don't focus on making marginal gains in in scheduling things better. Instead, focus on, as I said in the previous video, the cherry of your life, and you can have systems up here. We have professional personal relationships and health, and what is the number one thing in each of those areas and make sure you're putting a lot of time into that. So that's what scheduling is about all about. Put those at the beginning your day, and, uh, and then also make sure that you're keeping those buffer times so that you can keep on schedule at the beginning. Give yourself a lot of buffer, and then as you get better at estimating, you don't need as much buffer. Um, but buffer is always good Teoh to take care of those minor tasks. Those small tasks email can be a thing that you can do during buffered any free buffer time , checking out certain websites or spending time on social media. These are the sort of things where you don't necessarily need to schedule them. But Onley spend time on them during buffer time where you don't have anything else that's a bigger priority and ultimately those that can. That's how you make these sort of things. A routine is on. Lee when you have free time is, is there then that if then rule of okay, if you have that free time and your you're at inbox zero okay, then go to Facebook, for example, or then go to YouTube or then go to Instagram. All right, so scheduling is do the important things first. That's the number one most important thing to remember is. Do the important things first, And the reason why people don't do the important things first is because they're procrastinating or they just don't know what is most important. And when you don't know, you have to just yes, guess and commit Okay, so that's getting back to this when there's no optimal way. What you need to do is make sure you don't waste time trying to predict something where it's just impossible or just cut just computational e impossible or very difficult to come up with the optimal. So if it's it's going to be too hard to come up with the optimal. You just need a act, behave randomly or make a very quick guess. Commit to that and then start taking action. All right, so that's Ah, lot of procrastination comes down to just not having good priorities, which is what we just talked about is you don't know and and that's when procrastination. That's when you wait to the last minute and then it becomes urgent. So what happens is you don't know the the importance or priority is unknown until it becomes urgent and it's do that's that's the only. So what most people do is because they don't have any other independent metric for knowing how important something is. They wait until it's urgent, and then they do it. When you get clear on your priorities, then that procrastination should go away because you're clear on what's the most important thing. Why something else is not as important. And that's why focusing a certain day of each week on these things is so valuable because that really important thing on Monday, your you have guaranteed time to focus on that on Monday on Tuesday, you have guaranteed time to focus on that most important thing. Same thing with relationships. Health systems. So you have guaranteed time where you're gonna make at least some progress on each of the most important things in your life every single week. That builds momentum, and that gets you out of um, that also helps you avoid digging yourself into a hole where you just do nothing for months and months or even years and years, because you're making at least minor progress every single week. So the thing to remember about procrastination is it's really just about not being really clear on your priorities and not setting aside time to to make sure that you don't get caught in these computational traps. And what these are is when you just have too much to calculate and or you have too much uncertainty. So when you have uncertainty, the rule is make a very quick decision and then commit to it because you're never going to know the truth. So if it's something that you're just never going to know the truth, just make a guess. Or behave just completely randomly. Just come up with a number, commit to it and then use that and only change it. If it's grossly Ott, you later realise it's grossly off the mark and adjust it once. But be very reluctant to change these things. Just go with it because the time you waste trying to compute things that are uncertain is always almost always sub optimal. As long as you're you're fairly close and it's good enough you're best off just guessing and committing. And the second thing is having way too much to calculate. So, trying to calculate that list of 20 different things is really difficult. So instead, you make sure you're focusing most of your time on the number one things, and you have certain days set aside. So each day you're not trying to think well, is it optimal for me to think about my professional stuff on Monday? Or should I focus on this stuff so instead of of that's why these routines air so important is you no longer have to compute for each our of your day? What is the optimal thing for me to be doing right now? Instead, you have that set way in advance buyer by your schedule that reduces the amount of computational power you need in time you need to spend. And when I say computation, I mean your brain just thinking cycles and all the stress that that creates overwhelmed. All right, you're avoiding all this, and this is how this is how computers and artificial intelligence handle the's huge problems that are just impossible to solve, is they? They just come up with rough numbers. They use algorithms, toe handle, uncertainty, and when there's too much to calculate, they just throw out most of the options and, uh, focus on the things that are most important and use thes sort of heuristics. So you have to just make sure that you're never you're never trying to get to the optimal because it's impossible to get their taste way too much computation. There's basically infinite options when you get even passed, you know, trying to organize 10 things. So, um, you have to be highly aware of your priorities. You have to be getting spaced repetitions, and then you have to schedule based on your priorities. And don't worry about four through 20. Okay, don't worry about those. Handle those only during buffer time or at your monthly quarterly reviews at the week Day we and weekly level. All you're thinking about is this at the day We what we just think about Number one weekly . Weather your thing about two and three and you're adding those to your schedule and you're just not thinking about those except on those longer time horizons. So that scheduling it's really about simplifying things, forcing yourself to simplify things, forcing yourself to guess and commit, and you're going to get better and guessing and predicting as you practice more So you have to really accept and be OK with being bad at predicting bad at guessing right now and accept that doing this process is the only thing that's going to make you better. So you have to accept where you are right now. Be really realistic about that. Don't set high expectations, cause unless you've been doing this for a lot of a long time, there's no reason why you would be good at making these sort of estimates thes air. This is really difficult to do, even by the top people in the world and even computers. For the most part, it's impossible for them to find that optimal way to do things. So don't put a lot of pressure on yourself. Just do it good enough and focus on having these sort of heuristics focusing on the most important stuff and having certain days targeted at at the different areas of your life so that you're making progress every single week on all of these major areas. 15. Summarization and Visualization for Planning: this last video is on summer ization in visualization. And the reason these air important is because after you do all this thinking about stuff and you're you create your lists and you get clarity on that, it's still not necessarily in the format that's going to make the most sense to you. So some are ization means writing things out as a paragraph, and visualisation means coming up with a picture either on paper but really in your mind of what something is gonna look like. And this can actually be a picture or can be a movie. So what this does is it connects things emotionally, and it turns them, uh, into stories and stories are very efficient ways of storing a large amount of information that otherwise would be difficult to store and remember efficiently. So, uh, what you want to do is come up with, ideally, a visualization. But also if you prefer writing stuff down or if you want to use this is a framework to then visualize, which is often. What I do is just right out a paragraph for either, uh, the entire plan or, uh, each area of the five areas. The four and then systems level. Okay, so that's that's something. Whenever you're planning and remember, this whole thing is, is this whole Pamela model applies to every stage of planning every level of planning, whether it's short term at the hourly and daily level or it's at the weekly or monthly level. If that's quarterly year, we or even beyond that, this sort of stuff makes it so that you have something you can come back to and something that's going to keep you motivated instead of just having a bunch of lists where eventually you just it gets really boring. So you want to build it around stories around, movies in your head, just seeing things. And some of you may be saying, Well, I don't visualize. I don't know how to visualize. And the best way Teoh, I mean, is always You dream. You should have some experience on it when you're sleeping, of having that sort of experience. But, um, other times, when you might have that experience of visualization, is when you're reading a novel and you really start toe when you're when you start to process things emotionally, that's telling you that you're probably creating movies or pictures in your head, and they're not necessarily vivid pictures. They're not necessarily vivid movies, but as long as you're getting some sort of feeling of being able to visualize things, that's all you need. Another way of thinking about this is the sort of visualization you do when you're giving somebody directions. So you're saying, OK, somebody's wondering. How do I get from the highway to your house? And you tell them, Well, let's go off this exit and then take a left, Take a right, take a right, take a left, take a right and you'll arrive right here. So when you're giving directions in order to give those directions in your head, you're visualize ing what? That what each of those steps would look like and you're creating a movie of it. And then you're speaking that and the other person is hearing it. So that's a really bad a year, Um, but that that's the basic model. So as long as you've given directions once in your life, that's that's where you can start out. In terms of visualizing and visualizing is something that ah lot of professionals do. Athletes use it. Lots of people. When they get into goal setting and stuff like that, they learn the importance of visualization. Surgeons use visualization before they're going to do a surgery. They visualized the entire thing. Um, so visualization is very powerful, and I believe almost everyone has the ability to do it. When I first heard about visualization, it sounded like something that was sort of a spiritual thing or sort of Ah woo personal development thing. And, uh, I just didn't believe in it. But once I started thinking about and racking my brain for examples of when I had visualized before, I realized OK, giving directions. That's something I do. And I do kind of visualize when I'm doing that. So when you're just getting started, if you've never visualized before, try to just think about how you would give directions somebody to your house or within your house to get to your room or to your office or whatever else and that'll get. You started visualizing and then what you do is you just visualize the the process you start with. Visualize in the end, the final state of what what it's gonna be like once you're actually where you want to be, and that will take a certain amount of time. And you would do that for each major project or for each area of your life. Then, if you have time, you can also visualize the story or the process of getting from where you are right now to that final location. And you may even do this multiple times because that's going to drive it even deeper. That's and you can also do this with space repetitions. So do this multiple time, but break it out. Um, if there's something you haven't done before and you have troubled motivating yourself to do things, this is something you could do every day. When you wake up, you could do this. Before you go to sleep, you could make it a practice that you're doing consistently. At a certain point, um, you'll notice that you're just automatically motivated and this stuff has sunk in, and you don't need to do this stuff as much anymore because you've you've retrained your brain and you've got things where you want them to be. But, um, this is extremely valuable, and, uh, even if it doesn't feel like it's working at first you feel like you really can't visualize . If that's the case, then just use a summary. Just write it out and write it like it's a novel, right? Uh, this is the most important visualizing the end and what life will be like. And then if you have extra time, then go to the process of making it happen. Um, this is actually especially valuable for your mistakes. Is you go back to that situation where you made the mistake, and then you visualize yourself doing it the right way instead of the wrong way. So you may have done it the wrong way, you know, dozens of times. So in order to retrain your brain quickly, you want to visualize yourself doing it the right way even more times. So this isn't something that you just do once you want to do it over and over and over and over and over and over and over again and really build up those neural connections. The more times you think a thought, the more that that pathway in your brain is gonna get Meilin aided. That's the fat insulation area, uh, insulation that goes around thesis in APS connections and makes them go faster. All right, so really just firing along that same path multiple times makes it more Meilin aided. And obviously, this takes timeto happen. It's not gonna happen overnight. That's why space repetitions are important. But especially with mistakes or anything where you you're not totally comfortable with, uh, knowing that it's you're gonna be able to do it the right way when the situation arises. You want to visualize, especially those situations. And any time where there's a transition between two states where you're not really confident about how that's gonna happen, you want to visualize that happening successfully over and over and over again. And if you're not sure how it's gonna happen first, right, that summary. Once you've written a summary, then you can just start turning it into pictures. Be creative. You can do it in different ways. You can change things up, but, uh, it doesn't have to be really dry. You should try to fill in the details at some color, make it realistic 16. Introduction to PAMeLa Part 2 - Act: in this section. It's all about action. Okay, so the Pamela model, we're in the action phase now. And remember again, this is a cycle. So it's plan. Action comes in next at three o'clock. So what is action all about? It's about getting in a flow state spending time in a flow state be able to do deep work, be able to really focus on one thing and make sure that it's within that proper area of how difficult is it? How much skill do you have? And then the third dimension of how much you enjoy it. And this would be enjoying it a lot. So you really want to keep it within this area right here. And, uh, that's what's gonna keep you in the flow. But that being in the flow is really something that emerges from having really strong systems. And those systems are primarily made up of routines. Okay, these routines to make sure that you're consistently staying in the flow and you're avoiding distractions. So distractions air things that pull you out of your flow. And so you need tohave routines basically at the transition points. Okay, so any time where you're moving location or you're doing something functionally different. These air, uh, and where that usually shows up is between two blocks of time. Okay, so really, we want to manage these sorts of things, and we also want to manage distractions so we can visualize that as, like, a a lightning bolt where it's coming in and it's distracting you, and it's trying to get you to go do something else. So we want toe as much as possible eliminate these. But we also need to have a routine for And this this line right here, that's when you're sort of moved off to a certain thing. So sometimes you will get distracted. You need to have a routine for how to get out of that distraction and get back to what you were supposed to do. So really, this is about having a routine for your day. No being able to predict as much as possible. Um, what's gonna happen? What are the known quantities managed the unknown quantities and, uh, manage those transitions? So that's what you're gonna be learning in this section primarily, how to create those routines so that you you stay in the flow as much as possible and really reduce distractions and decision making. Decision making is very expensive, and you don't want to make the same decisions over and over. You want to make that decision once when you're designing the system and then you want to use that same decision over and over and over again, so you no longer have to think about it. That's what a culture is. That's what norms are. That's what routines are. That's what habits are. They help you avoid this computational load of making decisions because we just talked about in the last section How complicated is to really make decisions. You have to have your options. You have your constraints tasks. Um, and then you have to go through and figure out all this stuff you have toe figure out. Oh, are there any dependencies? What are the priorities? How am I gonna schedule these? And then the sum of is all right, so you can avoid that by just figuring it out. What are the best decisions? Most of the time when those same exact situations arise, what's the best decision? And they just make that a habit. You make that a routine and you avoid all that computational load. That computational load is what stresses you out. That's what overwhelms you. And when you get overwhelmed, then you go to, Ah, a self care coping mechanism, usually something that's unhealthy. But it's something that's comfortable where you can avoid pain and, uh, and do something that's easy. Take the load off, distract you. End of just avoid problems for a while, and basically this is equivalent of like you overheated your CPU, your computer. You've got way too many tabs open, and it's just gonna freeze for a while while it does stuff in the background. And then when it's ready to come back, then you can start moving your mouse around again. Okay, so this freeze time, that's when you're just kind of cooling off. That's what those self care slash coping when you get overwhelmed and you do that stuff. So you really want to avoid that computational load that you're putting on yourself by having routines, managing your distractions and really controlling when you could have incoming stuff you can visualize it is an incoming missile when you have this sort of stuff coming in and allowing it to distract you really create a shield for that and only allow these things to come through the door when you're, uh, when you have buffer time or otherwise schedule all incoming stuff? 17. Your Morning Routine: Now we're going to talk about your morning routine, and this starts obviously with waking up. And for some of you, you may have routine where you wake up, you go back to sleep and you wake up again, and you can consider that part of the routine ever everything. After that. First time when you wake up, maybe there's an alarm and start to look at Would you actually do in the morning And this video and the other videos in this section arm or about you doing an exercise than about me teaching you something specific? Because really, what this is about is learning where you are right now. We're coming back again to that idea of setting a baseline. So where are you right now? And you're learning a lot of new stuff in this course. So one thing you want to avoid is getting overwhelmed to this course and then not doing anything. So we're starting out with just getting down on paper. What are your current routines? And what I want you to focus on is don't go for what is your ideal routine? Go for? What is your riel routine right now? What are you doing most days? Okay, so, um, avoid the ideal. That's something that you can work towards, and that's something that you can also write out. But for right now, really, it's about setting a baseline. And this stuff is really, uh, something you should focus on once you've gone through. And we really understand the planning stuff and you're you've got this down consistently, So you're consistently doing this, then the next step is that that's when you get more into optimizing your action and your routines because those routines don't really matter if you're not planning out your days and you're not getting metrics. So this is the most important thing right here. The routines come at a lower priority. Okay, so maybe you go to the bathroom and there's a few things that you do in the bathroom. And then maybe the next step is getting dressed and you go back to your bedroom. If you get dressed, make your bed grab. Um, whatever's, uh, gonna be in your pockets and then maybe you go to the kitchen and you're gonna eat and notice how this is organized by rooms. Rooms are usually organized functionally so this is a bathroom because it's got water. It's got were all your hygiene products May be your makeup, um, taking a shower, go to the bathroom. Uh, you know, and then your bedroom that's mostly were sleeping. And then also where you've got your clothes and in the kitchen is where you're eating. So that comes next and you're gonna eat. Maybe you prepare a lunch herself, have kids, maybe you're preparing their lunches. Also, morning conversations. And then the next place you're going is, unless you work at home, is you're going to your car or you're going to public transportation, um, or uber or whatever your situation is, um, maybe you have a podcast you're gonna listen to and you drive and then maybe have to park, okay? And then you get to work, and this is gonna be a separate routine because that's, uh that's when you get get started at work, and you're also gonna have, uh, another routine for the end, the end of the day and that those will be separate videos. So, really, what we're focused on is this process right here, and we're organizing it by the rooms that your urine Okay, So draw out your morning routine, make it a series of steps, keep it simple and focus on what is your real routine, Not your ideal routine. And the next step after that is to start to adjust this and come up with an idea of your real routine. But for right now, unless unless you're going to be very disciplined with this course and come back and look at it later as you're making progress, really, Just focus on this. Just focus on where you are right now, and, uh, and just think about okay, how how long does this usually take? Try to break it down in each room. How much time your spending, What is the total time that you're spending? And it should come out to somewhere between half a Knauer an hour, so either one block or two blocks or even three blocks and that's that's what you're going to write down and plan for in your calendar each day. So you want to have those routines and what's gonna happen is what say this is an hour and 1/2 so your ideal might be I want to get this to an hour. Um and maybe wake up later or you want to stick to an hour and 1/2 that you want to get more done and maybe eliminate some things. And then you can start to sculpt this. But that's something that you want to do once you've got a really solid footing with this stuff, and you've been using the scheduling system for at least a couple weeks, so start by taking out a piece of paper or go into a one note or Evernote. Create a page titled My Morning Routine and start to write this out using boxes, separate boxes for each each task e mean each room and then have as bullet points inside each box, the various tasks that you do and give a rough estimate of how much time your spending in each room as you're doing these things. And if you go to the bedroom, start in the bedroom, maybe get dressed, then you go to the bathroom. Then you would have separate boxes for bedroom. One bedroom, too 18. Your Evening Routine: next, we're going to talk about your evening routine and you'll notice this is really about, uh before work and after work. So work is usually going to be the key thing that's taking up most your time each day. If you have a different system, you just break this up into more routines. But you just look for this is not about trying to install a routine that's new. This is about looking at your life realistically and saying, How much routine is there? Where are the routines? And if you're not sure, you can wait on this and just look, once you done a week or two of this, look where you're actually spending your time based on the right hand side of each of these columns for each day, and that's going to start to tell you where you're spending your time. And roughly, you know, is dinner, half hour thing, a two hour thing. Something in between. Where is that? So with with with, uh, with the morning routine, breakfast is usually not a big deal. On the weekends it can be, but on the week days, not as much and, um, and so with evenings it can be one big routine. But another useful way to break it out is before dinner, dinner and then after until you go to sleep. Okay, so these are the transition times get home and you don't want to do the same process we talked about in the previous videos. What is the routine for each one of these? And this routine is about where are you spending your time? And remember, you want have separate boxes for where you're spending your time, So maybe you bring stuff into your home office, spend some time, uh, talking with your family and maybe she's an exercise and, for example, something like exercise. Maybe you don't do this every single week. So this could be flextime. This could be an hour. Uh, that goes to your daily thing. So remember Monday's your business thing? Tuesday, Your personal Wednesday relationship, Thursday Health Friday systems. So you have that one hour each on each day of the week, and this could be that so on. On Thursday, for example, you would exercise during that one hour, and obviously you should be exercising more than once a week. But this would be, ah, critical time where you make sure you do that. And, uh, that flextime could also be down here. You could have two blocks of flex time. Um, but just figure out what you're doing right now, So if this is in flex time right now, you wouldn't insert That has flextime. But if it's tends to be free time, you know, maybe you just sit in front of the TV right now, so Okay, fine. And dinner. So you'd be do some prep that everyone eats cleanup, for example. And then what do you do after? Watch the news? If you read the newspaper, read a book. Okay. Some family time. What is it that you're doing? Read in bed. Okay. What do you tend to do? And if you want to put multiple things like two or three things, you can write a slash thing to slash thing three. But remember, this is mostly about what do you really doing right now? Where is your time going? And then how much time are you spending in each of these places? So the time for each box and in the time for the full period, the before period. Okay, maybe that's 2.5 hours. Maybe that's 1.5. This is 1.5. Okay, so and what time do you usually go to sleep? So and what time do you get home? So we have three for 5.5 would be 30. Yeah, so that's that's what it should look like. And then once you're ready and this could be weeks later, then you would design your ideal. 19. Your Workday Routines: we just talked about Ah, your morning and evening. Okay, Now we're going to talk about work, and this exercise, I've already explained, explained at some not going to belabor it, but, uh, the two main blocks of time you have at work and obviously this could be different if there's a different situation for you. But, um, when you arrive and then before lunch and let's say you have lunch at your desk, you basically don't stop working than this could just be one big block. But what we're especially interested in is what do you do at the beginning of the day? What do you do right before you go to lunch? Is there any sort of clean up worst organization? And then when you get back from lunch, are there some start up things you do and then queen up at the end of the day? Final organization. And if you don't have this stuff, this will be stuff you work on. Um, work on for your ideal, but we want to get a sense of what are you doing? What? You routines at work, and then next next to it, you can come up with your ideal, and this is obviously something you can do digitally as well as physically. So what's most important is before you start to do ideals for any of these, and if you want, you can just write down some ideas. So maybe you don't want to spend the time to come up with the full routine yet, but you have a few ideas for what you want to improve. Remember, this is what are you really doing right now? And, uh and so your first round should be doing the rial routines for all the all these different exercise all the videos in the section and then only after you've done that, then start to focus on the idea ones in really an ideal You'd wait a couple weeks to really get a 100% on making sure you're getting an accurate picture of this 20. Your Time Block Micro-Routines: the next type of routine we're gonna look at is a time block routine. And this is when you're planning out. Oh, that's gonna be half on hour. That's gonna be an hour. And you're planning out your day and then here you've got the more time you actually spent , What? Your routines for doing time blocks. So what is your especially your start and you're finish look like and maybe you don't have anything. So maybe piles of paper. Just stack up on your desk over time during the course of the day and stuff just piles up and you have a table and stuff is going on the table and all that. So maybe you don't have a great system and you don't have routines here. But if you do, what of those routines in reality? And then later on the other side of the paper, or later down, if you're doing digitally, you would come up routines for the start in the end. And the reason why this is important is because you want to reduce the amount of clutter and clutter builds up from a lot of little things. So it's like each of these time blocks. One way you can think about it is like a tab in your browser, and over the day you just build up more and more tabs. And unless you put them away, they just add up and it's you're putting a lot of cognitive load on yourself cause each time you look at this or open the window back up, you have to look at every single one and then you have to think about okay, what's the priority of thes what's the most important? And you have to sort this and that's computational e expensive. So it doesn't make sense to do that. If you're opening up this window dozens of times a day and minimizing it, you're doing a lot of computation that you really don't need to dio. And that's going to stress you out because you're gonna you're gonna be hitting that upper limit on the amount of short term working memory you have and what it's able to keep track of. So you wanna have routines for each time block. So really, this is sort of like a system of nesting dolls. Okay, that's your day. Yeah, before work, during work and after work and then within each of those, you have the various rooms that were in for lunch for working at lunch, which is the major separator. But there could also be additional ones. And then here you have dinner. And, uh and so those are the different levels of hierarchy and at work. It's really within, you know, before and after lunch. It's really broken up into those one hour, half hour to hour chunks that we looked at right here. Um, that you're putting it, you're putting into your schedule. And so the question is, what is the routine that's happening at the beginning of that walk and at the end of that block? So you take out a folder from your filing cabinet, you put it on the side of your desk, you take out a few pieces of paper that you're gonna work on your reading or whatever, and then at the end of that, ideally, you would have routine where you put it back in and you file that back in your filing cabinet instead of just I'll throw the whole pile over here and deal with it later. Over time, you have all these piles and It's just a huge mess. Same thing with digitally. So you just keep on these air the tabs from your first block, these air from your second thes air from your third, and you just start building up all this clutter instead on This is a really powerful tool that a lot of people still don't know about called one tab that allows you to minimize, not minimize, but close them and then puts them in a new tab called Your one tab. And it creates a list with the date another list. So this would be all the one from this. These would go here and then this would go here, and that allows you to keep things properly separated and minimize the the amount of clutter you have and help prevent you from just abusing your working memory, where it's constantly full of stuff. And it's the equivalent of your computer just chugging along because it's trying to keep all this stuff open at the same time. So you have to realize with computers, they're getting better and better all the time. But your brain, uh, no matter how much technology advances, I mean until we really get to some pretty far out places. Your brain is limited to the same on a memory that a computer from you can think about, like whatever computer you had when it was the year 2000. That's basically what your brain conduce. So you take a computer from back then and you tryto load up the current version of Firefox or Safar. Your chrome. Um, if it'll even install, you'll notice. Once you have more than two or three tabs open, it's just way too slow. And that's basically what your brain is is at. It really cannot do more than one thing at a time and even keeping track of two or three things happening going back and forth. That's really the maximum, and you want to avoid that as much as possible. So having these micro routines at the beginning and the end of each time block, meaning we have, ah, one hour time block right here you have a micro routine that might only take a minute or two, but it bookends the beginning of the end of that time block. So at each time block, once you're done with something on and you know what's he used playing an hour for something, you know, you're gonna need five hours. So you're like, OK, I just need a tie off the loose ends here, and I'll come back later on. So you should spend the last five or 10 minutes once you realize it's gonna be a much longer project, Spend the last five or 10 minutes saying, Okay, what are the next steps here? And one of the things I love to do is obviously I'm gonna have that one page project. Uh, Paige and I like to keep a log. This is what I did on this state. This what I did on this state, Okay. And you can keep some two DUIs and other stuff. I'll get into that in that course, but the point is, you're keeping track of this so that when you come back a week later, you know exactly where you left off. And I can't tell you how valuable this is versus most people system where they just, you know, somebody calls them to get a distraction. There's an event they have to go to. Somebody comes home, somebody gets in a conversation and they just stop. And they don't keep track of anything. They turn the computer off, They come back later. They don't care. They're distracted and they just lose huge, huge, huge amount of productivity's. So you need to have routines for the beginning. In the end, where are you right now? And then what's your ideal? And the ideal really is at the beginning. Check to make sure that your desk is clear, that your computer is cleared. You don't have a bunch of pending stuff going on. And at the end, make sure you're tying off loose ends and clearing everything up and putting it back in its place and making it ready, So that's gonna be really easy to pick up where you left off later. 21. The One Day Per Week Routine System: The last type of routine we're going to talk about is your, uh, day per week. And I've been really focusing on this because it's so essential to make sure staying balanced and at least making minimum progress in all the important areas of your life to remember Monday is your professional. Tuesday is personal. Wednesday's relationship Thursday is held Friday systems Saturday and Sunday. Relax, ation, creativity. Um and so what this means is that you're you're guaranteeing yourself 1 to 2 hours a minimum of of time each day of the week, Monday, Tuesday, and then Saturday, Sunday. I like to just not even, um schedule this stuff. I mean, on Sunday, you do have your weekly planning, but for the most part, I don't Even I don't worry about these. You can if you want to. So these 1 to 2 hours what is your routine for handling this stuff? What are you doing right now? And you probably don't have this implemented now, so you're probably not doing much. But if you do have certain routines on certain days of the week, write those down and then your ideal is gonna be basic things like going into your master project page. Even one Notre Evernote and just looking at the at all projects their status. Um, what is the number one thing to do and then work on that? And then nothing might be planned for next week, and four would be tie off loose ends and file away, all right? 22. Planning for Distraction with Back-On-Track Routines: everything we've done so far is assuming there's no distractions or you're really good at ignoring them. But we do want a plan for the inevitable, which is that you will be distracted and you won't be perfect in sticking to your schedule . So with that in mind, we want to have a plan for reacting to distraction. Okay, So what do you do when you realize and you become aware and that kind of light bulb goes off and you realize, OK, I'm not This is not what I should be doing right now, so you may be doing something important. So if so, how long is it going to take to tie that off meeting, and should you tie it off? So also, look at what's next. And should you tie it off? But the goal was to tie it off. And where should you do that? So you want to have your project? One pager, where you're gonna where you gonna write that down, go into the log at the date and then say Ok, this is what I did on this date and get all the information. What say you have some stuff from one tab you can copy and paste the links from one tab, um, into one note or Evernote. So you have everything you need to pick up where you left off. Leave some notes for yourself so you can get back on track and and then go. And then when you're done with that, you go back to your calendar first year and enter the time on the right hand side for where you actually spend your times. Then you're gonna figure out where where to go next with, uh, what's on the schedule and what should you do next, and then also optionally enter the mistake. So what mistakes did you make that got you off track? Maybe it waas not having phone on, uh, your point. So why wasn't your phone on airplane? Uh, where does that need to be? Added to a routine. And so you wanna have ah, have a routine like this for getting out of distractions and again start off with what is your routine right now? Maybe you probably don't have anything. And then what is your ideal? So, based on something like this, this would be your ideal 23. Using Checklists to Build New Routines: I want to talk about one more thing very briefly, which is check. Wis. Checklists are really valuable once you form that ideal routine to get these built in. And what you do is just create the checklist. One note has really great feature for this. Evernote also can handle check. Wis. Um, you just create the checklist for each routine, and, uh, you can create one checklist that'll cover an entire day that has multiple checklists within It could be a multi page document. Could be one page you could print out printed out. So it's two pages per page and it fits on. 1 may be double sided, but it ideally get something on a single piece of paper. And what you do is at the beginning, you need to use the check was to remember to do stuff, and eventually it'll become automatic and you can write in the date so you can keep thes and notice how much you improve. Over time, you may want to start out, which is focusing on one thing, one routine. So how could you really optimize your morning routine? Or how could you really optimize where your biggest problems maybe your morning. It your morning routine. Your evening routine aren't really a major issue for you, and you're fine with where they are. Maybe your big thing is what is my end of work day routine. Okay, so you have work, you know, before after lunch is fine, but end of day, you don't have a great way of tying things off. So maybe this You just focus on getting this really solid each day and you just have a checklist for that. And then once you have this down, then you can start focusing on other is another really important area would be your time blocks. So making sure do I really start and end my time blocks Those first couple minutes in those last maybe five minutes. Do I really spend those optimally so that once that time is over, I've saved everything and I can come back to our left off really easily later on? This is a huge issue for a lot of people. This is also a huge issue for a lot of people in terms of productivity. So, like, do you finish off with your email at the end of the day? Just basic stuff like that where you sort of clear things off and you feel like you're leaving everything nice and organized, your desk, your office. It's just you can sort of breathe a sigh of relief. Everything's done, and you can sort of turn off that side of your brain and then come back either later in the night and working on something isolated or just not think about it all until you get to work the next day. 24. BONUS What to Do When You Realize You Are Out of the Flow: I also want to talk very briefly about flow and getting full engagement with what you're doing. Already talked about this, so I'm not gonna go into too much more depth. But there are just a couple of things. So where is your skill? And then how interested are you? And we don't necessarily have to have this coming out. We could just say zero would be something you really hate. 10 would be something you really enjoy. Okay, so So when you're doing something and you're not in the flow, all you need to do is ask yourself three questions. One Is this too difficult, or is it too easy? What is the difficulty of this? All right. And that's that's sort of, uh, you should think about this is an objective measurement, Okay? Because when you're more skilled, something may seem easier. But objectively, for somebody looking from the outside, how difficult is that task? That's your first question. Your second question is what are my skills? Um, I a nube or my an expert, maybe novice, A green thumb greenhorn. All right, Um, and does it roughly match the difficulty? So if the difficulty is a six then we want to be in the 4 to 6 range. Okay, so that were roughly in the ballpark having roughly the right amount of skill. The last question is where we with love, hate relationship. So are we really in love with this task? Do we really love to do it or not? And that's gonna have a big impact on whether you really enjoy doing it, and you're able to get into the flow. So if you really hate it, but you can do it, fine, no problem. You're still not going to get into the flow because your brains constantly gonna be searching for What else could I do? What would be more fun? What would be better use of my time? So thistle is important, and the reason why you would love things is a variety of factors. You may be motive, I motivated by intrinsic factors, extrinsic. So maybe it's a promotion. Maybe it's making more money or impressing other people winning awards or accolades. Maybe it's something internal where it's just fun for you, or it's a way to relieve stress or just, um, I kind of do something that you internally enjoy and it's it's sort of fulfills you with its own reason. It gives you a challenge, and it's just something you enjoy doing. All right, so on sometimes we think or intrinsically rewarded when really were extrinsic Lee and we've sort of, um, blended the two together. So where are we here? And you like to have a five. Or better for most of these, you can't with everything you're doing. It's not necessarily Oh, I love I love it doing just for its own sake. Um, but what you really want is, you know, let's say this is six. This is for some of your stuff is going to be in here. Delegate this or just create a system so you can do it efficiently. Do it in batch mode. Combine it with something you enjoy. Okay, so maybe you get some music on you like you drink something, uh, TV show on why you're doing it. Just something that you make make it more enjoyable. But you you want to spend a lot of your time up here, so find something you really enjoy. That's difficult. That's valuable work. And, uh, try to spend most your time in here Sometimes that means learning to love something that you don't love right now. And that's actually possible. And I've done that many, many times. So, uh, it's not always just searching for what you already naturally love to do sometimes is about learning toe love something. And basically what that means is take the cluster of things that you already do love and then try toe and then take the thing that you don't love right now and try to build a many associations. Find as many common areas, and eventually you will start toe love this thing, and it will become part of things that you love to do where you enjoy doing in sort of an intrinsic way. So, uh, that's the strategy. That's how you consistently stay in the flow and, uh, just ask yourself these three questions, and if you're not in the flow, it's because of one of these three things 25. Introduction to PAMeLa Part 3 - Measure: this section is about measurement. This is the third part of the Pamela novel, and there's really two types of measurement. There's lead, and there's lag. And the reason why this idea is important is because the lead indicators are the things that you can measure immediately. These were often also things that you can control. So let's say you're writing a book. You can control that you write what say 2000 words a day. If you're reading a book, you could say I'm gonna read 50 pages a day. Those are things you can control. The problem is, these these metrics don't necessarily correspond or correlate with your ultimate success metrics. So these are things like, uh, these ultimate success metrics are things like, How much money did you make or did you learn the material to the point where you can do a new skill effectively and efficiently, or did you get some sort of other result? Final result out in the world? Did you go accomplish something? Get what you wanted. Okay, These are these are the final results and sometimes thes correlates. Sometimes they don't. You could also measure How many hours did I spend Okay, Uh, so there's lead indicators and there's lag indicators, and, uh, we're gonna be talking about. Those were also going to be talking about measurements in terms of taking notes on especially mistakes and accomplishments. And we're also going to get into rescheduling and time estimation, so I'll see in the next video. 26. Lead and Lag Measurments: Let's get a little deeper into measurement and talk about lead and lag measurements. The first thing you should ask yourself is, in each of the areas of your life, what are the most important things for you to accomplish or achieve, or or situations toe have happen or environment? So you've got your business slash professional. You've got personal, you've got relationships and you've got health and you've also got systems. All right, so what did the two or three most important things you'd like to achieve or improve? So for here might be salary here might be getting a new apartment that you like. Um, for relationships. It might be, uh, spend time with FAM or more spending X hours, for example. Um, and you could even say quality time health. It could be lose £15 systems. It could be, uh, get more organized, and we can look at each one of these, and some of them are a lot easier to quantify than others. So we have our end goal of Let's have one ad $15,000 to our salary. Get a new apartment. Well, we might say I want this apartment X or Y apartment. As long as I get one of those two, that'll I'll have achieved my goal. So lead and lag. So you'd set a goal for each one of these, and then you'd set some check marks along the way. So to achieve the final goal that I want, I need to check off all these boxes and checking off these boxes would be of lead mechanism . This this final actually achieving the goal would be lag. So that means that happens at the end. And what it's all about really is just this one word feedback. How do you give yourself feedback? So, you know, am I making progress and you wanna have something where you know you're making progress? On a short a time interval was possible. Think about video games. They're usually set up so that you're getting almost constant feedback, especially if you've ever played role playing games. You have metrics for every area of your life in a way that in real life you don't have. But those metrics are lead metrics. Okay, They you you get to build up points in various areas of your life even as you're just accomplishing minor things on the road to a large goal. So, as I said before, what say you want to write a book? And maybe that book is part of your strategy for making 15,000 more a year. So the ultimate goal was that 15,000. But what if you get zero feedback and never feel good about what you're doing and never feel like you're accomplishing anything until you actually make this money? Well, that's that's not a recipe for success. Where you want to do is have milestones and benchmarks along the way where you check that off and then you feel good and you and you ideally want to see while I'm I'm steadily, this is my starting point. This in my ending point, I'm running a marathon, but I can see Okay, getting closer. Getting closer. Getting closer. So one example on a project might just be, how many hours do you spend or how much money have you spent on this project? And those aren't great measurements, but they are something that you can measure another really important thing, and I'll talk about this in the one page project. Management course is keeping a log, so each day you work on a project, you write down some information on what you did and you just keep track of what's going on . So you do wanna have is clear ago is possible for what the end result is. But you also wanna have things intermediate things, milestones that you set up and some way of knowing how well are you doing? So is that a certain amount of word things you need to read? You could save yourself. Okay, I'm gonna research to the point where I get ah, three great books on the subject. And maybe if it's something you read online, you say a book is 60,000 words someone to find the equivalent of 180,000 words. So it could be blood posts. Um, other things you fill out or print out. It could just be a stack of papers. So as you print stuff out, you say, OK, I've got about 2 to 3 inches thick of stuff to read. That's that's, Ah, good milestone. Or you might say, OK, I've got well, 23 inches, actually a lot. What say you get 1/4 of an inch? You say, OK, that's That's enough that I can. It'll take me a day or two to read that you go and read that. And then that's your first milestone. Is your first kind of deep dive into the subject you're trying to learn? All right, so you set these milestones for yourself, and then you can see Okay, I'm kind of making progress on that milestone. Finished It kind of making progress on that milestone. Finished it kind of making progress to finished it. So you wanna have a way of keeping track and measuring things, even if they're not necessarily perfect measurements. So this sort of thing right here is a subjective measurement. Your subjectively saying, Well, what is my progress on this task? If it if it's a reading task, then it would east. It would be easy to measure just by an amount of pages read. If it's something like I need to synthesise this information, you could say, Okay, I've got this many pages I need to synthesize down to this into Ah, you know, 3 to 5 pages. Let's say so. You could track that by the amount of hours you estimate and then the final amount. All right, So, uh, this video is about making sure you understand the idea of lead versus lag first, making sure that you have any way of measuring once you've hit your goal and that you're actually setting clear goals that are measurable in some way. Um, and it could just be one way to measure it is just like toe. Imagine what the world will be like, what the state of the world would be like once you achieve it. And then as long as your state of the world matches up with what you planned it would look like, then you've achieved your goal. Okay, so it doesn't necessarily have to be something exact like £15 lost, for example, spending quality, spending X amount of hours a day or a week quality time with your family. That would be something more like it does. What do you mean by quality time where you could write out some examples you could kind of drop. Imagine a picture for yourself of what that would be like. Same thing with apartment is like a nice apartment. You could describe what the apartment, what the features the apartment might be. So the important thing is just making sure you're getting feedback on things, making sure you have ways to measure and specifically for planning that's measuring the amount of hours that you're spending on things. So that's what you're gonna get when you have this fully filled out is you're gonna start to get feedback on your planning skills, and you're eventually gonna learn from that and do metrics on that. That's something that will be talking about in the course that comes after this one on weekly planning, because that's when you analyze thes metrics is at the end of the week. And so that's part of weekly planning, not daily planning or our look planning. 27. Qualitiative Measurements - Mistakes and Accomplishments: Now, let's talk about qualitative measurements. These are the sort of measurements that aren't really metrics so much as or you wouldn't think of them as metrics so much as recordings. So this is entries into your journal diary, and they really fit into two categories than positive in the negative. So the negative, our mistakes and the positive our accomplishments. Okay, So what are you doing, right? What do you doing wrong? So for things you're doing right, you won't ask yourself How can I repeat this? And it's it's sort of counterintuitive because you would think, Well, if I do something right, then I'll know that I did it right, and I'll just keep that in the back of my head. But it turns out a lot of times we do the right thing. We get a great result. We get some success, but we don't really incorporate that into our life. So we don't make it a routine. We don't try to do it again in a slightly different context. So if we write a blawg post that people really like about a certain subject, well, we wouldn't necessarily just go and write another block post on that same subject, but in a in a slightly different sub topic. Instead, we'd say, Oh, well, now all right about something else. So it's It's making sure that your just keeping track of what is working and how can you capitalize on that? And a lot of people just don't do that. They don't capitalize. They just something good happens. And they just kind of go about how they used to do things and don't make a lot of changes. And there's so there's a lot of potential that's wasted with what's wrong, the's air, things that you want to avoid doing and sometimes and really look for solutions. And there's more than one kind of solution. And this with mistakes and accomplishments in terms of this course, it just comes down to taking notes on these in your mole skin or your ah, or your phone. You can create a different different set of notes for each one of these, um, or keeping both in one place, uh, typed them into one note or Evernote. But the basic thing and the most important even sent. Just send yourself an email and put in the subject line mistakes or an or have a thread with mistakes and have a thread with accomplishments. But the point is, make sure that you're getting these down immediately after you make the mistake, because the biggest mistake most of us make the meta mistake most of us make is we don't measure our mistakes. We just and because we don't measure them and we don't record them, we forget our mistakes. And then we make them again. You've probably heard the quote, and I may butcher this, but those who don't no history are bound to repeat it. The point here is in history, people have made mistakes. I mean, they've also been successful, but they've made mistakes. And if you don't know history, you're going to make those same mistakes. So what is the history of your life? And we're really getting into micro history because we're really just focusing on the history of your life, small time frame of the day, the week, the month, maybe 1/4 or year. But what are the mistakes that your consistently making on the level of every single day, every single week, every single month and if you're not measuring those if you're not writing them down and you're not fun. That means you're probably not gonna be finding solutions to them. And you're probably not gonna be able tow, avoid them. They're gonna happen over and over again. And with mistakes, this will really come. We're gonna talk about this one again. Um I mean, we're going to talk about both of them, but especially with mistakes, this is where it goes to. The learning is you need to learn from your mistakes, but until you write them down, it's almost impossible to really learn, really get great solutions and make sure you don't make those mistakes over and over again . We'll talk about accomplishments also. But the the important thing is make sure that you're making recordings like these, and these are at the at the broad level. These are especially looking at routines or just like minor mistakes that you make. Where it's it's daily things that you're doing or weekly or monthly things that you're doing. But you also want to be making the same sort of measurements as I'm calling them. Sorry about that. The same sort of measurements you want to be making for every single project. Okay, So all those Project One pagers, you should have a place where you're making note of the mistakes, the accomplishments that can be just checking off your milestones, but mistakes and or having a section for learning's having a log where you're just keeping track of what, you what, what you did each day or each session. So making sure that your any time you there's something that you can learn from in the future. Or you have learned something because once you make a mistake, you don't necessarily instantly know what exactly you did wrong. You may just know that something bad happened. So you put that down, you record that and then later on, you come back and you look at those and you learn from them, meaning that you recognize a pattern of the same mistake may be happening in different domains. You start to think about solutions to the mistake you start to think about, uh and we'll get more into that later. But, for example, things like, uh what is something that I can do after I make the mistake to minimize its impact versus something that I can do before, so I would never even make the mistake in the first place. Andi, even at the at the highest level, creating a system that prevents that bad thing from even happening. 28. Rescheduling: No. Let's talk about rescheduling. What happens is each day you're gonna have a plan for where you're going to spend time. That's what this is. And then you're gonna have what actually happens. So what say this time block goes over? Well, you need to shift this downwards. And we already talked about what? The major, This is your measurement right here, okay? And you're writing writing here, But what this task was let's say this is be Let's say you didn't even do be What? Say you just did something else? What say did Z? Okay, so be didn't get done. A got done. So he crossed that out. Remember, we circle in another color if it didn't get done, and we don't cross it out. C and D, those happened. No problem. So this right here is a measurement. All these things right here, our measurements and with rescheduling, remember, we we want to include, especially at the beginning, one or two, um, of these buffer zones during the day. So this would be a buffer and so we'd say, Oh, we'll be didn't happen. What's doobie right here? And if b did happen, then you could do email. You could respond Teoh texts on Facebook for a little bit. YouTube. Um, check out your to do list. All those different things you could do during the buffer if there isn't something pressing like this. But if it was pressing and you did be, you would then cross out be. And then at the end of the day, as long as you did everything you put a vertical bar, vertical line through this and that indicates everything that you planned eventually got done or got rescheduled. So if be never got done, you might schedule it for the next day and then because it got rescheduled. Now you can cross this out. This means when you're going back to this day of the week at the end of the week, you don't have to worry about anything in this list right here that you missed. And you just didn't do so on Tuesday. If this is Monday, this is Tuesday, you know? Okay, Everything I planned for Monday got done because you see that line right there? So that's a really valuable measurement to just give yourself feedback because you're gonna forget you're gonna forget what you did previous days. You're gonna forget if you did everything you would planned on doing so. That's the essence of rescheduling. And that's why I said You want to leave times open later in the week, especially when you're just getting started and you're not great at scheduling so that things that don't get happen the first few days, you can do those later in the week. So keeping those afternoons open, where you can then plug things in, transfer things over. If something's taking a lot more time than you thought it was going to take, and ultimately at the end of the week here and have all these measurements, you have all this information on where you spend your time, and that's what's really valuable. And that's what you can learn from and become a better planner with. So, uh, that's ultimately the most important thing. But you also want want to be measuring on a daily basis, OK? Did everything get done? Yes or no And remember, you want to get your to do's in here as quickly as possible. You want to keep in the same way we talk about inbox zero for email. You also wanna have inbox zero for your to do list. You want to keep this thing as small has bought humanly possible by immediately getting everything out of here and into your schedule. Either something going to do this week or you go into your phone or go on your computer and put it in for a time slot next week or in one of the future weeks, but get stuff out of here and into here. 29. Introduction to PAMeLa Part 4 - Learn: in this last section, we're gonna be talking about learning, and this is primarily going to be about How do you learn to make better plans, especially on this, on the aspect of allocating hours, getting really good at figuring out, uh, how long it's going to take you to get something done? And in certain fields there's really reliable hours. So, like a mechanic, well, no. Uh, there's basically a database where you know, for each job you're going to do on a car, how many hours it should take. That's a one hour job that's a 3.5 hour job. And so you want to get to the point where you're able to get really clear estimates. And that just happens by recording things and getting feedback and learning from that, making estimates, making plans and then learning. The second thing we're going to talk about is routines these air super powerful for reducing the amount of stress in your life, the amount of thinking you have to do decisions brought making priorities and these air computational e extremely expensive. That's why routines are so valuable is because you think about it once you come up with the routine. You decide that it's a good routine. You implement it, and then you never have to think about any of those individual tasks again, or you re evaluate on a longer timescale that time scale might be a month might be 1/4 might be a year, but the point is thes routines. You're doing them every day or on a certain day every single week. So they're taking up a significant amount of your time in bulk. But they're also saving you. Or they should be saving you a lot of time because you can. You can spend time to really optimize these routines, make them more efficient. And then even if it's just five minutes here, 10 minutes there. If that's every single day, that's 356 days a year. Times 10. This is how many minutes you're saving. Okay, so that's a lot of minutes. What is that? 50 hours So rough? No, that would be 50 hours. That would be, I don't know. So something like maybe 55 hours. But that's a lot of hours each year from just improving a routine by 10 minutes. So, uh, and that could be you because you have multiple routines going on each day. Just shaving a few minutes here. A few minutes there. You're talking about a lot, a lot of time. So these routines are things you can optimize and really learn about and improve. And then the last thing is your mistakes and accomplishments. How do you avoid doing the wrong thing and keep doing the right thing? And really, uh, take maximum advantage of what you've learned in terms of how to do things right? Because sometimes we have the, uh we have the need to do something new instead of the thing that's more boring. But it works, and it it's successful. And whatever you know, it makes money, or it, um, accomplishes the goal. It may not be as fun or new, but it works. And so we tend to overvalue this sometimes and not uh, and then their six. Looking at a lot of successful people, they're not necessarily super smart, But when they find something that works, they just put their head down and they just do it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and they accomplish a ton of success just doing that. Um, so these are the three things we're gonna be talking about. Mistakes on accomplishments, routines and making better plans by getting really good at allocating your hours. 30. Learning to Improve Your Time Estimates: this video, we're gonna talk about time estimates and the number one thing I want you to remember is do mawr predicting Take more shots. Okay. So just think about the time amount of predicting you're doing right now. It's probably zero were very close to zero. So the biggest thing for you is just to do a ton of predicting and part of what makes somebody an expert is they're really good at predicting things because they've made a lot of guesses, and each time they guess they get closer and closer and closer and closer, and you would be amazed if you just predict things. Um, you'll just get a lot better one way that I remember doing this when I was younger and I was just learning how to drive. And I was had a project of, um if you've heard me talk about my road trip, I wanted to do all my navigation without GPS and with GPS. They tell you when you're going to arrive, and it's actually pretty accurate most of the time. Um, but what I started doing is I would as much as possible. I'd use that. Uh, I'd use that road map that atlas, A big book and I as much as possible also try to memorize the directions. So the individual streets And then do you take a left? Do you take a right? If you know No. Monix left was lying, right was Rhino and I'd come up with an image for each street name or, you know, if it was an interstate or something like that. So the other thing I'd do is I'd estimate how long I thought it was gonna take, and I had no idea cause I wasn't using a computer and I wasn't using GPS, so I was just coming up with what do I think? How long is it going to take? And what happened is because I did this every single time I went anywhere. I got better and better at predicting how long things would take. Even trips that were multiple hours where it was in a place that I had never been before. I was often getting within 5 10 minutes, often really weird, like within one or two minutes, and we're talking about a multi hour drive. So, um, that's the sort of thing that happens as you just continue to predict mawr and more and more. And so that's the number. One thing I want you to get from this video is just do a lot more predicting. But also this sort of predicting is where you're doing something different every time. And so there's a lot of variables. Ideally, you want to minimize the variables. And so what I was saying earlier about a mechanic where there's really industry standards for how long each task should take. Well, think about what are the standard tasks you do that could be stuff at work. Could be stuff at home. Let's say you're a writer. How long does it take you to write 1000 words? You might think, Well, you can't do quality work if you're thinking like that. But the reality is a lot of really great writers. A lot of great people just in general and a lot of them tend to be perfectionists is this is the only way. Unless they put tough deadlines on themselves or publishers put deadlines on them, they just won't get anything done. So it turns out a lot of really high performers will give themselves goals like amount of words written per day or the book they need to write or the article needs to be certain number words, Um, or they need to get it done by a certain date and or they write for a certain number of hours each day, and that's it. And they put out really quality stuff. So you may be thinking, Well, that's not a recipe for quality, but it actually is. That's what a lot of really high performers dio. And if you think about a computational Lee, that's really the only way, uh, to even approach a problem like that and get anywhere close to getting something publishable out on time at home, it could be making meals. How long does it take? And this is something that you can also gamma Phi meaning that once you know Okay, I'm going to spend. I have to get this done in an hour and 25 50 minutes or less. Um, so this would be 1/4 of an hour or like I need to get this done in two hours. Then it becomes sort of a game where you're working against the clock and it becomes a race . Um and that's like a mini deadline. So try to minimize the variables and look at what are you doing right now and just come up with a one pager of What are your some your standard tasks and write down Keep track based on the area of life. You know, those that's a professional, the personal relationships and health. Then underneath this is how long it takes. This is the tasks that long it takes. This is the task. You could even order them by long, too short and just start to get an idea of the these sort of things. So, um, that's time estimates, and that's how you learn. Um, you learn by doing a lot of predicting you learn by minimizing the variables and getting standard tasks. And then obviously you're looking at your calendar, and this is something that, as I said before, we're gonna be covering this in the weekly planning weekly and monthly planning course, because it's something you do at the interval of the week, not the interval of each day. So you're not gonna be going at the end of each day and trying to do metrics on what happened the previous day. It's just there's not enough to get from that, but that is at the weekly level. That's why we're not talking about that year. But you will be Anil learning how to analyze those metrics. 31. Learning From and Improving Your Routines: this video's about routines and learning from your team. So I said in the previous video, When you're creating routines, you want to create a checklist. This is the single most effective way to do things. It's simple. It's easy. Don't make this complicated. Created checklists for each routine. And then at the beginning, actually print this out and use it meeting, actually check it off. And then at the end of the day, you have a stack of papers that show you what God done. What didn't. And another good thing to do when you're when you're looking at your routines is measuring how much time you spend on each step. So right next to that check box, you check it off in the right. That took five minutes. That took 17 minutes, all right, And so this is gonna allow you to see how long certain things take. And it may be different from how long you thought it was going to take. And you may be thinking, Well, this seems like a lot of work, and it is if you do it every single time, day in, day out, week in, week out. But the truth is once you do a routine even once, even if you just do this once, you're going to probably get 80% of the results you're ever gonna get from doing this exercise. So if you're thinking that's a lot of work out of what we want to do that just do it once because these numbers are probably not going to change drastically. And if they are, you're going to know it. So that's what the learning is all about. That's why this is part of the learning phase in the Pamela System Plan Act. Measure learned because what say, this was supposed to take five minutes and it takes 17. You put a star next to that, you take out your red pen and you say, OK, we've Houston, we have a problem. So we need to get in here and figure out what went wrong and improve that specific part of the routine. You know, this is good. This is good. This is good. This is good, but this guy right here needs some work. So the single most effective thing you can do is make sure measuring these routines and make sure you're going through and learning from them. So how long is it taking? If there's anything that's taking too long, go in and fix that. Fix that routine that step in the routine, either eliminated or figure out a faster way to get it done. Because, as I said before, there's huge amounts of time. You can save 10 minutes a day. Times 365 days means 3650 minutes. And I don't know why I was so bad with the math earlier. This would be 60 hours on this would be 50 minutes. So that's how much time you would save per year if you cut 10 minutes out of all your routine. So you've got your morning routine. You've got your evening routine, which is really three routines Dinner host, dinner predinner. You've got what you do at the end of your work, and you've also got your commute commute, and then you've got your work day. You've got what you do at the beginning, what you do at the end, and then you've got for you've got lunch. Whatever you do before at the end of do this first block. In the beginning of this second block and then within here. You have those where you're spending that. You know, our here half hour there, hour and 1/2 there. That those micro routines that you do at the beginning, in the end of each block. So how many routines do we have there? Morning. Um, commute. 34 five, six, 78 9 10 11 12 13 Okay, so even if you just shaved a minute off each one of the let's just not count Thes shaved a minute off each of these, that's 10 minutes a day. That's 60 hours, 50 minutes a year. Um, and even if we cut out the two days a week that our weekends, you're probably still looking at around 50 hours a year. Okay, so how much is your time worth? Per hour. So where $50 or $30? Um, let's say it's worth $30 an hour. Multiply that by 50. That's $1500. Okay, so that's how much this project is worth to you. So you may be thinking, Well, that's a lot of work. I don't want to make thes checklists and look at everything. Well, it actually is worth a lot of money, um, to do this. So how much is how much are you worth per hour? Multiply that by 50. That's how much this is worth in a single year. In 10 years, that's 15,000 over the course. Your life. Let's see, you've got 50 years left. That's 75,000. Okay, so this is worth doing. This sort of stuff that's happening on a day in day out basis has a huge, huge, huge, huge, huge impact. And that's why shaving off small amounts of time and really getting clear on these routines is so valuable. It's worth its way weight in gold. And you have to take a long term perspective on it because at the individual day level, it feels like nothing. But it has a huge impact because it's happening 365 days a year. And you gotta you gotta make sure that you're paying attention to stuff, which means that just when you're starting out, you've got your routine. Remember, you start with what you're doing right now and then only after you fully figured this out, got done the metrics, then you figure out your ideal routine and you start transition over. So you know, you need to know. How much time are you spending year? And how much time is this one going to take? As close as you can estimate is possible because you're gonna be doing a lot of the same stuff from your riel routine there. Just maybe a few things you change. So, uh, routines. Very important toe. Learn what is your current routine right now? And for each one of your routines and you've got a lot of them and then one at a time. How do you transition over and make sure that, you know, if you've got a budget of 30 minutes, your ideal cannot take 1.5 hours. And that's what people often do is they read a book, they'll reduce and new techniques, and they'll say, Oh, I should do all that stuff is part of my morning routine. Well, you just don't have the time. So you do it once or twice. You're way off in terms, your time estimate, and then you just go back here and you don't actually incorporate the new stuff. So you have to be really smart about this. You have to have the checklist. You have to measure how many hours how many minutes each one takes. And then if something goes way over what you thought it was gonna be, then you circle that and you say, Okay, let's really take a look at this. 32. Learning From Mistakes and Accomplishments: This is the last video in the section, and this is on mistakes and accomplishments. This is when you do it wrong, you do it right? And how do we learn from both of these? Well, ideally, whether you do, if you're doing something wrong, you're probably not doing it just once. This is probably something that you're doing wrong many times. And it may be something you do wrong every day and maybe multiple times a day. It could be once a week or once a month. It could be more rare. But the most important thing you can do is any time you make a mistake or you do something right, an accomplishment. You wanna integrate that into a system so that you do the right thing over and over. You repeat that you make it a routine or a habit because, as I said, people often achieve success with something, and then instead of doing that over and over again and really taking advantage of that success and said, they just say, Oh, well, now on to the next thing that I had planned, No. Well, if you if you did something right, then figure out how Can you do another thing? Another project that's like that. How can you repeat your success? Because that's how you get the maximum rewards for each accomplishment. Each time you solve a problem is go solve more problems like that and then eventually create a system for solving those and then delegate it. And then you you become a business owner or at least a manager. And, uh, this is where the rewards are geometric, because the more people you helped, the more you're rewarded. And this is where ideas to form businesses happen. Um, so make sure you're paying attention to that. The whole way I got into accelerated learning was this. I solved a problem for myself, which was how to learn faster. And I realized, Wow, there's a lot of other people who have the same problem. I'm to create a system for doing this, and then I'm gonna create courses and those courses air gonna help other people solve these same problems. So you want to integrate both of them into a system and what that means practically is again. We're getting back to the whole idea of projects. Any problem that you have should be turned into a project. Even if it's a small problem, just turn it into a project or add it to an existing project. If that makes sense, so if it makes sense to just add it to an existing project, then do that. But it should be one of these two things, and that project is going to be the solution to the problem. And the best solutions are the ones that air systems their routines where it prevents the problem from happening again. So announce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Don't wait until after the fact Be proactive, not reactive. All right, so, uh, focus on turning each of these things into a project. If you do something, if you make a mistake, can that be turned into a project? Is there an existing project? You can add that to. If you do something right, how can you make that part of a routine? How can you make that part of a project that already exists? Or add that to a new project? All right, so the learning process is going through collecting all these mistakes, all these accomplishments and then figuring out How can I get the most bang for my buck here. How can I take maximum advantage of what I'm learning here? So you may learn something, but what happens is then you forget. The only solution to this is either having a system where it doesn't matter if you forget we're doing spaced repetitions. Okay, so ideally, this is more efficient. A lot of the time there's some things that you do need to remember. But if you can turn it into a system, that's what a culture is a culture is. You don't have to figure out what makes sense or what to believe. The culture will tell you what to believe, and hopefully some smart people influence that culture so that it's Ah, it's a good belief system toe have. But if you can bake things into a system that's the most efficient way to do things, because then you avoid computation, which is just thinking, all right, so you want to avoid thinking decision making, sorting. These are all similar things. They're all in the same basket. You want to avoid these so that you can spend your time in the flow on the things that matter. So if you can avoid costly mistakes that happen once 1/4 and they take four hours. But they happen once 1/4. That 16 hours a year And what, Sayer, your time is worth 30 an hour. That would be 3 480 able use a year. Okay, so what do you spending 480 year on That could be your cable bill or your phone bill, maybe. Ah, how about you just add another one of those? So if that doesn't sound like a good idea, that's how much money you're wasting by making that sort of for our mistake, that happens on a quarterly basis. So this is gonna lie. You prioritize mistakes, prioritized projects based on what it's costing you. Toe, um, not solved them. And, uh, the big lesson here is make sure recording everything, making sure you're creating solutions. When you make a mistake, the right kind of solutions, systemic routine solutions get it into a project either a new one or an existing one and then solve that problem integrated into a system. Make it part of your routine. And if it's something that you haven't solved, just make it part of your routine and this Give me a simple is going into Google calendar and put in a reminder once a month or once 1/4 I haven't repeat and remind you to come back to something. So that's Ah, you may be wondering. Well, how do I keep track of all this stuff? The really important stuff is just sort of a brute force method to make sure it happens. Scheduled time blocks. That's another way to make sure that you avoid making them steak is go and say like, Okay, I'm gonna spend two hours for the next four weeks on this new project that I just came up with to solve and prevent myself from making this mistake again in the future. So think about it in terms of allocating time, getting it on the schedule and getting it inside a project. As long as you have a project and you have time allocated to the project, that problem is eventually going to get solved. So that's that's how you should be thinking about this stuff is very practically of a project where I keep track of how I'm going to solve the problem and the problems and solutions, and then I have time allocated that tells me go work on that project 33. Conclusion: this is the conclusion, and I'm gonna focus on practical stuff here. So your question right now should be What should I do? The first thing is, go to Google Calendar and print this out, okay? And use it every single day, folded up, keep it in your pocket during the day or in your purse, and then take it out anytime you're working and having it have it right next to you. Number two think about your routines and actually write out every single routine. You need to get these down on paper and also estimate, um and you saw the pieces of paper that I drew. But this is your real routine this year. Ideal eso fill all those out for yourself and also estimate the time for each thing Number three is Make sure that you're measuring stuff. Make sure you're thinking about KP eyes lead in a lag measurements because those air gonna be, uh, along with mistakes, accomplishments. Those were going to be the main things that you're gonna use to improve And remember, one of the most importantly measurements is time. So getting really good at predicting time. And that's a theme that was in this course over and over and over again is make sure getting really good at that and then four is the learning. Learning from all this stuff means everything gets turned into a project and you allocate time to that project. If you're thinking beyond the day we level in the current week, you're going into your computer or you're going into your phone and your allocating time for that project, right as you're working on it. Okay, so you're you're creating projects and these air going in one note and every note and they're getting each one of these projects is getting linked to the Master Project page. And this is organized by the four areas of your life. And, uh, just at a philosophical level of what are the different? How do you tie all this together? Remember, you have roles in your life before areas of life, professional personal relationships, health. Then you do have systems, and these are the different hats that you wear. And within each of these, you play multiple roles in each of these broad categories. You play multiple roles and a project. His tent is gonna tend two on lee. Really be relevant toe one roll. Sometimes they'll be relevant to multiple. But the way you create the list of what are all the projects is you think about each of these rolls and you think about okay, what are the responsibilities there? And those responsibilities get turned into projects case you have roles and underneath roles. You have projects in a lot of those projects. You want to be creating systems. I want to be creating routines. I don't never invent the meal the wheel multiple times. Try not toe, even invent it once. But if you have to invent it once, don't reinvent it over and over again. And then underneath projects. You have tasks, and these are the things that you want to schedule into your calendar to 567 days. Okay, so, as much as possible, you want toe, make things part of a routine. Anything that's not part of a routine. She is a task that's part of a project. So the the way to improve and optimize is toe have constraints, and by creating these blocks that are have routines or these blocks that are routines like your morning routine, your evening routine and the other routines we talked about. Those add a lot of constraints and give you a real picture of how much free time do you have, or just bigger picture. How much time And you could say how much work time and how much home time. And you could also say car or transport because you can do a lot of learning if you don't have a lot of time to learn. This is where it can happen. But where is your time? How much riel free time do you have when you subtract all the routines and you'll find you really don't have a lot? So that's That's one of the major lessons you learn from doing this stuff is that you have a lot less free time than you think you dio and the reason you think you have five hours, but you actually have two hours. Is that all? This is stuff that's a proto routine. Right now. It's something that you do every day or almost every day. It's a routine that is at an unconscious level, or or it could be somewhat conscious, but it's never you've never written it down, and so this is like preparing meals, helping your kids, maybe exercising, watching a certain TV show that you watch every day, browsing those certain websites, doing your email. And so the amount of actual free time you have is actually extremely limited. And once you realize how limited is, then you can properly prioritize. Because, you know, if I plan to do five hours of stuff, it's not gonna happen. And it's not okay to do the fourth most important thing first, then the third than the fifth, then one than two. Okay, that's not OK, because Onley these air going to get done. So remember, always, you always do the most important thing first, that's the single in terms of prioritization. That's the single most important thing you can do to optimize and bigger picture, adding the constraints by getting really clear on what are your routines making the ideal routines. Yet in a long run, those will be better. But the most important thing you can do is just figure out what your current routines are so that you can get a really clear picture of how much time do you have each day because you can't plan effectively if you think you have five hours and you actually have to, and this is how most people are living sound. Most people are planning, and that's why they don't get stuff done. That's why they procrastinate. That's why they're consistently overwhelmed. Is because they just don't have good information. It's not something where you have to meditate and do all this stuff, you know, um, just to clear your mind. This stuff does work and it it's good. But it's not the the smart way to solve this problem. The smart way to solve the problem is to get the right information, get the right system and then use it. And then if you still have problems, you know they're no, they're not being caused by you being overwhelmed with work because you've learned how to manage that or they're not being. It's not about being overwhelmed with stuff you have to do at home because that's not the problem, the problem somewhere else. But you really have to get this stuff down. You have to get basic information about how much free time do I have each day. Where am I spending my time and my prioritizing things properly and And once you just collect this, a lot of this course is just about Where am I? What am I doing? Okay, these very, very basic questions are actually pretty hard to answer. And so this is once you have this information, life becomes a lot easier. So you need to get these baseline figures, and that's what this course is really about. And you need to get this stuff figured out because you're not gonna be able Teoh successfully go through my long term planning courses. If you don't have this stuff figured out or, I mean, you can go through them and you will learn a lot, but you're not gonna be able to implement it because you're not gonna have them. That foundation set up where you can hand you can think long term because, you know, the short term has figured out you've got the metaphorical. You've got the roof over your head, you're you're not starving. You're in good health. You can start thinking about the long term, so this is really essential just to be able to think long term, cause if you think you have five hours a day and you have to and you want to make a plan for what you're gonna get done by the end of the month or the end of the year or the end of five years. You're sorely mistaken if you think you can do all this stuff and you really can't. So that's why getting these hard numbers down first. Well, then allow use to long term planning and be very accurate. And when you're accurate about your predictions, you're confident because what is confidence is just belief that you will be successful and it's hard to believe you're successful if you if you're planning based on bad information. So that confidence in long term I mean, you look at somebody like you want musk. Why is he so confident? Because this is how he thinks he may not have this exact system, but he does think in terms of metrics, he does think in terms of where my putting my time, how much free time do I have? How do I allocate that time and getting really precise about that? So if you have any questions, as always, you can put him in the discussion section, and I look forward to seeing you implement this stuff, share your results and, uh, and see you in the future courses as we get more into long term planning at the weekly monthly at the quarter a year, we at the multi year and getting into lifetime and legacy planning.