Transcripts
1. Introduction Part 1: welcome. This is a shorter version that I I usually do Watch the video after this. If you want a more in depth introductory sort of sales video, what you're gonna get in here The big ideas that you've got 24 hours a day. You got 168 hours a week and off those you have about 112 if you're sleeping eight hours a day, about 100 12 hours to allocate. And most people don't realize that they're overscheduling and under estimating every single week, and they never learn. There's no learning. Um, that leads to stress, overwhelm frustration and ultimately, lack of confidence. Because you're just not getting it done. And you never build up momentum. You never have that feeling of Wow, I'm really on track. I really feel good about all this. So this course falls along in the Pamela model, except you start with em. This is a large case. A. Actually, you start with them, so you start with measure you measure the previous week, then you learn from it. So you do a review of the previous week and you do a rough plan. This is on a one piece paper. That's a form that you'll get. Third thing you do is you plan, and during the learning phase, you load up into your We'll also called the loading phase because you're loading in your to do's your projects. Getting a big picture understanding. You're also doing a review of your long term plans and also your ah, who you want to be your roles, etcetera. Stuff like mind set. You're getting spaced repetitions on your mind set, and then fourth is your acting, and we get into how visualization is important In the planning phase, you learn how to split up your eight hour chunks into 24 hour chunks. Now, each of those four hours get split into 3 60 to 90 minute sessions, which is the ideal range of time you want to be spending on stuff. So there's a lot of stuff you're gonna get in this course related to how to split up your time, how to deal with the short term versus long term, and ultimately everything fits into a 60 minute planning session, which I call the 20 2020 clarity planning routine is something we do every Sunday afternoon and it strikes the perfect balance between over planning and trying toe plan everything and not doing anything at all. This is something that I've been doing for years and years and years, and I've I've narrowed it down to this dis formula, and this is something that works, whether you're somebody who likes to go with the flow and maybe you don't want to plan out all your time, but you do wanna have some sort of structure or just way of thinking about it and learning to get better at the skill of planning, but also for people who really do want to plan out every hour there day, I'm somebody who's most of my life outside of school. At least I'm big into the flow and big about. Just follow the flow and not over plans stuff. So this is coming from somebody, and this is a system that's built around the principle of spending as much time in the flow as possible. Doing deep work is what you want to be doing, and you should orient around that. So you're going to get both sides of the coin. This is a very powerful course. This is where you're to be spending most of your time when you're planning. Is weekly planning so very exciting? Course something I've been working on for a very long time. And if you decide to if you're still not sold, watched the video directly after this. Otherwise I'll see you on the inside of the course.
2. Introduction Part 2: welcome to this course on weekly planning. Hopefully, you're coming from the hourly and the daily planning course. And this is the calendar that you're gonna learn how to build and fill out. One of the key ideas in this course is you have very limited time. Each day you have 24 hours each week you have 168 hours. And once you take away sleep, which is about 1/3 of your time, you're left with about 100 12 hours. If you're factoring eight hours a night of sleep, so you really don't have that much time to play with. And this course is going to show you what is the most effective way of planning. Because if you're staring at a blank piece of paper and there's nothing on it, it can be difficult to figure out where do you fit the time? But once you get really good at at understanding your time budget, how much time all your routines take all the things that you may not think about scheduling , But you actually do at a very similar time each day, all of those things can be put into your calendar and you realize that you actually have a lot less free time than you think you dio, and that's both a good thing in a bad thing. It's a good thing in the sense that most people who aren't good at planning what they tend to do is they over schedule, and they tend to under estimate. And this is a recipe for stress frustrate in overwhelm. And when you're consistently doing these things, it lowers your confidence because you're consistently setting goals and failing to meet the mark. And that's not great for your confidence, your self esteem, whatever you wanna call it. So and this is all this whole has its roots in not being good at planning. So this course is going to take you to the next level of how to zoom out and look at planning at a weekly timeframe. And the Pamela model also zooms out to this next level, and basically, what you're gonna get in this course is we start with em, then we go to L. Then we do the planning and the acting, so the reason why is because at the end of the week, that's when you're reviewing the weak and you're planning the next week. So make sense. The first thing you're going to do is you're gonna measure you to figure out how well did this week go? The next thing is, you're gonna learn you're gonna learn from what you found out from those measurements you did of the previous week, and you're gonna start to figure out what do I have to get done for the next week? So this is processing all that information. It also includes things like loading up your short term memory or working memory with all the things that you have to get done in the next week. So part of this is just getting everything in your head so that you can see it all in one place so that you can access everything at once. That's part of what makes scheduling difficulties. You really wanna have a comprehensive view before you start this prioritising? What's more important? What's less important? What are you gonna get done and what are you gonna put off toe later or decide you're never going to do? The third thing is planning. This is when we actually get into scheduling the week and putting things into the calendar in filling this thing out. And finally we have action taking action. And there isn't much here besides actually going out for the rest of week and doing what you're, uh, what you planned on doing. But one of the things that we will talk about is visualization and why visualization actually has a positive effect on how much action you take, how confident you feel about it. Basically, this all comes down to a pattern. You've probably heard me talk about it before. Special. If you took my course on sales and persuasion is that part of planning and part of confidence is persuading yourself. You have to persuade yourself before you can persuade other people. And so visualization is about getting your mind more more clear, more more confident that what you've planned on doing is actually going to get done and that you can handle it. It's not gonna be overwhelming, so seeing yourself doing it is is what gets you one step closer to actually getting it done . So this is something that you can do to improve the percentage of things that you plan that actually turned into actions in turn into results. So for some of you, if this isn't a problem, you can skip it. But it is there. This is something that's been proven to work. A lot of athletes use this stuff on them. A fighters will use this before they go into a fight. Athletes will use it before a big game or really any game. Eso This is something that high performance people are using all the time. Chess grandmasters use visualization all the time, so it's something that's very powerful, and it really brings everything full circle so that at the end of your constantly getting feedback and you're constantly learning, remember, this system is different from other systems because the focus is on learning and you can't learn if you're not measuring if you're not getting feedback. So the purpose of this isn't just plan, and then what's you know? Whatever happens, happens. It's plan and then get better at the skill of planning every single week, every single day, every single month, every single quarter, every single year, so get better and better at planning. Now, I'll quickly go over a few other things. So with measurement, what you're doing is you're measuring how many of the things that you plan each week get done. What's the percentage there? You can also measure KP eyes. Then we go into the learning face with learning phase is a combination of of looking at the patterns that you see in measurement but also, uh, also the loading Faso loading your short term memory, your working memory. And that's with things like reviewing your roles, reviewing your major projects, reviewing your to do lists in the month in the daily and hourly course we mentioned one to do us, but you're actually gonna learn why it's important to keep a separate to do list for each of the major areas of your life. Those being your professional, your personal, your relationships and your health. Why it's important to keep as separate to do list for all of those. You're also going to be paying attention to your time budget, and this is actually one of the first things we're gonna cover. What are you doing with your roughly 100 hours per week? What are you doing with that time? What's your budget? How much free quote unquote free time and I'll talk about later wide The whole idea of free time doesn't really exist anyways. And it's It's not a good phrase to use um, and then also looking at your long term plans. So your short term plan should be a reflection of your long term plans. When you're doing long term planning, that's when things like values come into play. You know, stages of your life, really long term plans. You don't want to be thinking about this stuff and calculating it. Re prioritizing day to day, week to week, really even month to month thes air things that should be happening probably year. We may be quarterly, but it's usually yearly and sometimes even longer than that. So it's important to review this stuff to make sure that with the very and most of you will find that you probably have 10 hours or less of really free time or what I call discretionary time per week. So it's it's actually very, very valuable time, and you need to make sure that you're spending it wisely. Then we get into the planning stage, so that starts out with, uh, with actually getting your calendar printed out. And it's a two sided calendar you're going to get a template to use with it front and a back, and you're gonna print that out, and then you're gonna use that for the rest of week folded up. It's a one pager that you carry around with you. So you're you're also going to go through and, uh, and do something that's kind of half learning. Half planning is there's a one page review form, maybe thinking form. Uh, the reason why we do forms is so that you're getting consistent measurements every single week, week after week, month after month, quarter after quarter, year after year. If you're not doing something in a standardized way, it's very hard to compare. Well, what was I doing two years ago compared to now? What was I doing five years ago compared to now? So that's why you use a form. Because if you don't have a form, then things are gonna be all over the place and you're gonna end up never learning from it because it's too unstructured. The more structured the information, the more you're gonna be able to learn from it. And the less work it takes tow, learn from it. So this is a one page form where you review the previous week in each of these four areas and then you make plant very big picture plans would have the top two or three part priorities for each of those that starts to get the wheels turning so that when you go to planning, you have a better idea of what you're gonna do. So when you're in the planning phase, you're looking at the stuff that you've loaded in your to do less your projects and you're starting. Teoh. Break that down into how am I gonna actually spend my time and in planning you're gonna learn about the weight of break up a day So you have basically or 16 hours, break that in half and break each of those halves in half. Also cf 4/4 and then within each quarter you have three time blocks and you want to use to be 60 to 90 minutes long. Have you ever heard of the POUM ordo uh, system? That's what they recommend a time line between 60 and 90. Most people have a hot, a tough time planning or staying focused on one thing for more than 90 minutes and then we're also going to talk about buffer time. This is really important because you want to start out with a lot of buffer time until you become a good planner. And most of you, when I was the same way almost everyone is, is very bad at planning. As I said, we tend to overscheduling, tend to underestimate how long things they're gonna take. So it's a recipe for disaster. Having that happen over and over my own life is what made me want to create this system. So, uh, buff, you'll learn about buffer time. Why, it should be pre scheduled into your calendar. You can see right here we plan to buffer hours per day when you're starting out. Eventually, once you get to a certain level and you find that you don't need it consistently, then you can go down to one buffer our and if you get really, really good, then you can go down to zero buffer hours. But that's part of this system. It's about consistently keeping you from getting over scheduled, getting underestimating things and get you on the right track where you're consistently getting stuff done and what that happens is, once you're consistently operating at a high level, you build up mo mentum and you feel better and better about yourself. You feel better and better about the skills that you have with planning, and you get a really accurate picture of how much work can I take on and still enjoy it? You may be doing something that you used to enjoy, but you don't enjoy it as much anymore. Just because you're consistently not in a great place because you're planning isn't right. So this is the corner stone to Productivity's having a good planning system and everything else flows from year. So this is a very valuable course. Planning out your week is the core planning process now, of course, longer term planning is also very important. But this is where you're going to be spending most of your time and the, and the way this all comes together is in a 60 minute planning session. You do once a week on Sunday afternoons, and I call it the 2020 20 clarity planning routine. So it's the ideas you're going to get a lot of clarity and you're gonna be able to go through this entire process in exactly 20 minutes, I mean, 60 minutes split up into three 20 minute chunks. So that's what you have to look forward to in this course is a very, very excited about this course. It took me a lot of time to come up with this system and tweak it and get it right. Move things around and make come up with a balance between. You don't want to be spending 45 hours on a Sunday afternoon planning things out and rehashing stuff over and over again. But you also want to make sure you're doing something every single week. And it's something that you do consistently and remember. This system is based not just on making plans, but on recording. What do you actually do each week? So if you're if you forget and I'll finish with this every day, you've got plans for what you're gonna do on the left side, and then you have what you're actually did on the right side. And this is what lets you learn. This is what gives you feedback. This is what makes you a better planner. People go through their entire lives, and they never actually record what they did, they never see the difference. So this is a huge innovation in the area of planning and scheduling and productivity, because the learning aspect of it is the real core is the real focus. This is about getting better at the skill of planning every single week, getting better at scheduling, getting better at estimating and these air skills that once you get into prat managing larger projects, you want to take on more things these skills Onley become or more valuable. So I'm very excited toe have you in this course because this is a projects that taking a very long time and a system that's taken a very long time to create. So I hope you decide to enroll, and if you do, I'll see on the other side.
3. The Weekly Planning Calendar: The first thing we're gonna talk about is does that this idea of budgeting your time and figuring out how much time you really have the calendar we're looking at right now goes from 7 a.m. To midnight, so we're not seeing the time up here between 7 a.m. and Midnight. But that's if you want to see the full 168 hours of the week. That's what it looks like. So the first thing we're going to do in this course is open up your Google calendar scroll . This town's you can see well seeing his go to Google calendar and pull this up. And what you're gonna do is you're going to create five calendars, one for each one of the major areas. And as you know, there's four major areas. There's professional, there's personal, there's relationship, and there's health and under sort of a meta one of systems. And getting this stuff organizes a major aspect of that, and he's correlate to the five days of the week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. So the goal of this is to go into Google calendar, create those individual calendars and then start blocking out time and repeating it each day of the week. So you can see I have here stuff like sleep going from midnight to a A 29 a m. No, actually, 1 a.m. 29 a. M. And my evening routine is at, uh, 11 30 to midnight. I actually have a buffer our between midnight and one AM where I just sort of read Do whatever watch something on YouTube. But I do like to have that buffer Time to sort of fall asleep. I don't assume I'm in instantly fall asleep, and I do like to read also. So, uh, the first thing you want to do is put in your sleep and your sleep falls under health. That's going to be on your health calendar. The next thing is to fill out your morning and evening routines, so I give myself 1/2 hour for those. You may need an hour for the morning or an hour in the evening or whatever. You also want to fill in your meals. So time for meals in the morning. Put in breakfast. Put in. When do you usually have lunch? Put in? When do you usually have dinner? and repeat that for every day of the week. Now, even if even if you don't stick to the exact same time every day of the week or you're not sure, start by assuming it's going to be at the same time every single day of the week and then eventually you're gonna Your body is going to start to adjust to this. So before you have something like this, you may tend to eat at one some days to at some days three. Some days. Once you start to have this in a calendar, your body starts, you get into more of a rhythm, and your body just automatically starts to expect at a certain time every day. Which is a good thing, because when you're consistently in a rhythm, that's when you can build momentum. Same thing with dinner. The third thing is to start to fit in any other sort of regular things that you're doing every single week, so that could be like you're planning our from 3 to 4 PM on Sunday afternoon. It could be a financial check in on Tuesdays, which would be your personal day, so there's various things that you can put in, and ah, the next step after that is your buffer time. So I recommend that you put in to buffer hours to start out with one that's at the end of your work day and one that's right before lunch. And the reason why is because we split the day into three periods. The first period is sleep from when you go to sleep, too, when you wake up, that's eight hours, and you've got three of thes eight hour chunks throughout the day. For most of us, those 1st 8 hours, our work and then the 2nd 8 hours is free time. And sometimes it's sometimes your personal time, your free time or whatever you wanna call it after work is less than eight hours, but we start off assuming that eight hour, maybe you have a commute going into work, you have a commute coming back, so it's more like 10 hours and six hours. The important thing is just to be aware of what those chunks are each day, and then we split whatever those are in half case, you can see there's a pre work, I mean pre lunch. And then there's post lunch lunch and whatever happens afterwards. Then during this time, once you get home, you've got those two chunks. 1st 1 encompassing dinner, the next one after dinner. And these don't have to be exact, Uh, exactly the same as I have here. 8844 But you do want to have something that's consistent and make sense to you. Now, the next thing is, what do you do with these four hour chunks? Well, what you do with them is you split them into three areas that are 1 to 1.5 hours. So, like, right here, we would have 1/2 hour chunk. Then we'd have some filler time right here. And then we have a scheduled buffer our now, what do you do during these buffer hours? What you do is, if this thing goes over time, you just continue doing it. If it doesn't go over time, then you just hit your to do lists. And you look at what's on my to do list. Uh, specifically for each day you're gonna have certain things that you're supposed to during that day and you've got work things and you've gotten on work things. So you're gonna have stuff on your professional to do is that you can fill buffer time each day during the work day. And then there's also going to be time to ah, like, for example, that buffer time right here to get stuff done. And you can move around these buffer times to be whenever it it fits for you. So maybe you want you only want to have one buffer time during the work day. And maybe you wanna have a 2nd 1 maybe from 10 to 11 or maybe from 7 to 8 PM You wanna have your buffer? Second buffer time there and not not Have this one and have your first have buffer one here . Okay, so each of these blocks, your fitting you can fit three things into them. So dinner, you've got an hour, you've got a buffer here. And then you've got another hour that you can spend on whatever. So this is how you think about each of these blocks. And once there, once they become standardized for you. And you know exactly what are the boundaries you can eat. You can even draw these boundaries in. So you take a Sharpie and you just go through and you decide what we're gonna be. Those boundaries and over time, what happens is you build rhythm here, so you build rhythm, sort of. If you If you're familiar with music and 44 time, he's are your four measures 12 34 And I don't know if you would say most music it is, or the majority music is in 44 time. I'm pretty sure it is, but what happens is you build up momentum and you you build up a rhythm and your body gets into a rhythm, and that's conducive for things like flow. So the reason why we picked these four hour blocks is because you can comfortably fit three of those 62 to 90 minute sessions inside each one. That 60 90 minutes is the amount of time that for most people, is the maximum that they can focus on a single thing and be productive on that. The reason why we want a group three of those together is because once you get past the number three, you start to get overwhelmed. So, uh, that's just based on our the way that our brains are structured how much short term memory we have, and so by by splitting things up like this, it starts to become manageable. One way you can think about it. If you're familiar with American football was, you've got 4/4 and within each quarter you have 15 minutes and you can break that up into 55 and five. So that's just a metaphor that you could use going through your day. Um, but that's the big idea. You're breaking up into fourths, and then within that you're always giving yourself buffer time. You're always giving yourself leeway. So you have micro buffer time because you're gonna. If you have 31 hour sessions in four hours, you've automatic. We got an hour of play in between each of those, and then you set explicit buffer times to make sure that you're not overscheduling yourself , especially when you're getting started out. So the big idea here is you give yourself that buffer time to start out with, and then when you no longer need it, that's when you get rid of the training wheels, and what it helps you do is avoid getting burned out a vote, avoid getting overwhelmed and keeping you out of that stressed out state where your performance declines dramatically and it can be, it can. You can just get into a cycle of doing it over and over and over again, where you feel like you're supposed to be here. But you're actually Onley here, and so you feel like you have to catch up. So you over schedule again and what it's all about is really understanding what is a reasonable expectation to set for myself. And you can only get that through learning and through feedback and then try to get there and then slowly over time, improve on that as much as you can, but make sure you're staying out of overwhelm. So this is the This is the big framework that you should be thinking of for each day you wanna have, what are these transition periods of the day, and then when you're in each one of these periods, it's very easy, you know? Okay, these are the three things that I'm doing during this period. And of course, you know, if you want to spend two or three hours on one thing, that's 21 hour chunks, you take a break in between. Get some water. You get up, you walk around. That's stuff that's good for your posture. Just good hygiene. Um, good for your back. Good to stay hydrated, all those little things. So this system is designed so that you're checking off all those boxes and getting into your maintaining good habits. And it's something that's part of the structure of the framework itself. So this is what you should at the end of this video immediately. Or if you're not already in Google calendar, go into Google Calendar and set these things up. Set up your sleep time. Remember, you're you're setting up five calendars for the four main areas of your life and systems. Then you're setting up sleep. You're setting up your morning and evening routines. You're setting up your meals, lunch and dinner. You're setting up your buffer hours, and I suggest starting with three. So two during your work day and one during your off time when you're not at work, eso set up those and structure them around. What you want to be your four hour chunks or what? Say you only have three hours? Um, let's see. Only have six hours of non work time. You would break those up into 23 hour chunks, and you would you would have two blocks inside those three hour slots instead of four inside of three.
4. The Theory of Planning and the PAMeLa Framework: in this video, we're going to get a little bit more into theory of scheduling. And, as you know, if you took the previous course on daily and hourly, scheduling is mostly an intractable problem, meaning it's very, very difficult optimally, with a computer that can do millions of calculations a second, it's pretty much impossible in most situations. Toe optimize computational e a scheduling problem. There's just no way to do it. So that's part of why this framework is so important, because what you want to do is get out of thinking I need to schedule. I need to figure out the optimal way to schedule 112 our long blocks or if you're really I mean some of the year things are only gonna be half an hours, and then you're getting into potentially up to, you know, 224 blocks per week. This is a very difficult challenge. There's no way you're going to be able to do that optimally within an hour, so the way we make it easier is we break it down into blocks and we try to break it down to the minimum amount of time that is available for free scheduling so that you're not overwhelming yourself and you're not underestimating how long things were gonna takes. You can see from 10 a.m. to 12 a.m. That time is totally available from 3 to 5 p.m. That time is totally available. So each day during the work day there's really only four blocks. So there's only four things that you're really going to be able to work on, and so it becomes a lot easier instead of thinking, Well, what am I going to spend? You know what's the optimal way? Well, it's not hard that hard to figure out what are the most important to tow three things that you can get done during the day. So what say Project One Project to project to Project three? And those are the things that you get done during the day, and then during your off time, you realize, Wow, I really Maybe if there's a TV show that you watch on a certain day each week, or whatever it is, you realize, wow, you know, maybe you just want to relax during this time, so really, maybe you only have two blocks each day that you can really just goof off and do whatever you want. So when you start thinking about well, do I really wanna surf through YouTube? Do I really want to spend this on Facebook? You may realize this is what you used to do. And once you realize the only this time is so valuable and you only have one or two of these each day, then you start to realize, well, if I really want that side business toe happen, I've got to figure this out. I've gotto spend this time extremely efficiently, and you start to realize things like learning and accelerated learning when you really when you realize how much how limited your time really is, you realize how important it is to optimize the time that you spend learning whether it's to develop a new skill, get better at leadership stuff, get a promotion or develops, um, some skills that you go into a different type of job or you can build a business or grow your existing business, uh, in in new ways. Whatever it is, the amount of time that you have is actually very limited, and so you need a you need to be thinking about what's the best way to do that. You also want to make sure they have that time for your daily routines and one of the things we're gonna be talking about briefly in this course, because it's really something that goes beyond the scope of this, but setting up an hour for each day of the week where you specifically focus on keeping track of your progress in each of the important areas of your life. So professional personal relationships, your health and then systems here. And if you're wondering Saturday and Sunday, Saturday I mean, you can do whatever you want. Uh, creativity is what I focus on Saturday and Sunday is about. Relax ation so. But you can figure out whatever you want to do for those. But you do. I do recommend scheduling an hour each week to focus on those as well, and that's something that you would either doing. Um, you might only schedule this one for your work time, and you may focus on doing this the non work related stuff during one of these two blocks, Uh, once you get home. So that's how the theory of scheduling fits in another thing at a at a higher level is not just having buffer hours but having buffered days. And so what I recommend is that, especially when you're getting started, it may not be smart to schedule all five days of the work week at the beginning of the week on Sunday afternoon. Instead, what you can do is give yourself, for example, this block as a buffer block on Wednesday afternoon and potentially do another one of these or even the whole day of Friday as a buffer block as a buffer day. So what this means is that you really only schedule all day Monday, all day Tuesday, half of Wednesday, Um, sometimes. And then you could do Thursday. Also, What you can even do is wait and not schedule Thursday until you've gotten toe Wednesday and sort of split the split the week in half. So you have 2.5 blocks on ah, 2.5 blocks at the beginning of the week, some Monday through Thursday at noon, and then you have another set of blocks, uh, Wednesday afternoon to the end of the day on Friday. So depending on how how uh, how your job works or higher business works. It may make sense to actually use middle of the day Wednesday as a place to pause and maybe not schedule anything in. You know, there's multiple ways you could do it. You could not schedule anything for the afternoons on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and then schedule for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday mornings. Uh, the idea. What's more important is the idea, which is that depending on how your job works or your business works and the kind of projects you're working on, it can be easier or more difficult to reliably predict how long things were going to take and what you will want to avoid doing at all costs. Because you want to avoid pushing stuff. So you push that, and then this thing needs get pushed here and then this thing needs get pushed here. So let's say this Monday, this Tuesday this is Wednesday. Everything's getting pushed ahead. And so what happens with this is that everything gets pushed one block ahead, and then this block ends up not getting done, and either you have to do it off work time, or it gets pushed to the next Monday morning. And what that requires you to do is to reschedule this to this. This to this. This to this. This to this. This to this. And this too. This. So you've rescheduled six blocks and what you want to do instead is you want have thes buffer times in place so that the amount of rescheduling you have to do is minimize minimized. You really don't wanna have this This process of continually not making your deadline pushing stuff off, whether it's because of procrastination or whatever else, it slowly builds up stress and one of the keys. Because a lot of this ultimately comes down to reducing the stress and spending more time in the flow. You can't spend time in the flow. If you're stressed out, your body just won't biochemically. You're not gonna be able to do it, So this is really important. And that's why we we focus on things like planning out when you're going to do your routines, planning out all of these things so that you're not going to go over time. And if you do go a little bit over time, you can get get back on track very quickly. There's a pattern that procrastinators tend to get in where it's like poor, you know, you're on a diet or whatever, and you go over time you start. I mean to reschedule, and you realize, Wow, the whole day is shot. There's no way I'm gonna be able to catch up this entire day. And so you start to give up on the day and it becomes a bad day. And so you go into it a whole different emotional place and, uh, you start slacking off you started. Figure. Well, I already ruined the day. So I'm just going to procrastinate more. Uh, I'll go on YouTube or Facebook or whatever, and I might as well, you know, since the Dales has already ruined, I might as well enjoy myself or, you know, pig out or whatever. Um, whatever your thing is, whether it's eating or its social media or your phone or going on whatever website it is or doing whatever. Whatever is your thing, when you're stressed out and to relieve stress, that's what you do. So we want to minimize that in the way we minimize. That is by having those buffer times in there. So you're going to get information, and you should already have information from your previous, uh, your previous calendars doing planning out each day and then recording what you did each day. If you haven't already done that, it's gonna be very important for you to do that and give yourself a lot of buffer time. Until you get to that point, it's You're going to be much better off having extra time left over and banging stuff out from your to do list, then to be chronically over schedule chronically stressed out. And I think I already mentioned this. But what do you do with your buffer time or even a buffer block? And you have no idea what to do? Well, you can take what you already working on and just push it along, or you go to your to do list and you start knocking stuff off. So it's really not that complicated, and you don't have to feel guilty about giving yourself too much buffer time because there's always an easy way to fill it. You either go to your to do lists or you go to one of the previous projects you're working on and just make some more progress on it. Or you look at your big plans page where you can see all the major projects in each of the areas of your life, and you can do some stuff on any one of those. But for the most part, you just go to a project you are already working on earlier and make some additional progress on it, or you go into your to do list or you do email. If you're somebody who tends to spend a lot of time and email because you have a lot of email to get through, one of the things you would do is you measure out a block of time, maybe once a day, maybe twice a day, maybe half an hour in the morning or now in the morning, Khalfan hour in the afternoon, where you do email and one final tip, which is that when you have buffer time, you want to schedule the thing that is most likely to go over time, right before the buffer time. So what I like to do is that my mandatory one hour of focusing on each area of my life during the week I like to put that right before the buffer time, because then if there's something I need to get done instead of having to schedule it for much later, I can do it right then and there during that buffer time. And and so this thing can go over. So it's smart to ah, and then you have lunch after the buffer time. And what that allows you do is worse. Case scenario, work through lunch or whatever and still stay on schedule so you can see this framework is set up. So even if even if multiple bad things happen during the day, you can still stay on schedule. And then whenever you have buffer time, you can get ahead of schedule or get stuff down on your to do list or check your email or whatever. So gives you very easy way toe. You really have a limited amount of scheduling that you act in thinking and comparing that you actually have to do when you're planning, because most of your time has already planned out for you. So you know 1234 each day of the week and let's say you're gonna keep Wednesday and Friday afternoon, blocked off, or maybe all day Friday. You really only have 12345 67 blocks and each of those are too, so you really only have 14 blocks of of 1 to 1.5 hours per week of work to figure out. So you're taking that 100 plus hours or 200 and 24 half our time periods, and you're compressing it down to now, you only have decisions to make on 10 to 15 blocks of time during your entire work week. So it makes to the decisions a lot simpler. And it's easy to say, Wow, I have all these projects, all these things to do, But I really only have very limited time. And then when you're thinking about your non work time, it's even easier because you basically got two, maybe three blocks of time each day that you can spends. You think about how many hours per week do I want to spend on my health? How much do I want to spend on my relationships? How much do I want to spend on my personal stuff? My hobbies, whatever some of that can happen on the weekends, but during the week day, you know, educating yourself. Whatever it is, you realize how limited your time is. And the silver lining is that you realize all you really have to think about are these 2 to 3 blocks each day. And so when you have that long list of things you want to dio, you're really only choosing the cream of the crop that you want to get done because you realize how limited this time is.
5. Introduction: in this section, you're gonna learn how to do the measurement aspect of the Pamela model. So, as I've said before, this is out of order. When you're doing the weekly planning, you're doing the measurement first, then the learning. Then you plan out the week. That's third. And then fourth is you act on it. So that's why we're starting with measurement first cause you're looking at What did I do last week and what didn't get done? So what you're gonna learn in this section is how to take your old from last week, the front of your calendar, how to process this so you get everything out of it and you can discard this or save it, and then also how to process the back of it. And the back of it is a place where you can keep to do list mistakes, other stuff, and we'll get into that and you want to process this to a digital format. So here, primarily what you're doing is you're rescheduling things, anything that didn't get done and you're adding things to a to do list if they're not urgent or if you're not sure when you want to do it so high priority things are going to go here lower, medium and lower Priority things are going to go here, and this is gonna get put like the to do stuff will go in a will, Go to the to do list. Mistakes will go to your mistakes. Journal Ideas bank will go to ideas Bank. So this is something that you can customize. And the idea is that what say you want to keep a food journal? That could be accustomed thing that you're working on right now or a workout journal or whatever you want that to be, So these can be custom things that you fill in. And so this is the front, and this is the back. So that's what we're going to do In this section, of course, is talk about how to process so that you can file this single piece of paper, the front, the back, you can file it away and you've taken all the information out of it.
6. Processing the Front of Your Calendar: The first thing we're going to talk about is how to process the front of your calendar. So this is what your calendar looks like. It's folded into eighths, and it has seven days. And so there's one column that's blank. And so that column would either be this one or this one. It doesn't really matter. And you can. You can put whatever you want in there, and there's in the template you'll get. There's a guide that shows you what 1/4 of this looks like so that you can line up where the fold is gonna be, and it'll fold evenly on both sides of the piece paper. So what you're doing here is you've got your seven days and we'll just cross this one out, and for each day it's split in half and there's no actual line. So this is just a imaginary line, but each day is split in half, and then one side. This is where you planned out your day and a lot of this. Remember, you'll have already filled this in in Google calendar, so your sleep time, your meal time, your work time, your commute time, your lunch and dinner your buffer time so most of this is gonna be filled in. And you're just planning during the planning stage, those areas that aren't already filled in like this or this stuff like that. And then during the day, every hour, every couple hours you're going, you're filling in. What did I actually do during that time? And so what you do? And you can do this either at the end of each day, which is what I like to do. But you can also do it at the end of the week. Sometimes you'll forget to do it, or things will just come up. But what you do is you cross out anything that was planned that you finished and what'll what'll happen is you'll notice. Okay, I didn't do that. And you circle it so anything that is done gets crossed out anything that isn't done. Get circled. What can sometimes happen is you have something that you did spend the allocated time you dedicated an hour to something you spent an hour, but it's still not done. So in that case, you still circle it. Anything that isn't done get circled. It doesn't matter whether you spend time on it or not. And what you also do is sometimes you did something different than what was scheduled and you didn't finish that task. So you may have scheduled what thing? A. But you actually did B which was never scheduled. So you circle that because it's not done here. Maybe you scheduled C and you did D but you finish TC would cross. Uh, Well, in that case, you would circle C and cross out D I'll do another example. So that's more queer. So you plan to do E and you actually did f and you finished FC across f out. You didn't do e so your circle e what say you had scheduled g and you did hh and then you had buffer right here and you did g during this time she crossed out g here you cross out that buffer time and since you finished age should cross out age and you cross out g there . So the purpose of this is the only thing you want toe be paying attention to is the circled areas and what we talked about in a video ah few videos ago is that you can leave not just leave open buffer time, but you leave open buffer blocks of half a day or even a full day. And so if you have a couple things that didn't get done on this day, you could. And this is Monday. You could go toe Wednesday afternoon, where you have a blood buffer big block of four hour buffer block. What say and you could just easily move those over and you don't disrupt all your plans on Tuesday. That's what we really want to avoid. We want to avoid a cascade where you do one thing wrong and it ends up pushing everything else and it messes up your plan. So we want to isolate. We want to isolate those issues. It's kind of like the the Titanic, the way it the way it was supposed to work, as it had a bunch of in the hall. It had a bunch of sections, and the idea was, if there was a leak in one section, the water would fill that section, but it wouldn't affect the rest of the boat. It wouldn't leak into this section. It wouldn't leak into this section. Obviously, that didn't work, but that's the way we're designing this system is that you have open bays that can take any leakage if something goes over time or you just don't do it. But if for whatever reason you don't have time for these blocks or you fill it up and you still have issues than what you do is you just have that they're at the end of the week. That's something. What say you just have a buffer time Thursday morning right before lunch so you could take E. And you could reschedule it here. What? I should be half the left side of this, and you could do it during that buffer time. So maybe you have nothing scheduled for that buffer time just says buffer here. And so you look, you look back here and you see what's circled from previous days and you're side. I'm gonna do we. And then once something has been moved, then you can cross it out. Even if it hasn't been done, You can cross it out once it's been rescheduled. What you're trying to do here is not get overwhelmed with information. And what happens is, once you've rescheduled everything, let's say you've rescheduled um, be too right here E to right here. What say this is the open Z right here. Okay. Everything in this comb is crossed off for this whole day. So then what we do is we put a vertical line through, and this does get a little bit messy. And so sometimes it's hard to see the vertical line here. So we want to make sure is that the vertical line goes over the top. Ah, and bottom of the calendar into the margin of the white piece of paper. In that way, you'll know this day has been processed, and you just don't need to worry about it anymore. So ideal. You're doing this throughout the week. But if you don't, then at the end of the week, when you're processing this, that's what you're doing is you're going through. Did I finish this? Did I finish this? Did I finish this for doing this during the week? You're rescheduling things. You're doing it at the end of the week. You're not ready to reschedule yet? You're just circling things so that you know, What do I still have left to do? Once you've done that, you have two options. Either you can put this directly into your digital Google calendar or you add it to a to do list. So if it's something that's really important, you obviously want to schedule it immediately. It's not something that's important. Then you wanna wait and ah, third option is you can just print out the next week piece of paper and then add the's at that point. So that is 1/3 option is just do it on the printed version. So now you may be wondering what? How did these to do? Less work? We're going to get to that in the next video. So we're gonna talk about how the to do list work and why they work and how the this whole system works for, ah, for managing individual tasks. So we'll talk about that in the next video
7. rocessing the Back of Your Calendar: we've talked about the front of the calendar. Now let's talk about the back of the calendar. The back of the calendar is very simple. Peace paper is folded into fourths, and then it's Haft because we fold it in half and we're going to see appear. And these are things that you can customized to whatever you want. Two DUIs plans. Ideas, bank in mistakes and these ones you can fill in with whatever you want. And then there's optionally. You can put a little reminder of what the weekly processes for, uh, doing your weekly planning. And so you'll see that in the template two DUIs is obvious. We've already talked about that. You just put the time it's going to take, and then you put item time it's going to take, but item time it's gonna take Put the item. And in general, what you're looking for is, uh, is big numbers like this that are gonna fit easily within the time blocks that you're already using, which are usually an hour or an hour and 1/2. So you're looking for 5 10 15 30 maybe 2030 45 60 75 90 Stuff like that difference between it to do in a plan is it to do is something that is not necessarily urgent? Um, it's something that needs to get done, but you're not sure when it's going to get done by plans or things that have deadlines or are scheduled. So something's coming up later in the week as schedule or you have a hard deadline. That's something you would put in here. I tend to not use this very often. So, um, but it is there. And if you want to replace it with something else, if you don't use it, that's fine. This is for things that go into the ideas bank. If you're wondering what the ideas bank is and how it works, that's, uh, really these two are part of the structured notes. Siri's Ideas Bank is Volume one. Mistakes Journal is Volume two, and then these you can fill in with with whatever you want. Food journal Exercise journal. If you just have a lot of stuff, your ideas bank may go overflow. Your your mistakes journal may go overflows. He just might do mistakes. Uh, part two or your to do list part. Do whatever so you can have overflow. And if you tend toe, always do overflow. Then you can rearrange where each of these goes. So the temple you're gonna get has edit herbal fields here so you can edit Thies to say whatever you want them to say in the process of, uh, processing the back of this page is just transferring everything from here and typing it into your computer into wherever it's supposed to go. So this would go in your mistakes journal spreadsheet. This would go in your ideas bank spread. She these would go in the general to do, and you could put him in specific if you want Ah, and in these plans would, for the most part, they'd already be taken care of. But they would go into your digital cool calendar or if, uh, the things you need to play around with you could put them on the paper. Or you could just wait until you do the rest. You're planning to put those in, but again, this is something that I don't use very often, but it is good to have their, uh and to at least understand the difference. What is it to do versus what is a plan, and the idea of the plan is is it's situated on a timeline. Where is the to do? Is not it's just given a duration of time that it's going to take. So you process this entire thing, you cross out each one as you do it. Then when you finish the whole thing, you do that. You know what I like to do? Put a D for digitize. And then I'll put the date for the date that I did that work. And so any time I come back, I can see okay, the date and that will help you if you ever need to find something you know was edited on a certain date that can make it a lot easier to find something. Um, and you can just search the text inside here, and you should be able to find that document. But when you have a table contents and you have the system set up properly, that's really not gonna be an issue for you anymore. So, um, that's the back. And while you're doing the back, you can also do one other thing, which is your digital to do list on your phone, and the way I recommend you do it is this stuff gets sync to the cloud into Gmail. Each of these notes shows up as an email, and you just copy and paste the contents to your to do list. Or, um, if it's for Project A project, wherever it should go, based on what we talked about in the last video, with your various to do less and projects.
8. To Do List: Now let's talk about your to do less. The idea with ease to do less is number one, and this is a big idea. Is that as much as possible? You want to get away from to do lists that are general and you want to get them to specific . And what that means is you want to think more in terms of projects and less in terms of, ah, a bunch of unrelated tasks. All right, so the idea here is that as much as possible, you actually wanna have a mini to do list that's within a certain project. And then you wanna have a project one pager for that specific project, and when you're going to spend time on that project, you just allocate time for that project, and then you look at that one pager and you decide how you're gonna get it done. But that's not part of this larger picture. So you want to keep your generalized to do list as small as possible. And one way to think about this is that you're allocating a certain amount of time each day of the week, like Monday for professional Tuesday, for personal Wednesday for relationships Thursday for health Friday for systems you allocate on our each day and you can take care of a mini to do What's that you have for each one of those? So that's what you have. And the way the system works is that on the back of your calendar, you're gonna have a little to do area you're also gonna have in your phone a very simple to do list. And then you're gonna have a to do list for each one of the areas of your life, as well as a general one. So this is the general or the main to do list, and then you have separate to do list for professional personal relationships and health. These feed into here and the in this one feeds in to these more specific to do us that if you want, you can also have a systems, and then you also have your projects and you want toe figure out as much as possible, how to organize things into projects and these projects for all your different areas of your life. They each have this project one pager and all those Project one pagers, and you have dozens of them. They're all linked in to what's, Ah, basically a table of contents that's organized by area of your life. And that's something that I'll be discussing MAWR in my course on how to manage projects. But that's Ah, that's the flow chart of how this this whole thing works. And as I said before, you really I want to figure out how you can turn, uh, turn things into projects, and you really only want a have a few projects active at any one time. So a big part of what you're doing is you're deciding out of the dozens of projects all those ideas that you have where the 2 to 3 you're gonna work on and what you're gonna tend to notice is that when you turn things into projects, you go from thinking short term to thinking long term, and almost always you get better results by thinking long term than you do thinking short term. So these other to do s. And if you're somebody who's a paper person, you'll love this, and you may never use this for digital person. You may not use this, and you may just use this the formatting of the to do list is exactly the same, no matter which when you're looking at except the paper one. The paper one. Since you have such a limited amount of space, uh, you don't separate it. But what say you wanted to adapt this system and do a mole skin version of it or a paper notebook? You could do it. But generally, because digital is easy to move things around and physical, it's basically impossible. That's why I suggest you do with the way that I'm going to draw it out here. So here's what the to do list looks like, and the way it's organized is very simple. Uh, it's based on headings and the headings air based on time. So anything that needs to be done urgently meaning today that's the first heading. The second heading is weak, and you're probably gonna be able to guess the rest of a month, quarter year, decade, other and then completed. Some people like to use done. What you do in the digital version is, or any of these versions is when something is done, you just cut and paste the text, and when you enter it to do It's made up of two parts. The first is your estimating, and you don't actually have to put it in a tabular form. But But I'll put it like that just so you can see is time cost in task name. So something. Maybe you need to cancel something. Uh, that's the wrong. Okay, so it's gonna take 10 minutes to cancel something. Do you want to cancel subscription to a magazine? It's going to take you 10 minutes. Um, maybe you wanna put together a project one pager for this, and that's going to take you 30 minutes. Okay, So the way these air entered is you just do 30 space, and then you do project one pager for why, and the way you enter these in is under each heading, you sort them by how long they're going to take. So, at the top of the West, you have this thing that takes 10 minutes at the bottom and you have the thing that takes three hours. And when you get an idea for a project and you're not sure you don't have time to do it, Well, you do is you just make it a You make it a task to create the project. And once that project is created, which really means you've created a one pager for it and it's been put into your digital system and has been linked up with a hyperlink. So it's in your table contents. What that means is you never lose track of projects. And the cool thing about this is what say you have an idea for a project and you know, you don't have any time at this quarter this year. It's something that's low priority, but you want to keep tabs on it. You spend 5 10 minutes, create the project, write down all your ideas. You put it in here, you link it up and then you can come back to this years later and find that project exactly where you left off. It's really, really, really powerful. And this is the thing that most people are missing, their missing a table of contents and they're missing the ability toe link things from one place. So you create a task to create that project, and then any further, two DUIs go inside. There they go inside that project. So this is how you organize your to do lists you have separate to do list for each area of your life. And sometimes it just doesn't make sense to go inside a project to do a five or a 10 minute task. So it's not worth the trouble to take the to do item and then transferred into here and then do it and then move it to the done or completed area. You just leave it in here, you get it done and you put it in done. So this same exact lay out you're gonna use for every single to do list except as I said before for the paper one. And, uh, this is something that you want to take a look at on your phone and on paper every single day. If you don't want to have to look at it every day, then you have to make sure that any urgent items get immediately scheduled in your calendar itself. Otherwise, you're you're gonna for you forget to check this and then you miss an urgent task. So the great thing about it is anything that's urgent and really anything that has to be done sooner than next week needs to go in this area. Anything that could be done next week goes in the week area. Anything that gets gets done in the next month or later this month after week happens, goes under here. Anything that's that can happen in the rest of the month after this week would go and hear anything that can happen in some time in the rest of the quarter, after this month goes in quarter. And if it's the last month of the quarter than this would mean the next quarter. So those of the time horizons that you're thinking about when you're putting things in here and it gives you a great way where you can instantly see what are the things that need to be, get get done this week or next week or in the next couple weeks? What can I push off? Two month? And the other thing you want to do is you want you want to keep these pretty small. So if you if you find a ton of stuff piling up in the week area, you wanna start pushing those two month or quarter and start pushing things down so that your you're not getting a huge amount of stuff, and what you'll notice over time is if you tend to try to over schedule, or you try to tend to do too much or underestimate how long things will take. That's why these numbers air so valuable because you're estimating in minutes and you know 100 80 would be three hours, but you want to put it in minutes so you really get a sense of the scale, and you can see why. One to do might take 720 minutes and another might take 10 minutes so I could do 72 of thes in the same time it takes. And if you don't have that number there, you're not measuring. So remember, remember, if you're not getting feedback, it's really tough toe learn. You basically can't learn if you're not getting feedback. And so if you're not measuring, there's no feedback. That's why this sort of estimation is very important because you're constantly getting feedback. You finish the task when you move it, you see Okay, how much time did I estimate? And that's the third thing is at the end of the line right here. After the end of it, you put the amount of time it actually took. So maybe you took 45 minutes. This is something that's optional. You don't have to do it. You will start to build up an intuition just by having this number and getting constant feedback with the dozens of to do. So you're gonna be dealing with each week. So it's not mandatory that you do this, but it is very interesting. And it is also something that, if you did want to go in depth, measuring your performance over time, having this number is crucial, so that's something that's optional. But it's something that will allow you to get higher quality feedback. And if you love doing analytics on yourself in measuring things, then it is a good idea to include that at the end. So that's your to do lists, and what you're going to do later, when you're planning, is you're going to take a look at all these to do lists, especially the stuff in here in here, but especially in here. And that's what's going to tell you what you need to get done in the next week so you can start allocating time for those things when you're doing monthly planning, quarterly planning, yearly planning. That's when you start looking at these areas and shifting things up to the weak area and shifting things down if they're lower priority. So it's all about maintaining an idea of priority, maintaining an idea of how long things take and getting feedback by measuring that, you can then learn and improve at your planning skills over time and be doing that consistently.
9. To Do List Addendum: One thing I forgot to mention is that when you're doing your time budget, you start to see how much discretionary time you have. And we talked about that. And so when you're saying OK, I'm gonna spend X hours. What say outside of sleep, you're gonna spend 10 hours a week on health related things. So when you're looking at your health to do list and you're seeing wow, look at how much time is here gonna much thymus here, you realize well, either I need to change this number or I need to realize that I have a lot more stuff listed here than I actually have time for. So that's really important. Is you know how much hours you have here and you can convert that two minutes very easily and you're seeing the minutes right here, and you can very quickly start to see Wow, Either I have more time than I need or I have a lot more things that I want to get done. And I need either need to allocate more time, or I need to really look at my priorities and push stuff down That just isn't as important , so I can get it all done. And that's what it's all about, is it's about you are gonna have to make tough decisions sometimes. But the question the question is the old way. The old way you were doing it was making very You were making these tough decisions, but you were making them unconsciously or or haphazardly. Where is the new way is you're really clear about, Okay, this is a tough call, but this is the smart thing to do in the long run. And so I'm gonna de prioritize this cause I just don't have enough time, and this other thing is truly more important. And when you're doing that consistently, you get much better results.
10. Introduction: in this section, you're gonna learn how to do the learning slash loading and in Pamela, is that last stage. But remember, we're doing it in this order, so the first thing you do and the first thing you're gonna learn in this section is how to review your mind set, and we're not going to go into depth on what your mindset is or how you do that. But the gist of it is that before you're doing you're planning. You want to make sure you're in the right place, you're in the right zone mentally, and the way to do that is to get a spaced repetition on your mind set to remind you, What kind of person do you want to be? What kind of where you trying to go? What tryingto life are you trying to build for yourself and what's your attitude going to be? And so you don't want to take chances that you're not in the right place when you make your plans, because your plans determine what you're doing for the rest of the week. So this is the most important time to be getting space repetitions on this stuff. Remember to looking at your long term plans, and there is a little bit overlap here. So this is the stuff that's the most abstract and this sort of unchanging. This is the stuff that slow changing so long term plans were talking about, you know, decade we're talking about year, quarter month. Then after you do that, you're looking at what are your all your projects as well as here? Tasks which are stored in your to do less. Remember, projects themselves have many to do lists within them, and a project is really just a way of grouping multiple tasks. After that, you get into what, What is your budget or what are your constraints? So you need a review? How much time do you have to allocate? What sort of, um, time budget are you dealing with? And that allows you to think about how you're gonna prioritize things and which things you just can't do. And there is 1/5 part of this that we actually deal with in the planning stage because it's a single worksheet, and so this will be talking about this next. But it's basically a very it's a one page review and plan So after you've looked at all this stuff on 1/2 the left side of peace paper you review the previous week in each of the areas of your life. And then you do a very rough plan for each of the areas of your life, or what are the two or three most important things to get done. So this is something we cover in the next section. But I want you to be aware of it, because that's ultimately what we're driving at.
11. Review Your Mindset Documents: the first area within learning is to review and to review your mind set. So, as I said before, this whole structure encompasses things like who you are in the various areas of your life , professional personal relationships, health and then when within each of those areas, the individual roles that you play, that's one part of your mind set. Another part is your values, which is a part of your belief system. And then you have other beliefs about how the world works. People places things, why things happen. And for some people, this is a religion. For some people, it's culture, and the culture is basically just a lot of people who share a fairly similar set of beliefs . A cult is a very small group of people that all share the same beliefs and usually are are Sina's outsiders by the larger culture and every every culture has, or at least a lot of them, has started as a cult, or they were another culture that slowly evolved, usually by other smaller groups within that larger culture, certain nudging it in one direction or another. So this is the stuff that you want to review, especially if there's things that you're trying to change, and these include beliefs about yourself and other people and, for example, what you're capable of. So confidence in any area is really just beliefs about your capabilities. And usually we look for proof the experiences we've we had so as a as an individual that you've seen other people or people that are related in some way. So family, friends, people who live near you, Um, and so one of the interesting things is that if you're in a negative state emotional state , then you're going to tend to only remember negative experiences. And if you're in a positive state, your only remain positive. And if you're sort of in the middle, you can be pushed in one direction or the other. So you know, if you go to a movie in a pretty average place and you can you know the music of the movie and the story is gonna push you in one direction or the other. And that's actually a big purpose of the music is to control where you are and how you process them, the images in this story and the characters and what's happening. Um, so when you're coming in and you're planning. If you're really stuck in one of these places, it's not gonna be is easy to shift yourself, but most of the time you're probably coming to the planning stage in a fairly sort of blanks slate. So it that's why this stuff can be so powerful. And if you look at a lot of religions and even a lot of things that aren't religious, like the national anthem or certain symbols for a country, there's rituals to to reinforce those beliefs over and over and over again, and certain experiences over and over and over again because that builds a mindset which becomes part of somebody's identity. So their identity would comprise of their nationality, for example, in what country they represent or their religion. And that's repeated on a daily weight basis on a weekly basis on any significant event basis where these things are reinforced through space repetition and review. So the large you can see the largest organizations, countries and religions that have lasted a very long time. They use thes ideas, and so if you want toe, get a handle on changing a certain part of your mind, set, You should be using the same tools. So the review stages to make sure before you do anything else you're getting in the right emotional place where your your best self, That's really the goal of this is to get you from wherever you could be, Whatever whatever place you are emotionally too. Any of these different places get you here. And when your best, your best self, you're gonna make the best plans. And you're also gonna tend to do things like think more long term, be more generous, be more forgiving Whatever your best values are when you're feeling happy, you're gonna tend to make the right decisions. You're not gonna be in a state of fear. Okay, so the goal was your best self, and you want to review your mindset. And this is something that you can do via audio. You conduce the, uh uh, reading. You could even turn it into pictures. You could. You could even store this in a memory palace and even do some visualization with it. But if you just want to get started with this than what you do is, you start creating pages for each set of beliefs and then you just make a list and you have a stack of these for each of the important areas of your life. So this stuff right here, this stuff right here values, and this is something that you can review on a weekly basis. Spend five or 10 minutes doing it, and I recommend rotating. You're not looking at the same stuff each week cause you eventually get bored and, uh, you'll you'll be seeing it too often. So, uh, you want to rotate this stuff out, but that's it for review. So you want to spend some time at the beginning about five minutes reviewing and getting yourself to this place.
12. Review Your Long Term Plans: No, let's talk about your long term plans. So these things and we talked about this in your to do list is you start at the day in the week of the month, in the quarter, in the year in the decade and then other so and then complete or done so you're right here . You may be thinking, Oh, I should review all of this every single week, but it turns out you don't really have enough time to be consistently doing this and get it done within an hour. So the theory behind long term planning that you'll see throughout this course Siri's, is that you do the long term planning less often, and once that's set in stone, then you don't come back and fiddle with it very often. It's not to say that you can't have a realization and go and immediately change it, because if you do have something like that, then you should go on, make that immediate change. So if you have some realization, you don't wait three years until you update this. So if you ever have some sort of epiphany or realization Oh, this career isn't right for me. This relationship isn't right for me. This whatever isn't right for me, then maybe that, uh, that's going to change all of this. And so you do have to go and maybe spend several hours, if not several days updating this, which then flows into that, which then flows into that, which then flows into that. Okay, so there's that flow. And the reason that this course is oriented starting with the short term is because if you don't have the short term figured out and your dot uh, confident about it, then you're not gonna have the freedom to feel like you have enough time to tackle these bigger things because they take more and more time, each one of them. So you first get a handle on the short term stuff, and then that gives you the ability to take time and feel comfortable about focusing on on longer term stuff. So on a weekly basis, what you're really doing is just looking at your monthly plan. And if you feel like you need to look at your quarterly plan, so if you're at the last month of your quarter, then that's when you're starting to think about wool. What's happening for the next quarter or excuse me if you're If you're at the end of the month and you and you haven't gotten next month's plan ready yet, then you're going to be looking at the quarter. If you haven't gotten the next quarter plan ready, you're looking at what's going on for the rest of the year if you haven't planned. If you're at the end of the year and you're in the last quarter, then you're thinking about well, what's planned for next year. And so that would come in, for example, with the decade, although I do recommend doing ah, a shorter interval between year and decade, so I'll get into that in another in one of the later courses on long term planning. So what you're doing for this is you're looking at the monthly plan and maybe the quarterly plan look, and that's about it. So if you want to or you need to look longer term to make a certain decision than you can look at the quarter or even the yearly, but most of the time these air optional and these are going to take more time, and that's gonna push you above the 60 hours a week. I mean 60 minutes a week. So if you want, when you're consistently trying to keep this within an hour, you really only have time to look at that monthly plan. So that's what you do in this stage, and that should only take five minutes, max.
13. Review Your Projects and Tasks: Let's talk about projects in tasks. So this is where you're getting an idea of what are all my options for projects and one of the things that you'll learn more in my course on projects and project management. He's creating a table of contents, and what you'll see within that table of contents is the four areas of your life, and within each one you'll have your main projects. Then, at the bottom of that, you have something, says Minor. And as some points under that, you keep all your minor projects in that area. And then also, when something is completed, he gets moved down to here. So there's three main zones. There's your current active major projects in that area. There's your minor projects, and you can collapse this in one note so that it just becomes a single line. You don't see any of these, and then you can collapse. This is well, and these were completed projects. So the first thing you do is and what I like to do is print this out. You don't have to print it out, but I like to print it out, and you can decide whether you want Teoh, keep thes, collapsed or not, you should definitely keep this one collapsed, and you can choose whether to keep this collapsed or not. And one of the great things about one note is there's keyboard shortcuts that allow you to automatically collapse anything, uh, at a certain level of hierarchy or below. So you can press a keyboard shortcut in everything, but the top level lines of text will show up. You can press another shortcut. The top level in the secondary will show up. Anything that's tertiary or below will be collapsed. So it's a really powerful feature of one note, and it's one of things that makes it so strong for things like outlining, taking notes and basically zooming in and zooming out on data in the same way. In photo shop, you might zoom in or zoom out on an image, Uh, and there's very few software that can do that. So you print this out and you take a look at it and, uh, you make updates. Do it so you circle anything that definitely wants to get planned. And then you also annotate anything that needs to be changed. Uh, for whatever reason, so there may be a link that needs to be updated, or maybe it needs to be moved to complete. Or maybe you just need to change the language of it or merge things together. Um, toe actually make those changes. That's probably going to go outside your 60 minutes, so it's a good idea to do it, but, um, that will be outside your 60 minutes. So make sure you're not getting to sucked into this because you're going to go over the 60 minute timeline. Really, the core to it is just circling what are the most important projects? And again, this is about five minutes. So you want to go through everything, give your spit self a spaced repetition on what are the most important projects, and you're circling those. And if you're having trouble prioritizing stuff, you can do things like put one dot next to everything, then go through again. Put another dot next to the things that are most important and anything that just gets one dot you you push off to next week, and that's a way to create priority priorities. What I like to do is how maney circles ideo and yeah, you can count the circles, But you can really just tell, you know, that's about four times around. This is about two times around, and even how much you press down will have an effect on how the circle looks. So I use that visual cue. This is a big part of when I'm annotating anything I read. Okay? I can easily tell how important something is by how hard I was pressing down and how many times I circled it. So this is a great way to quickly go through everything, circle what's important and give it priorities so that when you go back, you have effectively a heat map. Number two is you're gonna look at your tasks in your to do this and these tasks you really just looking at Is there anything urgent? Which is, at the day level, what's at the week level? And then quickly look at what's at the month level. Because sometimes these things turn into these, um, so that's that's the process. And you're gonna be looking at both your general to do list and all the individual ones and the great thing about one note and keeping the zone one note is that you can batch print all these. You just select all the pages and you print and the better organized you are, the fewer of these to do with tasks you're gonna have because you're gonna be constantly moving them over to your projects. And if you if you find that you do have a big backlog of to do list items than what you have to do is is take sometimes separate from this and just focus on transferring those all over so you would schedule a time block of an hour where you just focus on your to do list clean up. And part of the reason for the structured no taking Siri's is that they're certain notes types of to do's that you get over and over and over again, like read this book. Watch this movie get. This album was into this song where it makes sense for those to go into something related to types of media that you wanna watch, where that you want to finish her that you want to read or you want to get from the why were you want to buy or whatever, So that's actually a system that I haven't released yet, but will be coming out soon. I have other ones that are already out on ideas. Bank Mistakes Journal, where these are the kind of things that come up, over and over and over again. They seem like they're uncapped ago. Rise herbal, but actually, they just belong in what effectively is a database of similar things. And so you learn in these courses how to create those databases, and then you'll find that a lot of your to do list items actually belong in here. So as you get better with your structure notes and your projects, this thing is going to get cleaned out, and you're not going to need toe. Use it as much. And it's mostly just gonna be for urgent items, especially stuff that you'll find that as you get better and better with projects, you can basically fit everything within a long term project. Which and a lot of these projects are about creating systems so that you no longer have to do list items. Thes things just get scheduled and they happen automatically. You may still have to do something, but it's automatically part of your schedule. You never have to plan it again. And so what you're trying to do big picture is you're trying to create systems where things are pre scheduled and they're, ah, they're repeating at a digital level. And so the computer is scheduling for you and and the way you improve your planning and you speed it up is you up the percentage of time where the computer is scheduling your time? Not in the sense that it's deciding for you, but you make the decision. And then it carries out that decision week after week after week by putting it in your actual calendar so automatically, once you add your sleep to your calendar, the computer is technically scheduling 33% your time because you're sleeping for eight hours a day, you add in your meals that's getting you up to 40% when you have work. Um, well, work at schedule anyways, but you have your other routines and and meals is actually more probably gets you up to 50% . Um, so just with that and then you add your morning evening routines, you're probably getting up to, like, 60% your buffer time. Two or three hours of buffer time a day you're getting upto maybe 70% and, uh, and so you can already see just those basic things allow you to fill most of your schedule automatically week after week. And as you build more systems, things start to fall in place and you start to get like, 80% preplanned, 20% discretionary, 90% 10. And so when I said stuff like, you know, out of the 100 hours of waking time per week, you probably have 10. That's truly discretionary. That's where you get into having 90% of your time. Preplanned if you really want to have all your routines and habits being done on a very consistent basis. So the great thing of now this this could be depressing. Or this could be demoralizing when you first find out about it. But you eventually realized that this is a very positive thing because the more of those habits and routines you're doing, the better your quality of life is in terms of your health in terms of relationships, where your continuously maintaining those positive habits and you don't necessarily have to do the same thing every single week. If you if you block out some time for sports or exercise that could be running. It could be biking. It could be swimming. It could be basketball. Could be whatever sport or activity that you want to do. So you can. You have that time set aside. In a general sense, you can pick and rotate what you do specifically in the same sense of you eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at about the same time each day. That doesn't mean you're eating the same thing every single day, so this doesn't mean you're doing the same thing every day. It just means you're doing the same kind of thing in a general sense at a certain block each week. And what that allows you to do is, is make the scheduling task a lot easier. It's no longer overwhelming if you basically only have to really decide on about 10 hours of time, and when I say that that's really your discretionary, mostly personal time, that's not your work time, which takes a significant chunk of this 100 hours of waking time. So, uh, that's the big picture, what you're going for and when you hear people who are really busy and they have a lot of stuff and and they even 15 minutes or half an hour, maybe a lot of time for them. That's what their situation is, is they really understand? And, uh, I was looking at it was Hillary Clinton's schedule that some of her schedules got released and you can see her entire day has been scheduled, and there's literally years of these schedules. Every single day is scheduled like that. Every minute is accounted for. So people who are very busy can have schedules like that. Not all of them do. But you start to realize how valuable even a small amount of time is, and and that's what this system allows you to do. So you really want to get as much as you can into projects. You want to get into structured, uh, structured notes databases so that you're not swimming in a sea of thes. And if you do need time to do that queen up, that's something where you want to block often our and get a lot of those things sorted. So in this stage number one, you're going through all your projects reviewing all your projects. Number two is You're going through all your to do lists and you're not. You're actually not going and looking at thes structure, notes the's air things if you want to review them. These are things that you want to set aside time toe. Look at these.
14. Review Your Time Budget: The last thing is your time budget, and there's a few different ways that you can approach this. The first is something I mentioned earlier where by hand, you're looking at your previous week and you're looking at where Di spends time. That was good. Where I spend that wasn't that I want to change. And how did those hours add up? And what does that give you in terms of how much you know, if you spend six hours watching TV, do you want to get that 23 hours and the three hours is then freed up to do something else ? Another thing is, once you've really got this schedule down the way, you know how much time you have is just look at how much white space there is, and usually that white space occurs at the same time each day so you can just multiply by seven. So the really basic time budget is just take your calendar and add up per day and then add all these up to get your per week, and you may want to split this up into work time and no on work time. That way you have a sense of okay, these work projects and my professional life, they have to fit within this constraint. And my non work, which is basically your personal relationships in your health, goes to thin non work time. And to the extent that any of these are relevant to your work, especially relationships, that would be probably the top one. Um, then you could split this off and and make sure you allocate time for work relationships. And the funny thing about these is thes really carry over, even if you quit a job or you move into a different business or whatever. And so it makes sense to keep the information related to your work and non work relationships in the same place, and I will be coming out with a course on how to organize your relationships, especially contact information. Another just important information, basically creating a digital role index. Um, this is really another. If you want to think about it with what I was talking about in the last video is structured information. When you get overwhelmed with information, usually part of the problem is it's not structured properly, so that's your budget. You want to take a quick look at your time budget and this is this sort of calculation you're doing. You're really usually doing it only once or very infrequently. So my change in the first couple of months that you're implementing in my change, on average once a month. But then probably once 1/4 once a year and maybe not even that once you really start to get into a rhythm. So when you're starting out, you want to do this sort of analysis to figure out where you can find time and then once that's pretty stable. Once you have a pretty stable calendar, then you're just looking at okay, where my free blocks. And that's how you figure out how much time you have. And it makes sense separate work and non work, because that's gonna control how you allocate stuff you don't want to say. Oh, I have, you know, 60 hours to allocate. But it turns out, you know, 50 of those air work or 40 of those air work. So you're these projects will seem like you have a lot of these, even though you don't have nearly as much time to get these done as you do for your work projects in terms of per week. And so, if you're if you're trying to treat them all equally, you're gonna have, um you have a really tough time with that. So it's important to know these which usually have a a mandatory time out element of you show up at a certain time. You go home at a certain time, and so this is basically non negotiable. And and so it, uh, you have a fixed amount of time you're allocating here, whereas this is less fixed, it's more negotiable. Um and so you really want to have a strong idea of how much time you have per day for work and non work and then per week working on work. That way you can take the previous things we talked about your long term plans, your projects and your to do's. And now you have an idea of Okay, I have 40 hours to put towards those professional projects, and then I have 20 hours that I can put towards personal relationships and health
15. Introduction: Okay, Now we're in the planning stage of the Pamela model, so we've done our measurement. We've done our learning. Now we're here. So and I mentioned this in the previous introduction to the learning section is we have this one page item right here. So that's the first thing is you're doing a big picture review. And what that looks like is it's very simple. Your review The peat previous week. Any plan the next week? And this is split up just like that. You have your professional personal relationship and health, and you're basically writing the most important things that you can fit within this area. And so good way to think about is your writing 2 to 3 things per area. If you want to put more, you can put more. But a good way to think about this is on a on a monthly basis on a quarterly basis on a yearly basis. This is really the most information you can comfortably process, um, without just going completely overboard. So this is this is this should be dense and you want to think about well on a monthly basis . I'm looking at four of these. Maybe five on a quarterly basis, you're looking at what's a 12 to 14 of these? So there's a significant amount of information here in terms of your plans, which are on the right side, and your views, which are on the left side. And the learning process happens when you compare these. When you compare the plan from one week to the review side from the next week. So this plan and this review are connected, this plan and this review are connected. Okay, so this one, the's are learning opportunities. And so this is when I talk about how this whole system is different is it's based around learning and getting better at planning every single week. So when you're consistently looking at what did I do last week? What was my plan and what did I actually achieve over time? That gap is going to decrease, and that's really the definition of learning. The definition of learning is just over time, and of course, that's debated. I'm not saying that's the one definition. Experts do debate and disagree to an extent, but the most widely accepted definition is you have experience over time and performance improves over time. And so this is your performance. This is the gap between what you plan and what you actually achieve. And as you get better at this, your confidence increases and you get more and more. This sense of I can make things happen because you see yourself over and over and over again planning something, and then it happens, planning something, and then it happens, planning something, and it happens at a small scale and at a large scale. So this review is the first thing. The second thing is the plan, obviously, Then we get into allocating time, and then we print Excuse me. Um, we actually print first, and then we allocate time. Um, if you're gonna allocate time digitally, then you would do this first and then print. So if you're printing and printing is what I do, But I know a lot of you like to do stuff all digital, so if you want to do a digital, you allocate first and then you print it out, and maybe you're not gonna print it out at all. Maybe you're just gonna have it in your phone and just go by the phone. The issue with that is that? Then again, you can't record. So to effectively record there's really no digital system, um, that allows you could use a spreadsheet. Um, but the problem with that is, when you're not at your computer when you're not at work and it's not convenient to do it, you tend to not record your time. And so you don't want to be tied to some digital device where you always have to have that around just so you can, Um, because you can enter this information. So I do highly recommend that you print it out and record what you're doing on the printed out version. Whether you want to allocate time digitally or not, it doesn't really matter. Um, it does. I think it does look better actually to do it physically, because the blocks necessarily take up the entire width of the column, and so it makes it. It makes it not look as good. So I do recommend you print it out first and then allocate and, uh and so what's get started
16. Your Weekly OnePagerr - Review on Left Side: okay, In this video, we're gonna talk about the review section of your weekly one pager. As I said, you're splitting this up into four sections. Professional personal relationships, health. And the question is, Well, what do you right in here? The first thing is any major projects, and you're gonna tend tohave, usually several. You know, 2 to 3 major projects professionally and then personally, relationships and health. You may only have one or two or 2 to 3 projects between all of the's areas, and it really depends on how much time you have to allocate. I also what I recommend in terms of time allocation is that you try to limit the amount of projects. And even though I have talked about doing a mandatory our each week for Monday for professional Tuesday for Personal Wednesday for relationships Thursday for health Friday for systems Saturday for creativity Sunday for relax ation. I've talked about that, but some people have interpreted that I was talking with my coaching clients about this actually where you don't just spend a certain, you know, dedicate all your time all your discretionary time on Monday to planning out or working on professional stuff. You don't dedicate all your discretionary time onto every Tuesday to personal stuff. It turns out that that's actually not an efficient way to do it, because the time it takes between last Tuesday and this Tuesday, six days have gone by. And so you need a spend a significant amount of this time actually, just refreshing yourself on what you were doing, uh, the previous week. Instead, what you want to dio is dedicate yourself to one or two projects to work on during your discretionary time each week. And then you can schedule those back to back sessions where you need to spend very little time, if any, refreshing yourself on what you were doing last week. So you end up spending less time on what's called a context switching penalty, and you may have heard me talk about this and that you want musk course. If you take in that one. That modeling report context, switching part of this is physical and part of its mental. The physical part is filing stuff away and then taking it back out. So I'm finding it. You may even forget where exactly you put it or if it's in a minimal folder. Where is it in that Manila folder? And then number two is Ah, is mentally. You need to refresh yourself. Load all that information back into your working memory, which we sometimes called RAM with the computer metaphor. So this is your opportunity to write down about that. And then also, if you want, you can write down any major milestones. Achievements, uh, any good or bad things that happened so mistakes. Obviously you would want to put those in the mistakes journal. Um, you can also keep something that's the opposite of mistakes, of things you did right, which you could call achievements, and that that helps you keep track of those sorts of things. But there's not necessarily as much value in that, um, but you can do a very similar thing with achievements, as with a mistake's journal. So you're keeping track your projects, and then, if you want keeping track of good or bad things that happened during the week and that's really it. So you're doing bullet points. You want to keep it as brief as possible. You want to make it something that you can easily go through and read and if possible, try to keep progress on projects of what happened separate from this stuff. And don't go into writing pair paragraphs of stuff. Because the problem is, even though you may be thinking, well, this is good because I'm getting mawr information. It turns out that number one, it's unstructured and number two it takes two long to process. So you end up never going back to this. And even if you do go back, it's tough to figure out what does all this mean and put it all into a bigger picture because there's just so much toe sort of go through. And so it ends up being more of a a narrative strategy that isn't really useful for finding patterns. It's harder to find patterns, so this makes it easy to find patterns and just focus on what are the most important things that happened in that last week.
17. Your Weekly OnePagerr - Plan on Right Side: No, let's talk about the planning stage, and this is something that's really important because it gives you the ability to prioritize. And it forces you to prioritize before you go to your actual calendar. Because when you're looking at this, even if you don't have a ton of white space, you can get intimidating. So this is the process of taking everything that you've reviewed during the learning phase , which I also called the loading phase because a lot of it is loading information into your working memory so that you can then process it. So this is your view, and then this is your plan. And so what you're gonna do is basically think about out of all the projects and all the to do's what are the most important in each of these areas professional personal relationships and health. And sometimes people get confused about what is personal. Um, I talk about this in depth in my information organization. Siri's specifically Volume two of the mastering productivity, which in hindsight, may not have been the best, uh, name for this, and I may end up changing that. But the title, of course, is information organization and the one before it is called information in boxes, and it's a two step process for organizing information. Eso What is personal? One of the big elements of it is financial. Another is managing all your assets. So that's physical property and its intellectual property, which you might call media books. Anything that's printed anything that's digital physical property. Generally you have containers, and then you have objects that go inside containers. And yet land, which you could think of, is a container. Um, so all your electron ICS all your furniture, uh, your vehicles, your bike, your motorcycle, your boat, your plane, whatever your drone. So ah, managing your assets financial, which includes stuff like insurance. So that's a big piece of of personal and health includes your meals and food and water. Uh, any sort of medications and, like, uh, doctor, visit anything related to that medical and then also your exercise and also things like flexibility and, uh, which basically comes down to stuff that's preventative focused where it's about staying healthy and then acute, which is about solving actual, uh, significant problems that come up with your health. So for each of these, ideally, you want to be mostly focused on projects and then some two Duce. And what you'll find is that you can look at your projects and you can see which ones are short term. Which ones are long term. Which ones have a deadline that maybe is a year out. You you needed eventually get it done. And so you look at this stuff and you think about okay, I want to spend a little bit of time on this. A little bit of time on that, And you have a general sense of this is good. This is allocated to my work time, which you just did your budget. And this is my non work time. Also called your discretionary time. So you have that in the back, your head and you're thinking about OK, what can I reasonably, reasonably expect to get done? And you don't have to have exact times that you wanna spend on each of these things. But if you want, and especially since for two DUIs you already have that information you can for projects. Think about about roughly how much time you want to spend in terms of hours. How many hours do you want to spend because your budget is made up of ours. So your to do's may add up to a you know, 2 to 3 hours, and then the rest of it is gonna add up to ah, the rest of your projects. You're gonna be thinking in terms of how many hours. So I want to work on this project versus that. And as I said before, you don't want us. You don't want to pick out five projects and spend an hour on each. You want toe, pick out 1 to 2 projects and make significant progress. Okay, You want to make significant progress, You want to hit some sort of milestone where you can sort of save your work. And there's so projects tend to look like this. You have a milestone, and then things expand in a bunch different directions, and then they eventually sort of come back to a point like this. He had another milestone, and they ranch back out, and then they come back down. And so what you don't want to do is you don't want to stop here, because then you have to load a ton of stuff in your short term memory. you have to pick up all the pieces so you don't want to stop in the middle. You want to stop where you're near, that you're at a conclusion. You're at a milestone and things have sort of come together. So when you're when you're allocating time, you're always thinking about context, switching penalty, and you want to reduce that by doing fewer things more time hit a milestone, and this is a good reason when you're thinking about well, what if I have to reschedule? Reschedule strategically by thinking about what is the cost of not rescheduling this immediately versus pushing. So, for example, what say you need another two hours to finish this and you don't have to. Ours pushed something that you, your third project of the week that you haven't even started on. Push that to next week and finish this because this is already out of milestone. You haven't branched out yet, so push this one off and then start this later and finish this and get it toe a milestone where you consort of box it up and and pull it back out later and it's gonna be in a good, solid floor. So that's planning that's coming up with a bullet point. And this is going to force you to stop overestimating how much you're going to do when underestimating how much time things will take because you put a number next to each project that says roughly how many hours you're allocating and you have that number, which you can write up in the corner here in the corner here of how much time do you have allocated toe work and non work? And if you want to, you can switch up this more mad a little bit so you could make. Let's say you have a lot of work stuff. You could make work 1/3 of the page and then split these up into thirds. You can make it half of the page and split this up into thirds. Okay, so if you need more time, that's how you do it. And, uh, if you're wondering how I draw this stuff and how I I'm able to ah draw these pretty evenly . The way that I'm doing that is I think about how many sections I want to split it into. And then I subtract one from that number and That's how many lines I need to draw. And just knowing how many lines I need to draw evenly spaced makes it very easy. So it's always easy to cut something in half. So that's how I do these eighths. But when I have to do an odd number When you saw me do earlier the KP I sheet when I was doing 123456789 10 11 12 13 14 lines, that's how I was doing it, Um, is just having that rough number and I've practiced. But if you're interested in drawing, that's how I do this stuff. But you're gonna have a digital version of this year and have a template. So it'll be very easy, um, to figure out. And even even at a grand scale, you can think about each month. You've got four, sometimes five weeks, but basically four weeks, you can decide. Well, I'm gonna rotate through one of these each week. So this is week one. This is we to This is week three. This is weak for so when you're thinking about your discretionary time each week, you can spend discretionary time one week on professional stuff, maybe long term professional. Or you just need a work extra hard one week and bring work home. And then you spent an entire week on one of these. And that means you can get through an entire book, maybe two books. You can spend specific, uh, deep time on on one goal and make significant progress towards the next milestone. So don't think about each day, whatever. The purpose of the one hour of mandatory time each week for each of these main areas is so that you're not following behind. It's really about maintenance, not about adding new features or making progress towards the next milestone. Okay, so I had that come up in one of my coaching calls, and that's that's an important thing. So the one hour a week is for maintenance, adding new stuff. You really want to split it up more like this you want have 12 projects and maybe your plans for this air basically blank or it's a few two DUIs, but it's nothing major in terms of projects, and you're just focusing on this, So that's how you do it to do so in projects, and that's going to get you where you want to go
18. Printing Your Digital Calendar: Okay, The next thing is printing your calendar, and so what you do is anything that's essential that needs to get done. That has a deadline that should be in your digital calendar. Google calendar. So anything that's essential is going to go in here, and you're looking at the week view 34 56 So you want to get into week view. You want to scroll down so that whenever you're going toe, go to bed used for a lot of people, this is midnight, and then this is around 7 to 8 a.m. and you want to fill your screen with this and then take a screenshot of it, and the proportions of your screen are usually gonna be 16 29 or 16 to 10. And this is not the proportions of a piece of paper. A piece of paper is more like this. This is 8.5. This is 11. And so if you wanted toe fudge things, you could say this is nine inches. This is 11. This is nine inches. This is 16 inches, so there's a five inch difference here. And so if you take a screenshot, what ends up happening is you have margins of white space and your stuff is scrunched. So what you want to do is you want to actually on your 18 on your, uh, your screen, you want your window to be shaped like this, leave this space open, and then take a screenshot of this space right here of just the calendar, and then you copy and paste this into the Google slide template. Good. You could you confined? I'll probably put it in a text file at the end of the course. And, uh, the Google slide has each slides like this looks It's basically power point, but is online. And, ah, this is the date. This is the front. This is the back, and then you have more of the's going down. So this is the last week date. This is last week's front. This is lack sweets back. So this gives you a great record that you can look back at of all your plans, and you can update things as you go. So you copy and paste this into here, and what you're gonna find is a little object. A rectangular object like this that represents 1/4 of the page. And what you do is you first, um, dragged us over to Philip this area right here and then you will line this image so that this is your one year fold increases you're may increase is right here. This is folding a piece paper and 1/2. And then these creases right here, folded in quarters. The reason we do this is because there seven days and we're trying to fit it into an eight , uh, eight section thing. And so we need to have one of thes blank. This is Monday. This is Tuesday and Wednesday. This is Thursday and Friday, Saturday and Sunday. And if you haven't already, you want to change your Google calendar so that it's the week starts on Monday, and the reason why is because we want to have the weekend together on the calendar because people tend to think of their weekend as a block and they're weak as a block. You don't wanna have Sunday over here and saturday over here, because then you can't think of them as a block. And that's what's important, how you think about it in your head and, uh and so that's gonna be more useful. So what you do is you have this square. I mean, this rectangle right here, you bring it over here, and this edge right here represents this crease when you're folding the calendar. So this is an example. This is the crease we're talking about right here. So you have this transparent rectangle that you drag and Google sheets over, and it represents this rectangle on drawing right here with the green man. And what you want to do is line it up and you see this area right here is the blank space that we want on the calendar so that it folds perfectly. So we first fold it like this, then we I might as well just do it right now I see it, you line up the corner and it's folding perfectly on that line, and then you have it half. And then now we fold it again, and sometimes it's a little bit off because your printer, which is what happened here. So if if it prints out and it seems like it's not perfect, it's actually probably a problem with your printer, not with, uh, the template itself. And so if you're if you use the same printer every time, What you'll find is that your printer has a standard offset What's it's consistently off where it's supposed to be printing by a certain half inch or millimeter or whatever. You can adjust your template so that when it prints out, it folds properly and then you just use that template. So this is what it looks like, and then you fold it in half again. So that is pocket size. And so what say today, Saturday you now have a view of Saturday and Sunday, Thursday and Friday. So that's how this works. And, uh and so you print it out and you get this and it has a front and a back to it. So what you do is you go and print this out. When you got a print preview under pages, it'll default all, and you just do pages 2 to 3, which are this is page to This is Page three, and you said it to double sided and then you print it out and you're good to go
19. Allocating Your Time on Your Paper Calendar: Okay, now we're in the final stage. A location were allocating space, allocating the time that we have for projects. So what you have in front of you on your desk, number one is your review slash plan and number two is You have your calendar, and if you want, you can also have that time budget that you worked on, which is optional. But primarily what you're doing is you're taking this material right here, and you're taking your free blocks during the week and you're figuring out, let's say this is work time and this is non work time. You're figuring out how to allocate work to your worked blocks, and then you're figuring out how to allocate your non work to your non work blocks. And as I said before, really, the most efficient way to do this is to rotate between these and you may. Maybe you're thinking, Well, how do you rotate three things into four weeks? One way you can do it is actually focus on systems as your fourth and rotate between those or you can rotate in a professional week, where you actually spend your discretionary time working on something professional so that could be is simplest taking homework are working on a long project. It could just be working on stuff that's more long term. It could be working on your career. Maybe you want to set up a website. Maybe you want to do a side business. What's the next step for your side business? Maybe you spend a week of your discretionary time just on that. So when you're in a certain stage where you don't have systems set up with, which could be a lot of you when you don't have strong systems in your life, that may be an area where you want to dedicate one week a month to that. If you're very focused on your career, maybe you want to focus one week, a month on that and then rotate between these three. Maybe you have one area of your life, whether it's personal health. Uh, I mean relationships, air health. That's basically you can coast, and there's no projects that you really want to work on. You could come into that only once 1/4 or twice 1/4 and you could dedicate an entire week to a certain thing. So the more you're dedicating an entire week toe one or two areas, one or two projects, the more efficient you're gonna be. And you're going to be more efficient when you're thinking more long term. So these things go hand in hand. You get the benefits when you're thinking more long term, and you can think more long term when you're better at planning and you're not overwhelmed . So you really want to get to a point where you're doing. It feels like you're doing less and less, but you're actually instead of going very shallow and then coming up in switching, you're going very deep each time and that will Actually, that's not the best view of it, because this is your four different areas of your life. Instead, you're going very deep on one or two things, and so you get much more area underneath right here. Then you do hear, hear here and here. Okay, so this is the long term approach. This is the approach of dedicated entire week of discretionary time towards the projects in one area and then rotate each week. So, big picture, what are you doing? You're looking at where those white spaces on your calendar on, then you're allocating time and whatever possible, you want to spend big chunks of time on one thing rather than a bunch of small chunks of time on a bunch of different things. So, as much as possible, you want to do deep work where you're focusing on one project for a significant period of time when you have two DUIs, one of the and that's projects we were talking about the last few minutes. There's also two DUIs. So what I like to do with two DUIs is two things. Number one is you have that mandatory. Our and I want to put that right before a buffer time so that if there's certain to deuce that I have in that area, I have buffer time right after that for an hour, and I can fill that with two Duce related to that out area. So if it's health, it's a Thursday. I use that buffered time for two DUIs. The other option is to actually schedule. You see, on your review page, you're reviewing planning page. You see that you have your to do's and you see roughly how long they take. So you know you need to schedule about that much time for two DUIs for that area of your life to get all that stuff done. So you go through when you schedule to do time, and you don't write what the specific tasks are because you just go here and there in your plan so you don't when it when it comes to that block of time, it just says two DUIs health. And then you go into this health section here and you do that to deuce and even more general way to do it is to just go to your the specific to due West for health. And you can just go down the West and do it that way. So there's multiple ways to do it. But to keep it simple, you're just right. You're transferring your to do's from here to hear, based on prioritization, rough prioritization. And then from here to here, you're not writing down the specific tasks. You come back to this Ah, when you're gonna actually do those if the to do's are longer and each one is a hat at minimum, 1/2 a Knauer, if not an hour, then you could write down the specific to deuce, but as much as possible, you want a group stuff together, Um, to keep things simple and to get into the flow. Remember, you're not just doing a general to do section and then doing one health to do one personal one. Relationships. You want to avoid doing that, you want to do all the to do's related to a certain domain at the same time, one after the other in one time block.
20. Action: Finally, I'm going to talk about action. We've talked about measurement. That's where we started. Then we talked about learning and loading that we talked about planning, which we just did. We just allocated Finally, we're looking at acting, and I'm not gonna put together a whole big section on this because this is mostly about just following the schedule. You just look at that. Your schedule in the morning. You have it next to you all the time and you're just looking at it. So you look at it and then you fill in, you measure what you actually did, So you already know how to do that from the hourly and daily planning. So the one thing I'm gonna focus on in this video is visualization, and this is something that is optional. You're probably you may have time to do a little bit of it. Um, and it's something that when you're just getting started, is most valuable. And as you get more experience, you get more confidence in yourself. Um, you tend to not necessarily need this is much anymore, although for you it may be different. So this is not the most scientific thing. Even though it has been shown to be effective in scientific settings, it's not. It's not something that has widespread adoption yet what athletes use it. People who have coaches, the coaches will do guided visualizations. Sometimes they're called guided meditations. And what you're doing is your just doing that doing a walk through and ah, good metaphor. This is football American football. Sometimes they'll practice with pads. Sometimes they'll do a practice that's just a walk through. So it's no contact. Ah, no tackling. They just and there's no running. There may be running, but, you know, depends. Um, they don't want anybody getting hurt, even spraining an ankle, pulling something. And so they're just walking through the play. So they have the playbook and they have what each person is doing, and they just walk through what they're going to do on that play. So this isn't a This is a type of practice that's not exactly the same as game time, but it is effective and something, and that's what's visually visualization is. It's your running through in your head what's going to happen. And this simulation is valuable because the more times it's basically a version of spaced repetition, the more you've done something more comfortable you feel doing it. The more you've fired those neurons, which is really a path of neurons or even a cluster, the more you fire those neurons out and you, which is basically neuron. One to neuron to you're on three to neuron four. OK, that's a path. Each time you fire along that path, it gets mile unaided, which is like it's a layer of fat similar to Teoh on any cable like a copper cable. It'll have rubber insulation outside. So each time you fire along it, it gets Meilin ated, so you fire it again by visualizing it again. Get smile UNDATED. Again you fire again gets my eliminated again. And so this goes from a dirt path to a highway. As you fire it more and more times, it gets easier and easier. Eventually it becomes effortless. So that's why doing something for the first time is very mentally taxing. And this is actually a phrase that I want you to remember. One of my coaching clients brought this up when we were talking about implementing this system. Is that what what? You what sort of difficult to pin down before you have a planning system is you go through the day and you're constantly paying a small toll or tax because you're constantly trying to remind yourself, Oh, I need to do this and this and this. Just keep those in the back, your mind, and what should I do next? What's most important? You don't know the answer to these questions and see you. You pay a mental tax because you have to think about this stuff and all this tax adds up to a lot. And what the system does is it means you're not paying this tax anymore. Instead, you're spending one hour a week, 60 minutes, and you're getting it all taken care of at once, and you're making very high quality decisions. So that's 60 minutes helps you avoid paying all this tax, and it frees you up to get into the flow, to enjoy it and to not have to. You can fully let go because you know your calendar is always gonna be there, uh, to basically keep you on time in relation to your longer term plans. So this is useful, especially when you're getting started when you don't have a lot of confidence in your ability to get stuff done, get things done, um, to take on big projects, which is just a bunch of little tasks, as we've talked about when you feel like you're procrastinator. The problem with procrastinators, the problems that they have are all related to prioritization, and the challenge they face is balancing between. Do I spend a lot of time right now establishing my priorities, or do I put it off and just do something that's lo in terms of productivity but is a certain payoff? And so when you have a ton of options and they're hard to prioritize, you tend to do something that you know is beneficial, even if it's only at a very low level because it's certain, whereas prioritizing and correctly feels very uncertain and part of what we value is certainty. So when it's 50 50 we'll go here instead of here. So what that procrastinator needs to do is break out in a cycle and focus on prioritization and coming up with a schedule that matches their values, their priorities and when they do that, they get out of this constant state of uncertainty. to a level of certainty, and there's a lot of people that live their entire life here that never really figure out their priorities, And that's why they feel like they don't have a lot of energy. They don't know what they're doing with their life. They don't know what's really important and what isn't. They kind of just go from one thing to another, whether it's social media or TV or YouTube or whatever their vices or whatever their thing is. They spend their time because it's a low level of benefit. But it's a certain benefit. It's going to make them feel good, and they can't feel good about taking long term action because they've never done the long term planning and prioritization that's needed. And if they have and their still procrastinating, it's because they haven't really discovered their values what's really important and what's going to drive them emotionally at a deep level. So if you're wondering, well, when are we gonna talk about that? That's coming in long term planning and, to an extent mindset also what we're talking about values. So that's action visualization. This is something that will increase your confidence. Um, no matter what you're doing, whether you're in m m a fighter preparing for a fight, or you're going to do public speaking for the first time and you want to look good up on stage or in front of everybody in the conference room visualization and visualizing yourself. Doing something is gonna help you feel more confident. And so if you haven't done something 100 times or 1000 times and you look at somebody else and like wow, there a natural, they just do it effortlessly. Well, that's actually a function of them visualizing and acting in practicing. But it turns out there's certain things that you can't practice where visualization actually does help. Um, and it really helps, period. So you visualize yourself doing something the right way, and it does have a positive effect, and there are scientific studies. So if you're wondering, go to Google search visualization, scientific proof, and you're gonna find it. So this is not something that's just, you know, from the sixties and seventies of, oh, visualized stuff, and it will make you successful. It's obviously not a panacea. It doesn't replace actually doing the hard work in the practice and making stuff happen on your own. But it is scientifically validated toe work, and it makes sense why it works because of this, because you can fire that neuron path, whether you're imagining it or whether it's actually you're actually doing it. And one way you, you know, this is because when you dream, dreaming is just a more intense version of this visualization. And even if you're not intentionally visualizing our brains naturally do this. So a lot of the things that you feel like you were naturally motivated to dio unconsciously or through doing stuff like watching videos, TV listening to an inspirational speaker. All of these things have a function of having you imagine things in your head that they don't actually show on screen with an inspirational speaker. There's no images with TV and video. What you'll notice, if you really analyze it, is that. And this is sort of like a comic book. That's probably the best example is the action happens between the frames. You're visualizing the action that happens, and you're just seeing a frame. And in TV and video you get to see more of this. But when they cut for a scene. You have to imagine what happened between this scene and that scene. And so your visualization abilities allow you to make sense of the overarching story. Okay, so that's the power of your visualization. This is something that everybody does in one way or another. Don't worry about if it's not clear if you're not seeing images, just imagine yourself doing it. And if you really can't figure out any other way, just write it down. Just write a story and it doesn't have to be like a it can. It can literally just be a list of events happening. Could be this. I did this and then I do this and then I do this and then I do this and this happens that I do this and this happens. Then I you know, I was speaking, and people are paying attention that I say this thing. And then people clap at the end and etcetera, etcetera so you can paint that picture with words. Even if you're not getting those queer visualizations, that doesn't need to be the ultimate goal. Uh, just sort of closing your eyes and even talking yourself through it. That internal voice that narration. That's fine when you're writing down, what you're really doing is just translating that inner voice in tow movements with your fingers or movements with your hand. Okay, so one way or the other, if you want toe, get more confident in whatever skill that you're practicing, get better at planning. Make sure that you get stuff done and help eliminate procrastination. Visualization is one of the best ways to do it.
21. Conclusion: Okay, You finally made it to the conclusion. So it's too little summary. Remember the Pamela Model Plan Act measure learn. The reason it's set up in this way is because our final outcome is learning. And that's what makes the system separate. Ah, and different and in my opinion, better than other planning systems with other planning systems. Yes, you will learn as part of the process, but they're not geared towards learning. They're not geared towards helping you improve as a planner, every single cycle that you go through the system, whereas this system is geared towards that. So number one is measurement. We talked about how to measure what you're doing each week. We talked about going through your calendar, crossing stuff off moving stuff and ah, measuring KP eyes as well. Then we went until learning slash bloating. He also talked about budgets up here, measuring where you're actually spending your time learning we talked about. This is really a lot about loading into your short term memory. What's gonna happen? Measurement is really about, uh, in terms of what's actually happening with the paper on the desk is your you're processing information, getting it out of the calendar and into your storage systems. So you're making, uh, you're processing the front and the back, making sure there's no ah, tasks that haven't gotten done. And if they I need to go to a to do list or the digital Google calendar, that's where they go. And then you also process the back and even optionally stuff on your phone, but especially the to do list on your phone if you're keeping one there. Next thing is loading stuff in, so we load in the mind set. Do a review of that. We also go to the Teoh, the one pager, which is all about reviewing the previous week, and, uh, and when we're reviewing the previous week, we're looking at long term plans. So month. We quarterly year. We, but mostly monthly, and we're getting ready for the planning when we're creating that one pager. That's the review and the plan read for review Green for plan. And so, in a learning phase, we're making sure that we're loading all that stuff into our head. The budget that we worked on earlier this is something that really you're only gonna create once or not. So often. But you want to review that budget and you want to know specifically what are your constraints? That's what a budget is, a set of constraints, and you want to know how much work time you have, how much non work and you want to know roughly you want to know for the entire week. You will also want to know on a daily basis what those are. We also talked about reviewing your projects and your to do list. So projects remember are just collections of tasks which are captain to do lists. And so you want toe. Get a big picture view at what are all the projects, and you want to circle the projects that you want to focus on for that week. And then those projects go into this planning area so planning finishes. It starts with your review on your plan. Then, uh, we print out the calendar. Can we use Google slides for that? Get that template and then once it's printed out, then we fill in those open time slots based on the plan. And then, finally, four is action. We talked about how to visualize and how visualization can help you prove your confidence when you're doing any specific task. A lot of people think about confidence. They think about this generalized thing they think about. Often somebody can appear confident either because they're socially confident or because they're confident in, ah, task specific way. And you only see them or even in a role specific. So you see them at work and they always seem confident. But when they go home, they may not be so confident. Whether it's with their spouse, their kids with their friends, their mentor, who knows. Okay, so they may be tasks a specific, which is even more specific than role. They may be confident in a specific task of their role, but other parts of their role they may not be confident. Somebody who's socially confident may be confident when there in a social situation, we're really just your ability to talk with other people and schmooze or chat. That's the main ability. But when they get into a another situation where it's not about that, they may no longer be confident. Eso what a lot of people do when they're not confident, is they look at somebody who's either socially confident, role, confident or task confident. And they assume that that person is confident in all four areas of their life in all contexts. And that's actually extremely rare and usually confidences because of competence, which is because of learning and training. So that's where it all starts. But people will often assume that somebody who's socially confident, task, confident. A role confident is really has this sort of general confidence. And it's it's just not the case, um, and so that's the definition of confidence, but visualizations good for confidence. Also good for procrastination. Um, because it's gonna make you feel more confident that you can complete a task that scheduled . Sometimes we have something scheduled, but we're afraid that will fail. And so we don't do it because of that, even though it's a pretty high priority, it's pretty important for that area of our life for our work for a business career, whatever. But we don't do it because we're scared. When you have that fear, a failure. Visualisation helps reduce that fear. So that's that's the system. In a nutshell, we start with measuring. We learned from that measurement we look at we compare the past, uh, plans. We made with the pat with what we actually did. We see the gap, and we work to reduce that gap each week until we're very confident, both in our planning ability and also task specific and this bill to confidence that you can get things done, make things happen and you can spend. And it's not just that it's a struggle, but you get to spend that time in the flow. You enjoy what you're doing because it leads to the long term goals that you want. And if you're wondering what's gonna come next with monthly planning, quarterly planning year, we planning decade life span planning that will be covering that in future courses as well as mindset. And that's really the base of all this stuff. So this gives you a great system that you can use every single week, and, uh, and the way it breaks down when he's talked about 2020 20 20 minutes here, 20 minutes here, 20 minutes here. And visualization is something that, um, if you want to shave five minutes off here, there, you can spend some time on that. But the real goal is how do you get from in a single hour get from your previous calendar to a new calendar. Okay, so this is a 60 minute process that gets you from point A to point B and in the middle, you're doing that one pager that summarizes your progress so that at the end of the month yet for these at the end of the quarter, you have, on average, 13 of these and at the end of the year yet 52 of these and you can see step by step each week you can compare your plan, which is really 1/2 page toe. What actually happened? So each week you have a one pager that shows you how will you performed, and you can do as many analytics is You want on that? You can look at your KP eyes Did talk about how, in addition to this, you can also have that KP I sheet that you track per quarter and you're measuring things on a weekly basis and you can turn day we KP eyes. You can take the highest. Take the max. You can make the men you can take Ah, the mean which is the average. And you can put that in your weekly tracker. Or you could literally track it every day. You can set up a spreadsheet, do whatever you want, but if you're thinking about if you want to measure stuff consistently on a single piece of paper, this would be the K p I. She to do it. You give yourself 14 Rose. I mean, 14 columns for the 14 weeks and then you have, you know, 2 to 3 KP eyes for each area of your life and your measuring those once a week.
Timothy Kenny, Author of "Accelerated Learning for Entrepreneurs"
