One Simple Change To Make Your Planning More Effective

A small change in your workflow can make a big difference

Photo by Vlada Karpovich

Happy New Year! This is going to be a short one.

I am a big proponent of planning and reviewing. Plans force you to clarify what you want and measure your progress.

If you don't know where you're going, then its your job to figure it out and get there

Planning and reviews are just an extension of your thinking at a specific time and your evaluation of your own planning abilities.

Plans serve as reminders of what you need to get done and how so you can avoid all other distractions

Without plans, you don’t know where you’re going.
Without reviews, you don’t know if you’re following the plan.

With both, you can make course corrections as you see fit.

Planning is usually easy, but there is an invisible resistance to reviewing those plans later. The resistance is even stronger if your plans are scattered across pages, notes and software, and are not readily accessible.

To solve this, make one single change.

Instead of writing plans on paper or in a note-taking app, write your monthly and yearly plans as emails and schedule them to be sent your future self.

How it works

At the start of the month, write your plan in an email and send it to yourself, but instead of sending it now, click the arrow next to Send and select Schedule Send.

Schedule it to be delivered to your email address at the end of the month¹.

Now, the plan is set, and at the end of the month, you'll get an email from past you on what you had decided to do versus what you actually got done. (if you ever need to recall the original plan, just check your Scheduled folder).

Repeat this every month.

This method works because it makes your plans accessible and introduces zero friction in reviewing them to take further action.

You can apply the same idea to weekly, quarterly or yearly planning as well.

What should the plan look like?

I usually make all items in the plan as either input or output goals.

E.g,

• Input Goal: Exercise 5 hours a week

• Output Goal: Hit 1k views on Youtube

Here’s a template you can use

Email Subject:

W1-2024 Plan

(Replace the number by week or month; E.g., M1-2024 Plan for the monthly plan. Add a “planning” label to all these emails)

Email Body

Single Outcome

[ ] Add here

Work

[ ] - Item #1

[ ] - Item #2

[ ] - Item #3

Health

[ ] - Item #1

[ ] - Item #2

[ ] - Item #3

Personal

[ ] - Item #1

[ ] - Item #2

[ ] - Item #3

Relationships

[ ] - Item #1

[ ] - Item #2

[ ] - Item #3

To know what to prioritize, use the following 4 frameworks in conjunction with the Life framework

Cheer and have a stupendously successful 2024

- Atman

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Note: Special thanks to

Siddharth Raikar

for this ultra useful planning hack

1. I personally set it to deliver at the end of the last Saturday of the month.