EPISODE 032 - Organisation: How to improve my daily planing?

Michael Seidl: Welcome to a new episode of the Get Shit Done in IT podcast. My name is Michael Seidel and our topic of the day is how can I improve my daily planning? So how to improve your to-dos you have to do, your appointments you have to accomplish today. So I have three points I use, or at least I try my best to use and to work with. And those I want to explain in this episode. So first thing is plan your day ahead. what I usually do is plan my day on the evening before, the week before, mostly on Sunday, before planning my week, see what appointments to have, what to do I have to accomplish and plan those things for the next episode, so for the next day, for the next week, roughly for the next month or also for the next month. So multiple months, roughly, but the specific planning is always the day before or maybe the morning on the day before. Before all the to-dos, all the calls, all the appointments start, I try to plan the day before. As I said, at least the morning, mostly the day before. So usually when I try to quit my day, I see all the things lying on my desk and my emails and plan the to do so at least write it to my list and then see what I need to plan immediately or maybe can plan later on. And then I plan it for the next day or for the next days. And so I have a rough, a very concrete list or appointment or schedule what my day looks like on the day before. And that's a really improvement on solving things and tasks. And the next one is be flexible for the unseeable, unplannable things. So we work in IT that happens a lot of strange things. Maybe security patch break down the whole network, whatever. So plan for some unplannable.

Michael Seidl: So don't plan your to-dos minute after minute. Let some space between have some spare time for unplanned stuff. And if there's nothing unplanned, then you're lucky enough to everything's solved and there is still time on the day. So you can do something more or you can quit your day, quit your job and spend some free time, but keep in mind to have some slots. time for unplannable stuff. And also maybe one more thing on that thing is just be relaxed. If your plan doesn't work out, be relaxed. Plan the things you haven't done for the next day, for the next weeks. helps me is to plan the important stuff in the morning at the beginning. things I have to do that specific day. is mostly that thing I do first and all the other stuff coming next. And then it's not so bad when something unplanned is coming. So at least things I had to do that day are finished and all the rest I can plan for the next days or weeks. And the third thing is go through your list. On a regular base. see a list, what you have to do, see a list, what you have to do the next week, the next month, maybe the next year and clean up this list. And maybe one thing is if there is a point on that list, what is untouchable or untouched for maybe a year, then it might not be. Okay. To be on that list, to drop it, remove it. Okay. Cause it doesn't make sense to think about those. thing every year. So what was the idea? What is the usage of that point? If you don't do it for one year, it might not be that important to be done in any time. So remove it from that list. the prerequisite of all those things is to have one single source of all your things to do. So have a single source of everything you have to do. That's the only way to have an overview of everything.

Michael Seidl: That's the only way to have a good overview and a good prerequisite to plan accordingly, to understand and to see the full picture. That's the main thing. You need to have a single source of shit, a single source of all your to-dos, which are unplanned, to understand what's important, to define what is important and to plan it and to understand what to do. and to estimate how long it takes to do. that's on top of all of those three points I mentioned is the single source of everything prerequisite. Otherwise it doesn't work. So you cannot combine multiple lists and plan your day ahead. You cannot combine multiple lists and plan the next weeks and so and see what is important and what not. So the mandatory thing is have a single source of all of this. And then plan your day ahead and on the day before, maybe in the morning before everything starts, stay flexible for unplanned stuff and go through your list on a regular base and remove stuff that needs to be removed and only keep stuff that is really important. Okay, so that was a short one for this week. I wish you a nice week, stay productive and bye bye.