Pro Tip - Track Your Misses
Posted by Cheri Kuhn on
Hello Doers & Achievers!
The Perfect Planner includes a page of pro tips to help you get the most from your Planner. These are practices and disciplines that we use and come from a variety of sources: friends, colleagues and productivity mentors. This post highlights one of those, “Track Your Misses”.
This is a valuable tool to help keep yourself accountable each week by highlighting what you committed to do-but didn’t get done. It is incredibly simple and can help us in several ways. Here is how it works.
First, once the week is done, look back over your projects and anything you had made a point to schedule (especially your Deep Work projects or Vital Work). Circle anything that did NOT get done. If you have one or two circles, you are probably doing OK. If you have six or seven circles when the week is over, you might have a problem - one of several possibilities.
The first is lack of focus on what is important. If you did well in determining your priorities for the week, then you need to take a hard look at where your time went. What distractions got in the way and hijacked your week? Was there a legitimate emergency that cropped up? Conversely, was an emergency created as a result of poor planning? Life happens, and sometimes we have to shift gears, but if we are being honest with ourselves, it is more likely that we allowed distractions to pull us off task.
Second, are you trying to do too many things? Remember, when everything is important, nothing is important. Be realistic about what you can do in a day. Take into account all things on your plate for the week, professionally and personally. If you are in a conference for two days, you will need to pull back on your workload!
Finally, are you focusing on the right things each week? This ties into what we talked about above - doing too many things. When you take a little time to review your bigger goals and determine what are the most important things you need to accomplish this week, your chances of success will improve. More importantly, you will be getting more of the right stuff done every week. Categorize your tasks and projects and make sure they each are contributing to your big goals.
Over time, you will get better at prioritizing and planning your weeks when you track your ‘misses’ and work to understand the why behind it.
The Perfect Planner includes a page of pro tips to help you get the most from your Planner. These are practices and disciplines that we use and come from a variety of sources: friends, colleagues and productivity mentors. This post highlights one of those, “Track Your Misses”.
This is a valuable tool to help keep yourself accountable each week by highlighting what you committed to do-but didn’t get done. It is incredibly simple and can help us in several ways. Here is how it works.
First, once the week is done, look back over your projects and anything you had made a point to schedule (especially your Deep Work projects or Vital Work). Circle anything that did NOT get done. If you have one or two circles, you are probably doing OK. If you have six or seven circles when the week is over, you might have a problem - one of several possibilities.
The first is lack of focus on what is important. If you did well in determining your priorities for the week, then you need to take a hard look at where your time went. What distractions got in the way and hijacked your week? Was there a legitimate emergency that cropped up? Conversely, was an emergency created as a result of poor planning? Life happens, and sometimes we have to shift gears, but if we are being honest with ourselves, it is more likely that we allowed distractions to pull us off task.
Second, are you trying to do too many things? Remember, when everything is important, nothing is important. Be realistic about what you can do in a day. Take into account all things on your plate for the week, professionally and personally. If you are in a conference for two days, you will need to pull back on your workload!
Finally, are you focusing on the right things each week? This ties into what we talked about above - doing too many things. When you take a little time to review your bigger goals and determine what are the most important things you need to accomplish this week, your chances of success will improve. More importantly, you will be getting more of the right stuff done every week. Categorize your tasks and projects and make sure they each are contributing to your big goals.
Over time, you will get better at prioritizing and planning your weeks when you track your ‘misses’ and work to understand the why behind it.
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