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When I think about being productive,
I think about a concept that's usually talked about
in the realm of video games, actions per minute,
or APM, as a lot of people like to say.
In real-time strategy games and MOBAs
and in other games, like Don't Starve, every second counts
and learning how to move and act as quickly as possible
can mean the difference between victory and defeat,
between, well, starving and not starving.
In other words, move fast or get left behind.
But the sheer volume of actions you can perform
is only half the battle.
If there's no plan behind the actions,
no greater vision ensuring each movement is the right one,
then, well, you're just wasting energy,
or possibly even worse.
So today we're gonna dig into
how you can effectively plan and prioritize your work,
both on the small scale,
so you know how to best plan each work day,
and on a larger scale,
turning an eye towards the weeks and months head.
Now, both of these are important to master
in a general sense,
but even more so when you're working from home
and are much more responsible
for how you manage your own time and energy.
When all that management is on you, it's crucial
that you're able to set the right priorities.
Like, for example, should I have prioritized
building an entirely new set for this video?
Well, probably not.
But, hey, this is a learning space.
You see this tastefully selected amp?
See this vintage camera from the antique store
that doesn't actually work
but really ties the set together?
Yeah, this is a learning space,
not a judgment space, Derick.
So let's start learning and let's kick that off
with how to properly plan your day.
At the most basic level, I plan my day
by creating what I call a daily list.
Now, I do this on the whiteboard in my office
but you can do it basically anywhere.
You can use a paper daily list
or even rely on the due dates in your task manager.
But whatever method you use,
there are a few things you should keep in mind
when you're doing your planning.
First, realize that the due dates in your task manager
may not paint a perfect picture
of what you should actually do today
or, indeed, what you can do today.
Now, I say this because I know that I am guilty
of continually allowing my intentions
to eclipse my abilities and if I don't stop myself,
I will often write down way more tasks
than I can realistically get done in any one given day.
So try your best to keep this list limited
to what you can actually do and when you fail,
you will inevitably fail sometimes,
make an observation of it
so you can plan more accurately for the next day.
And realize that it might actually take some time
to get better at this, as our brains really aren't built
for making accurate time estimates.
In fact, researchers have found
that people typically will give nearly the exact same answer
when they are asked to give estimates
for the best case case scenario
versus an average case scenario.
Now, of course, by definition,
the average case will always take more time
than the best case.
Like if we're talking about driving to work,
which is probably something
that you don't actually have to do right now,
but let's just use it as an example here,
the best case would mean hitting every single green light,
it would mean never encountering any traffic at all,
and an average case wouldn't look like that at all,
but naturally we tend to conflate the two.
Now, one thing that can help you plan more accurately
is breaking down your tasks into small chunks
and then scheduling those chunks.
This strategy is called time-boxing, or time-blocking,
and to use it, you slot your tasks
into small time blocks on your calendar.
Now, this doesn't work well for everyone,
some people feel like it kinda boxes them in too much,
makes them feel too much like cogs in a machine,
but a lot of people do find
that it helps them avoid procrastinating during the day.
That's a big problem, especially when you work at home.
I like to think about it this way.
When you're planning your day, you are in planning mode
and once you start working, you move over into robot mode.
At that point, your job is simply to execute the plans
that were made earlier,
so the more accurate those plans are,
the more likely you are to stick to them.
Now, if you don't want to go
the uber-granular way of time-boxing,
I would suggest at least listing your day's tasks out
in the order you're going to do them.
And for most people, I think you would be best served
by planning to do your most difficult,
or dreaded, task first,
especially when you're working at home.
When you're at work,
you can often procrasti-work a little bit
by answering your emails
or doing other little, small tasks first,
but eventually you're gonna run out of tiny things to do
and you're gonna have to tackle
that really big, dreaded task.
But at home, well, how do I put this?
There's always something to clean.
There's always something to organize.
And, honestly, I am not too proud to admit
that I have literally convinced myself
that I needed to hang a picture
before starting a video script.
And that is because, quite honestly,
my robot mode is more like trained monkey mode.
I am easily distracted by shiny things,
so a strong, ordered plan always helps me to stay on task.
With that said, let's get a birds-eye view
and take a look at long-term planning.
So, like I mentioned at the beginning of this video,
a high number of actions per minute
only matters if those actions are guided
by a strong game plan.
And since most of your overall goals are long-term ones,
you need to know how to look beyond your daily schedule
and effectively plan for the weeks and months ahead.
So here are just a few techniques
for keeping track of things on a larger scale
and even dealing with things
that don't have strict due dates.
First, I want to show you a great method
for breaking down large projects into manageable pieces
and then tracking their progress.
It's called the Kanban Method
and it's employed by teams everywhere around the world
to get all sorts of huge projects done.
At its core, Kanban uses cards and lists.
Cards keep details about individual tasks,
while the lists indicate the stages of the project.
So as you work on tasks and move them to different stages,
their respective cards get moved through the lists as well
so you always have accurate birds-eye view
of how things are going.
Here's just one example of Kanban in action.
This is our video project tracker,
which we, of course, keep in Notion.
Now, normally it's in list view,
but I can also switch it into a Kanban view
and this lets me see which videos are being researched,
which videos are in the writing stage,
and which videos are being edited.
And as each video progresses,
it moves through each of these stages
so, again, I can see where it is
and what needs to be done next.
Next, for a more complicated example,
let's take a look at the Trello board that we used
for the website redesign we did a couple of years ago.
Now, this was a huge project
that had hundreds of tasks and tons of considerations,
design, typography, code optimizations, SEO, you name it,
so there was a lot more going on in its respective board.
But the general idea was still the same.
Cards moved through their lists as they got worked on
and we could always see the general state of the project.
So that's just one technique that you can use
to plan more effectively for your long-term projects.
And, of course, there are a lot more
that we could talk about, but to keep this video short,
I want to move onto the question of prioritization.
How do you decide what to work on
when you're looking at things on a larger timescale?
Well, as it turns out,
my friend Martin has a system for that,
so let me just ring him up real quick.
Oh, hey, Martin! - Oh hey.
- So a couple of months ago, I made this video
about something that I dubbed the Martin System
and people liked it.
And as it turns out, you have yet another Martin System
to share with us.
- I do like making systems.
Let's see, basically my kitchen system
of organizing my Todoist.
- And how is this different
than the normal kinda category-based system
that I have been using forever?
- Yeah, so I had my Todoist set up like categories before,
'cause you know I do a bunch of stuff,
podcast work, writing work,
all sorts of extra different things,
server stuff and programming.
And what I found was that every single day,
I had to look through six or seven lists
to figure out what I wanted to do that day,
which was cumbersome.
Eventually, the lists became full
and I stopped wanting to look through them.
So I've switched it now.
I've got four lists everything goes in,
regardless of category,
and they're all based off of the kitchen metaphor
putting something on the back burner.
So obviously one of the lists is the Back Burner.
That's where everything goes when I'm not focusing on it.
It's not important right now, it might be at some point,
but I shouldn't be doing it today.
And to compliment that, I created three lists,
one of which is Vitamins.
Everyday you take your vitamins.
So this is stuff like check my email.
This is stuff like check the publishing schedules,
make sure we're on track.
Stuff like that you do every day, it's a small task.
You just do it real quick.
- Now are these gummy vitamins?
- Well, obviously they're gummy vitamins!
I hate other vitamins.
I hate-- - Just checking.
- And I hate the chalky ones, so it's gummies
all the way down.
Anyway the next list is the Front Burner.
It's the stuff that I'm currently looking at,
the most important stuff.
So if I'm prepping a podcast
that we need to record next week,
that's on the Front Burner.
If I'm fixing a big bug, that's on the Front Burner
because I want to wake up, say okay, what do I got to do?
Oh, those two projects are important today.
I should get to them.
And the last list is the Oven list,
so I'm going off the assumption
that I'm running some sort of oven timer.
Basically, these are scheduled items
that happen every once in a while,
like backing up image files or running through a process
or checking email statistics.
Something that might happen every month
or every other month or every year.
- Checking our Amazon has three backups,
make sure they're fine, all that kind of stuff.
- Yeah, stuff like that.
I don't need to think about that on a daily basis,
but, much like an oven timer,
when it goes off, I should probably see what's going on.
I shouldn't forget about it.
- So Todoist obviously has the today list,
it has the next seven days, and then you can make filters
to have next two weeks so theoretically,
you could just use the classic categorization approach
with due dates.
What made you feel that that wasn't good enough
that you needed to build
this kind of Kitchen System instead?
- That would be because of my,
and I presume many people's, completely inability
to understand how long something might take
or how much time one has in a day.
So I'd set all of these things due optimistically.
They don't all have a due date
of I'm gonna do it all on Tuesday,
these 10 tasks, I'll get 'em out of the way,
and the week's gonna look great.
But that's not how it works.
What happens is I'd accomplish maybe three of them,
if I'm really lucky,
'cause something else important was going on,
and then I now have seven things
that are overdue in Todoist.
Now, I can take the time to reschedule them
but what tends to happen with me
is that I just keep rescheduling the same things
over and over because they're just not important,
I've got a huge list of things that are overdue
or due today, and I know now by now
that I'm not going to do them all.
- Yeah, that makes sense.
All right, so quick recap time.
On a daily scale,
make sure you're creating a daily plan for yourself
each and every day that you work.
Try to keep this limited to the tasks
that you can actually get done
and be observant about anything you don't get done,
so you can become more accurate over time.
Again, aim to bring your intention
and your ability into alignment.
Additionally, aim to tackle your most difficult task first
and use time-boxing if you need.
On a longer-term scale,
experiment with techniques like the Kanban Method
to map out your projects
and make sure you're always maintaining an accurate view
of how each piece of them is going.
And finally, find a way to prioritize what you're working on
and if the way you've been doing it
in the past isn't working,
then look for a method that does work
or invent one of your own.
Martin's Kitchen System is a great example of this
and it's also a great example
of how taking a novel, creative approach
to solving a problem can yield great results.
And if you want to improve your ability
to creatively solve problems,
then you might want to take some of your free time,
which you should have more of now,
if you're now planning effectively, and check out Brilliant.
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So to get started for free,
head on over to brilliant.org/thomasfrank and sign up.
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Thanks as always for watching this video.
Hopefull you found it useful,
hopefully you got something helpful out of it,
and if you did, definitely hit that like button
to feed the YouTube algorithm with more tasty, tasty data.
Also if you did enjoy this,
especially if you enjoyed the conversation I had
with Martin in this video,
then you might want to check out our podcast as well.
I'll have that link in the description down below.
And you may be interested to know
that our most recent episode was about working from home,
so check that out if you want some additional tips.
Beyond that, you can subscribe right there,
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click right here to get one more video on this channel,
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Beyond that, go do whatever you want,
I'm not your dad, but I will see you in the next video.