My 3-Tier Planning System for Getting Stuff Done - College Info Geek

Key Takeaways

hey what's up guys so in today's video I'm going to go over my entire planning system that I use to get things done now there's one thing I've learned over the past like six to seven years of experimenting with tons of different apps and productivity systems and reading the daily habits of famous people it's that productivity is a very individual thing we all have our own little idiosyncrasies and weird quirks and ways that we like to work so different systems are going to fit different people and your system might be a weird Frankenstein amalgamation of different systems that you've seen from other people which mine is all this goes to say that you don't need to look at my system and think that it needs to be your system but you might find specific components that work well within the things you're already doing with that caveat out of the way I will start this off by showing you that my system has three specific tiers tier one which is for idea capture and organization tier two for weekly planning and tier three for daily planning where all the actual action happens so tier one I call idea capture because I don't think calling it task capture does it justice now in a task management sense at least to me an idea is any piece of information that you want to process and take action on later and that could include a specific task but it could also include an event or a free form idea that doesn't exactly have concrete action items attached to it yet but that you still want to save since ideas can take a number of different forms I use several different apps to capture them based on their category or action type and then process them as efficiently as I can so specific tasks or action items go into todoist and I've used a number of different to-do managers over the years like Wonder list and productive and all sorts of other kinds of apps and I've kind of settled on todoist now because it's very minimalist list it has a clean design I can use labels to assign contexts uh energy levels or locations to my tasks and it also syncs between all my different devices events will go into Google Calendar which I've probably been using for six or seven years at this point and if I'm out and about away from my computer and just have my iPhone then I use an app called Sunrise calendar which syncs nicely to it anything that's not a task or an event will go into evernote where I have lots of different notebooks and I kind of consider Evernote my second brain it's where all my ideas get stored so I don't have to keep them jumbled up in my head and then I can process them later now tier one is all about idea capture so I'm using these apps on a daily basis whenever things come up to capture things quickly but then I don't really have to mess with them later on Sundays I have my planning sessions where I actually take these ideas from all these different tier one systems and figure out what I'm going to do with them in any given week and I do all that in my handy environotes sustainable cardboard not very attractive looking notebook now on the current week's page I put the week's dates at the top and then I make three different sections events tasks and maybe so events are things that I have scheduled on the calend maybe meetings with people or events I want to go to conferences things like that and I'll write them down there to keep them separate from the actual tasks the task section makes up the bulk of the weekly plan and it basically holds all the different tasks I want to get done in a given week and at the top I always have the video and the podcast because I'm a content creator but I'll also have lots of little things that just need to get done and finally the maybe section holds some tasks that I'm not exactly sure I'll have time to do but I'd like to get done if everything goes well and that brings us to tier three which is my daily plan so when I wake up at 6:00 a.m. every morning morning I come into my office and I look at both the notebook and my calendar and from that I create a daily plan on my whiteboard now the daily plan is all about action I want it to drive me through the day and take away all ambiguity over what I should be doing at any given time to help with that I try as hard as I possibly can to write the daily plan in the exact order that I want to do the tasks and I also estimate at what time I should get each one done using a fudge ratio to account for the planning fallacy and this helps me with lots of practice mind you be able to basically predict how many tasks I'll be able to get done in a given day using the time estimates also puts a bit of time pressure on me which makes me work a bit more efficiently and that's always helpful now as I go through my day and complete tasks I'll check them off on the Whiteboard and then once I'm finished with my work for the day I'll also check off everything I got done in the weekly plan so hopefully you enjoyed this video and got something out of it if you've got other planning tips I didn't mention here or want to talk about your own system then let me know about it down in the comments otherwise I will see you next week hey there thanks for watching this video about my planning process now i' just like to let you know that I also wrote a 100 plus page book on getting better grades and chapter 4 of that book is all about planning so if you want some additional tips then click the picture of the book and I will send you a free copy if you want to get more videos every single week on being an awesome college student then hit that big red subscribe button right there and you can also find any of the resources I talked about in this video at the companion blog post which you can find by clicking right there if you missed last week's video is a clip of playing so definitely check it out and if you want to connect with me I'm @ tomf frankley on Twitter or you can leave a comment comment on this video and let me know if you have other ideas for new videos thanks for watching