Mastering Planning Vol 1: Hourly and Daily Planning

Learn the system for planning on an hourly and daily scale and the PAMeLa (Plan, Act, Measure, Learn) Planning System.

This course is the first in a series of courses on planning and scheduling.

You will learn the PAMeLa model for planning as well as a system for managing your time and your calendar on an hourly and daily basis.

The courses that follow this one focus on the larger scale units of time: Weekly/Monthly, Quarterly/Yearly, Multi-Year, Lifespan/Legacy planning.

This course is design to solve the paradox between spending most of your time in the a flow state and being able to schedule your time down to the hour and half hour– and be accurate with your time estimates.

For a long time I was a go with the flow type planner. Meaning I tried my best to have zero items on my schedule each day. I loved having the total freedom to work on whatever I wanted to work on and do whatever I wanted to do.

This works for many years. Then I started asking some tough questions.

I wanted to know how I was spending my time.

And how much of it I was wasting.

I figured I wasn't wasting much, but I knew there had to be some. I just had no idea whether it was 2 hours a week or 20.

I was spending so much time in the "flow" I had no idea where my time was actually going, and if it matched up with my long term priorities and plans.

So I decided to do a complete 180 and start planning out EVERYTHING.

Literally every 30 minute block of my day. Just as an experiment to see what would happen.

Plus, I learned that there were certain projects and areas of my life that I was chronically neglecting, and I wanted to use an hourly planner to make sure I gave those areas the time they need to really make some progress where I had been falling behind.

I did this for a week, not expecting much.

It turned out there was a wealth of information in the data I collected. I kept track both of what I had planned to do and what I actually did for an entire week on a single piece of 8.5x11 paper.

You'll see how to set this up in the course.

I did some simple metrics and learned some interesting facts, like on average I was only getting 4 hours of deep, productive work done each day.

I learned there were certain people in my life that were taking up a lot more of my time than I thought, and often with things that I wasn't really enjoying or where I wasn't the best person for them to be doing that activity with.

I also identified a handful of bad habits or consistent time wasters that were adding up to 10-20 hours each week.

I learned that I was a lot worse at estimating how long things would take that I originally thought. I had a couple projects that started as 1 hour time blocks and ended up taking up entire afternoons, 5-6 hours each.

After doing this for a few more weeks I started seeing big improvements.

I started cutting out the time wasters one by one and re-deploying that time where it was more needed.

I started getting a lot more done and streamlining my life.

And it was all because of this small experiment.