Buckets > Choices > Reactivity
Level 0: Pure reactivity.
Moving from Crisis to Crisis. Constant stress.
Level 1: Freeform planning.
Pausing daily to plan. Moments of respite, but Planning and Process and the Task List become heavy and daunting.
Level 2: Buckets at appropriate scale.
Depending on the size of your workday, this is probably somewhere between weekly and monthly.
- Buckets give space for Going Deep.
- Buckets reduce indecision, cut down Process overhead, and allow me to ignore large portions of the Task List.
- Buckets allow me to defer most forms of reactivity.
I just completed an exercise in rebuilding my schedule, and moving from Daily to Monthly granularity feels good.
At the daily granularity, I tried to fit in everything that was important to me, and I found I had scheduled myself a 28 hour day. No wonder I've only been getting 4 hours of sleep a night recently! And even with all that lost sleep, it felt like nothing was getting done. None of my projects had enough time each day to really get into flow.
Stepping back to monthly granularity suddenly resolves most of my stress points. I'm no longer trying shoehorning things into each day wasteful ways. I feel free to schedule a single project a day rather than worrying about needing to make progress on two things at once. At the monthly granularity I also feel like things will happen at meaningful paces across the board.
- 3 hours of focus each day.
- 3 focus days a week on "Alternating Missions".
- One focus day for Tasks/Chores/Maintenance.
- One focus day for Coaching.
- One focus days for Calls or planning.
- Planning happens once every two weeks.