Evolution of Planning Systems

I am highly inspired by those who plan their daily lives in writing, and execute their plans successfully. I am equally inspired by those who everything mentally and yet execute everything perfectly. Since mental planning is hard to observe, I have only had a chance to observe various methods of black and white planning adopted by people from different age groups and professions. The planning technique can be studied from multiple perspectives such as

• Planning Medium (paper vs. digital) – it is said that visual learners prefer paper planners and linear learners prefer digital planners.  
• Term of Planning (daily/weekly/monthly)
• Abstraction Level – how much information is associated with the plan – notes, task duration, venue, time, resources needed, etc.

Another perspective that interested me is how planning on the whole has evolved over the past few years. In this post, I present further analysis of the various generations of planning originally introduced by Steven Covey in his popular book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” These generations are discussed in the chapter that describes the 3^rd habit called “First Things First” related to personal management. Without further ado, I present the 4 generations of planning systems.

The To-Do Generation (First)

This is the simplest and the most minimalistic form of planning wherein all you need is a flat list of tasks to do. An advantage of such a system is that it’s quick to develop and has no learning curve. This is very common and effective in planning for specific events such as shopping, travel, packing, etc. However, it is not very effective in terms of daily planning, which is the subject of this post.

The Calendar Generation (Second)

The main issue with the previous generation of standalone lists is that it is independent of the time dimension. According to Julie Morgenstern, a dangling task (i.e. unassociated with time) never gets done! The second generation addresses this concern. Herein, the list is not just prepared but also scheduled in advance with respect to a standard calendar. The tasks of the to-do list are mapped to certain days on the calendar, possibly in a time table format. Along with capturing the things to do, one can also record important appointments, deadlines, and due dates. This is the most common form of planning I have seen among people.

The Priority Generation (Third)

As people are getting busier and overwhelmed with responsibilities from all over, professional organizers suggest prioritization of tasks based on certain subjective preferences. The third generation is about making a to-do list and prioritizing the tasks so that the higher ranked tasks are scheduled earlier or at a more productive time of the day. For example, I would schedule working on my prime project early in the morning as I am a morning person, and then do the low priority tasks such as voluntary project in the evening. This kind of planning stipulates scheduling your priorities rather than prioritizing your schedule, and is simply powerful. I have seen very few people(top management/influential/successful people) who follow such a prioritized planning system.

The Inside-out Generation (FOURTH)

The problem with the earlier generation is that most of the people prioritize by urgency and not just by importance, e.g., exercise is important, but working against a deadline is urgent. So, people end up taking time out only for the urgent matters and procrastinate the important tasks till they become urgent and bubble up in the priority list. At the core, the problem is that people fail to understand/discover what is really important in their lives. This is because the earlier planning generations work in an artificial and shallow manner. They start with external tasks and try to bring these tasks into the person’s lifestyle. This outside-in approach only scratches the surface of a person’s life and does not get deeply ingrained in the life.

In response, we have the inside-out 4^th generation planning system. This is the transformational  generation – just like how there is a transformational/transitional person in a family – the one who changes the course of the family – by taking up a non-conventional profession, or by just being rebellious for a meaningful reason.

As the name suggests, the approach works from inside out. The gist is to determine what is important for oneself and then link the important things to daily tasks. This could be performed into two steps.

1. Preparation Step: Write the mission statement for your life – this is a one page statement that describes the overall goal of one’s life. Herein, first write down the different roles you play in life (e.g., Mr X may have the following roles to play in life - physician, social worker, husband, father, instructor, and human being). Then for each role, write down the higher level life goals (e.g., as a social worker, I want to offer free medical services to certain sections of the society). Your mission statement should be easily accessible and possibly integrated with the planner (add it to the first/last page of the planner so that it’s visible enough).
2. Planning Step: Every week, you look at the mission statement, and determine the tasks that need to be accomplished in the given week for each role of your life. What is important here is that the tasks should be aligned with the goals mentioned in the mission statement. Finally, the tasks are mapped to specific days of the week.

So, this is an inside out approach that starts out with the life mission and translates various life goals into tangible daily tasks. Preparing such a planning system involves a lot of thought, hard work, and patience; but is totally worth it. For an in depth understanding, I recommend the Habit 3 chapter of the 7 habits books which I am paraphrasing in this post.  For experimentation and curiosity purposes, I transitioned to a (handmade) 4^th generation paper planner about two months ago, and the results are amazing as of now.