Transform Your Day with a Game Plan, Not a To-Do List
A game plan will identify your most impactful tasks and eliminate the time-wasters
Most of us start the day by reacting. Open our inbox. Turn on the news. Scroll social feeds.
We let other’s agendas rule our day because the decision-making network in our brain doesn’t prioritize.
Decisions in the moment favor the urgent or pleasurable over the important.
Prioritization is no secret but hardly anyone does it.
This is why I am a big proponent of creating a daily game plan. It involves identifying the most important thing to get done but also the things that will derail you.
This turns each day into a conscious act of progressing toward goals rather than a series of reactive moves.
Before I talk about how to write a game plan, let me debunk why a to-do list cannot be your plan.
The Purpose of a To-Do List
A good to-do list (digital or paper) is meant for one thing. Taking anything in your mind that needs action to an external device.
But to-do lists have a flawed feature. They don’t account for time.
This makes you bite more than you can chew.
There is a feel-good moment from marking something to be done today at the start of the day to the inescapable feeling of guilt by the end when you realize you barely made a dent.
A game plan prevents this from happening. It narrows your focus to a few important things.
How to Write a Game Plan
I like to think of my to-do list items as basketball players and I am the coach of the team.
Coaches take time to develop game plans for different matches and variables.
For most of us, these things are procrastination, task anxiety, energy levels, and distractions.
Good coaches also know who their star players are and how to maximize their potential.
Determining Your Best Players
Star players in basketball have a greater impact on the team winning than any other sport.
Your most important tasks do the same thing. Once you get them done or make substantial progress, you’ve won the day before it's over. In sports, this is a blowout.
How do we identify our best players? We put them through drills to see if they are star-worthy.
I ask myself these questions to distill the most important tasks/activities:
Is it related to one of my goals?
Does it induce anxiety?
Does it have a high impact, if I do it?
If I can’t say “yes” to one of these questions for the item, they sit on the bench.
Don’t let yourself off the hook. Every day has a million possibilities.
Strong filtering questions are the difference between working hard and working smart.
Being smart also means working on a few things well.
Giving Your Best Players The Rock
Good things happen when the ball goes through your best players. The blueprint of a basketball dynasty is two-star players that complement each other.
Jordan and Pippen. Shaq and Kobe.
The blueprint applies to your day.
2 of the most important things. One for work. One for life.
You can have a third and fourth but there is only one basketball. With only 3 to 4 quality hours of focused work each day, do you really want someone else taking those shots?
And those hours are not distributed equally. This is why our game plan must start aggressively with our stars taking all the shots.
Picking Your Starters
The best players start the game. So should our most important tasks.
We should always try to have our highest impact tasks go first, set the tone, rest, and put them back into the game, if necessary.
This is the formula for winning. It’s simple but often we don’t execute because something else takes away our attention.
It feels harmless in the moment but it's a silent killer.
When I start the day by checking e-mails or going on my phone, I end up trying to do the most important thing, last.
It’s like being down by 20 in the 4th quarter. Comebacks are possible but if you are always putting yourself in a bad position, you are going to lose.
Be aggressive. Be selfish. Take your shots, first.
For me, 7 am with fresh eyes and peak energy versus 5 pm after a draining day at work is the difference between victory and defeat.
Good game plans also understand the role of other players on your team.
Your Bench — Postpone Everything Else
There is an endless list of desires trying to distract us the moment we wake.
If we are going to identify the most important things to get done, it makes sense to also pick out what will derail us and keep it on the bench.
It’s our Not-To-Do List. Writing down what you won’t do (or postpone) prevents us from miscalculating the notion we can do everything.
These are the prima donnas on our basketball team. We need to put them in their place until the game is won by the starters.
This is the act of delaying gratification.
During a blowout in a basketball game, coaches clear the bench and let everyone get some shots in. It's a sign the game is over.
Make it a rule to always clear the bench after you win the game to reward yourself for doing hard work.
There will be days though, when things don’t go according to plan
Watch Out for the Refs
Basketball games are filled with unfair calls. You will hear the moans from the home crowd when this happens.
But playing through bad calls is part of basketball and part of life.
Boxer Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone Has a Plan Until They Get Punched in the Mouth.”
When the day punches us, we have to punch back.
Good coaches make halftime adjustments. In the same way, a daily game plan should be tweaked if things aren’t going your way.
This could mean dialing things down from the 2 most important things to the most important. Or shifting the balance of the day to only work items.
Other times it is okay to give yourself a break and take the loss. There is always another game.
We overestimate what can be done in a day and underestimate what can be done in a week.
This is another compelling reason to write a game plan. It provides you with awareness. It’s evidence you are taking your goals seriously.
Thanks for reading!
Irfan
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