Daily Planning

Purpose

Guided daily planning is designed to help you create a calm, focused, and achievable plan for your upcoming workday.

Walkthrough

How to use

Introduction

Guided daily planning automatically shows once a day at the time you've specified for your daily planning. You can change this time and/or disable automatic daily planning from your account settings.

If you pick a morning time for your daily planning, you will reflect on yesterday's progress and plan out today's work.

If you select an evening time (after 3:00PM) for daily planning, you will reflect on today's progress and plan out tomorrow's work.

Manually initiating daily planning

• Use the keyboard shortcut p or open the command palette and type "plan".
• Click "Plan" at the top of a day's column. You can plan any day future day as well but not days that have past.

The daily planning ritual has five major steps. On each step, you can read the instructions and best practices in the left hand panel. Click through to the subsequent pages in this help center if you'd like to explore one of the steps in detail.

1. Reflect on the past day: Review your progress from the last workday.
2. Add tasks to your day: Add new tasks from your integrations, calendars, emails, objectives, etc.
3. Push back non-essential tasks: Move tasks that can't get done or aren't important to another day.
4. Finalize your plan: Pick the order you'll work through your tasks and/or add them to the calendar.
5. Share your plan: Reflect on any obstacles you may anticipate facing, and optionally share your plan with your team via Slack.

Best practices

• Your mission during daily planning is to go from all the things you could do or want to do to a list of things you can actually and reasonably do that day.
• Planning in evening versus morning is personal preference and requires experimentation to see what fits your work style.
• You should be planning out just the next work day in detail, not the entire week in detail.
• Always import your meetings and add time estimates to tasks (even if they're imperfect). This helps you visualize your workload, assess if it's reasonable, and make decisions about what to defer.
• It's okay to re-plan your day if things change. It's more important to move forward with intention when priorities change than it is to try and stick to an outdated plan.
• If you don't have a lot of meetings, don't feel pressure to timebox all your tasks. Instead, just add time estimates and sort your task list from top to bottom in the order you'll work through them. We call this the "playlist method", and it's a fine technique for those who aren't bound by set schedules or meetings.