Day 126: The Magic of Week Plans

So it turns out that getting things done basically boils down to two things:

1. Write down important things to do
2. Do them

Yeah. This might sound like I’m basically discovering the power of a TODO list, but doing this at the scale of a week has crucial benefits:

• Ensures that you choose what you want to spend your time on ahead of time

  • This is incredibly helpful because it forces you to prioritize your work and decide what not to work on.

• Separates planning from executing

  • Every day, I referenced my plan for the week, picked one or two items, and worked on them during the day. I don’t have lulls where I have to ask myself, “What should I work on now?” because I had already decided that during the planning phase.

This past week, I basically accomplished all the things I set out to do, with the exception of setting up the Intention community because I didn’t want to send out invites late Friday afternoon or over the weekend.

Thanks to Michael, Victor, and Calvin for getting me to pick up my weekly snippets/planning practice again.

Week 19 Plan

Summary

Try to get coverage for Intention and continue improving the product.

Last week

• Done

  • Update Hide Likes to support Facebook’s new UI
  • Update Hide Feed to support launching with a friend’s productivity newsletter
  • Finish Intention feature that displays visits, unlocks, and time saved in Intention and release an update
  • Clean up existing Slack channel to prepare for new Show & Tell cohort
  • Decide on and invite new members for new Show & Tell cohort starting on May 11

• Unfinished

  • Set up Intention community

This week

• Intention

  • Set up Intention community and send invites
  • Send emails to 3 journalists about Intention
  • Finish and release cooldown feature
  • Build and release focus mode feature

• Show & Tell

  • Respond to everyone who had applied
  • Organize first session
  • Organize second session
  • Finalize and share code of conduct