Planning Your Day

A document structure for regularly planning your day to support rapid learning and improvement, especially in estimation and implementation.

Structure

We suggest the follow main sections in the doc, in order:

• Backlog (optional)
• Learnings
• Daily Plans

We give more detail on each section below.

Backlog

This is Backlog of your specific tasks.

Learnings

For bigger longer-term learnings. Recommend grouping these by date e.g.:

2018-07-02

• What I learned X
• What I learned Y

Daily Plans

These are plans (and outcomes for each day). Fast and simple to do.

Intention: every day you have a list of planned tasks with estimates and you see how you do => you strengthen your planning muscle, you identify blockers/questions early

Each daily plan:

• Gets its own subsection with a heading with the date.
• Most recent day at the top.
• Two sections to the daily plan:
  • Plan for the day (usually done previous night or first thing in the day).
  • End of day note including a score.
    • Percentage of planned tasks that got done + summary score out of 10.
    • Quick retrospective on learnings from the day – what worked and what did not work so well.
      • Add major ones to the learnings section.

Scoring your day

Points out of 10

• 3 points for doing prep and analysis (3 out of 3 = perfect, no corrections, on time, etc.)
• 7 points for performance =
  • 4 points for percentage you got done
  • 3 points for how you felt (you were well and balanced, content, challenged (positively), and not too tired)

Plan for the day

In setting out your plan suggest two groups:

Big items (try and get specific so you easily evaluate whether this happened or not). Example:

* [ ] Work on email sending, specifically complete research on options and post in issue

Misc (small) items e.g.

* [ ] Call xxx
* [ ] Email yyy
* [ ] Do plan and review

Template

Full (annotated) markdown template for a Planning your Day doc

# Backlog

*Note: you don't need to duplicate stuff in a board -- if something is already in board then leave there -- this is just for extra things*

# Learnings

*For bigger longer-term learnings. Date these*

# Plans

## {yyyy-mm-dd}

* X% (Done)
* Y/10 (3 = plan, 4 = % done, 3 = experience)

*End of day comments go here* [copy major learnings from this to main learnings at top]

* Worked:
* Did not work:
* Learnings:

### Plan

Big items (try and get specific so you easily evaluate whether this happened or not)

* [ ]

Misc (small) items e.g.

* [ ]

Copy and paste-able daily section (without annotations):

## {yyyy-mm-dd}

X%
Y/10

* Worked:
* Did not work:
* Learnings:

### Plan

Big:

* [ ]

Misc (small):

* [ ]