Contents
Weekly Planning
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Review your week.
Open DateBk3 and set it to display completed ToDo items. Then go back through the week, looking at each day, the appointments, the tasks you checked off. Read each of the Daily Journals. Then compare what you see to what you wanted to accomplish for the week. How close did you come? Did you meet or exceed expectations? If not, why not? When you're done, turn off showing completed ToDo items.
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Reacquaint yourself with your mission.
Open Arranger and review your Mission Statement. Your mission statement should be the very core of what matters most to you, and sums up what you want out of life as well as what you want to be remembered for.
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Review your Values.
Do they still reflect the real you? Under each value should be a Clarifying Statement, anywhere from a sentence to multiple paragraphs laying out what that value means to you specifically. Read over each one of these and make sure they're consistent with what you know in your heart. Also make sure you have your values sorted in order of importance to you, so you know which one to follow if two of them come in conflict.
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Review your Roles and create or edit Compass items.
In First Things First, the authors recommend that you have a compass to keep you on track for the week. This will include things that don't have to be done on any particular day, but things linked to roles you want to emphasize that week. For example, you might have a compass item derived from your Employee role to remind you to lend a hand and help train the less experienced people in your department.
In your Roles outline, you have the various roles in your life and an additional role called "Sharpen the Saw". According to the Covey literature, this role is to focus on things you need to do to renew yourself. Under that role, you have four datebook appointments linked in, "StS-Physical:", "StS-Social:", "StS-Mental:", and "StS-Spiritual:". In DateBk3, you'll change these to Floating Events and add an activity to each after the ":". Other roles are handled the same way, by creating datebook events for them with the aspect you want to focus on that week. Because they're Floating Events, they follow you from day to day until you check them off, and they have a check circle instead of a check box to differentiate them from ToDo items. The Floating Events' changing dates doesn't seem to affect Arranger in any way; it can still track them just fine. In addition to the Sharpen The Saw items, you only need to pick one or two other roles each week, to avoid spreading yourself too thin. You also don't always have to have each Sharpen The Saw item each week, so the ones you're not using you'll reschedule to the next time you do your weekly planning.
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Review Goals and create new tasks.
In your Goals outline, you have top level items for "categories" of goals, creative, professional, financial, etc. Under those you have long range goals, like "$3.5M by 65". Under each of these, you have linked-in ToDo items and appointments that contribute towards the fulfillment of that goal. For example, under the above "$3.5M by 65", you might have a ToDo item dated six months from now called "Open E*Trade account" and so on and so forth.
When creating new tasks to support your goals, create them with a priority of 5 and make sure they're manageable as single tasks. A good rule of thumb is to judge whether or not a task can be done in a single afternoon. If not, break it down further before creating ToDo items.
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Purge done items.
Open ToDo+ and purge your completed ToDo Items. Since you've already reviewed them in DateBk3, you don't need them cluttering up your ToDo List. Make sure you set them to archive on the next HotSync.
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Prioritize and schedule your tasks.
Urgent
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Important | I | II |
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|_______|_______|
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| III | IV |
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|_______|_______|
In First Things First, Covey and Merrill talk about a four quadrant approach to prioritizing your activities. If you draw a two by two grid and label the first column Urgent and the first row Important, you see that Quadrant I activities are important and urgent, Quadrant II activities are important but not time-critical, Quadrant III is urgent but not really important, and Quadrant IV is neither important or urgent. They also recommend that you have a Master Tasklist, a list of things to do that don't fit anywhere on the four quadrants because you don't need to worry about doing them for a while yet. This just so happens to work perfectly with the Palm ToDo List's five priorities. Assign priority 1 to things in Quadrant I, 2 for II and so on. Priority five items are your Master Tasklist, things that won't show up on your radar for a while.
Everyone tackles Quadrant I activities first, but most people tend to focus next on Quadrant III, dealing with the urgent at the expense of what's really important. Try to keep your attention on the Quadrant II activities first, doing the things that will make a noticeable difference in your quality of life, rather than just putting out fires.
Review ToDo+, category by category, re-evaluating the things you didn't get done, reprioritizing them as necessary. Decide which priority five items need to be done this week and assign due dates and priorities to what you pick. Lastly, set up any alarms or repeat settings you need for this week's tasks.
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Fine-tune your schedule.
Look at your tasks and appointments in DateBk3's text week view. Make adjustments as necessary to avoid conflicts. For example, you don't want to schedule housecleaning on a day when you won't be home that much. Also keep an eye out for days that you might be overloaded. Spread the due dates out more or less evenly across the course of the week. Once you're satisfied with what you see, you're done.
Daily Planning
First thing in the morning, briefly open ToDo+ and allow it to recreate recurring tasks (this can be done automatically overnight via the shareware program LookAtMe). Review your Mission Statement. Try to keep it in mind throughout the day. Open DateBk3 and adjust past due items as needed. Also make sure DateBk3 is only set to display ToDo items of priority 1 through 4, so the priority 5 Master Tasklist items don't show up on your agenda. Read each item on your agenda. Visualize yourself doing the tasks today. How will you address your Compass items? Do you have everything you need for your scheduled appointments?
Acting in the Moment of Choice
As you go about your day, remember to act according to the priorities you've specified. If you have to make a choice between two items, bear in mind their relative importance to you instead of merely attending to the more urgent one first. Record the actual events of the day in the DateBk3's Daily Journal. Some people do this periodically throughout the day, and some do one long summation before bed. However you do it, make sure you hit the major points. What happened to you today that you'll want to remember later? How close did you come to meeting your daily goals? What could you have done better? There is an old saying: "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." Keep in mind that no matter how you plan your week, you have to remain flexible. Things you planned to do on Tuesday might suddenly work better on Thursday, and something you hadn't planned on doing until Friday might fit perfectly into today's schedule. The nice thing about doing all this on a handheld computer like the Palm is that you don't have to cross something out somewhere and write it in somewhere else. You can just open the Details of the appointment or task and change the due date. Be careful, though, and try to keep things balanced. You don't want to end up with your entire week's schedule staring you in the face on Friday.
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