Note: Big Picture Planning Makes Little Picture Planning Easier

site/notes/2025/01/Big Picture Planning Makes Little Picture Planning Easier.md

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+---
+title: Big Picture Planning Makes Little Picture Planning Easier
+subtitle: Year, month, week, day, hour—and probably not further.
+
+date: 2025-01-06T22:00:00-0700
+
+image:
+    cdn: daily-planning.jpg
+
+tags:
+    - working effectively
+
+---
+
+My overall planning approach these days is fairly simple: a paper-and-pen bullet-journal-ish approach, which has a kind of fractal quality to it (much as my [work logs][logs] do when I am doing that). I plan out my year, month, week, and day, each one with increasing granularity and specificity compared to the higher level, and each one in terms of the goals I have set for those higher levels. This takes some time—though not as much as you might think—but I have found it very helpful. One of my major takeaways from my personal review of 2024, in fact, was that the months and weeks and days I took care to do my planning and [review][review] were consistently the months and weeks and days of the year in which I worked most [effectively][effective] at my goals and aims.
+
+[logs]: https://v5.chriskrycho.com/journal/writing-down-what-i-do-in-obsidian/
+[review]: https://v5.chriskrycho.com/notes/structure-for-personal-reviews/
+[effective]: https://v5.chriskrycho.com/notes/working-effectively-instead-of-productivity/
+
+One benefit this “fractal” approach offers is making it so planning what to do on any given day is generally straightforward, because it is *obvious*: Pick things from the list for the week. The thinking about what to do on a given day is mostly down to thinking about *which* items from the list for the week should happen on a given day. That still requires prioritization, but if I have done the work correctly in picking my work for the week, even prioritization is usually pretty clear—though it can definitely also shift over the course of a week as life happens.
+
+The same dynamic is at play at each level of planning. Planning out a week takes some time, but is straightforward if I have done a good job of thinking about what I hope and can reasonably aim to accomplish in a given month; and likewise for planning months when I have given thought to the year as a whole.
+
+In practice, of course, there is always going to be a good deal of “flex”. Today, for example, I had nicely mapped out my day, only to find a few hours in that one of my four planned appointments had to be rescheduled and then, a few hours further along, that another had had a calendar mishap. I adjusted on the fly, as one has to. I still knew the big picture of what I wanted to get done both today and this week, so that made my adjustment rather straightforward.
+
+This exact approach may or may not work for you, but I commend the *gist* of it to you!