The Plight of the Pre-Med

Of all Study Hack readers, pre-meds are among the most skeptical. They tell me that although they like my philosophy of doing a small number of things well, this is impossible for them. Their course load is too demanding. Filling most waking hours with work is unavoidable.

Then there’s Nathan.

Nathan is pre-med at the University of Texas at Austin, where he’s currently tackling the weed out courses that give this major its bad reputation. Here’s what makes Nathan interesting to me: he finishes his work by 5:30 pm every weekday.

In fact, he doesn’t just finish it, he dominates it.

“On the last chemistry test, the average score was a 57,” he told me recently. “I made a 98…My professors are fascinated by me.”

Naturally, I asked him to share a typical day’s schedule:

• 6:00 to 6:30: Breakfast/Shower
• 6:30 to 9:30: Study
• 9:30 to 10:20: Class
• 10:30 to 11:30: Study
• 11:30 to 12:30: Lunch
• 12:30 to 1:30: Class
• 1:30 to 2:30: Class
• 2:30 to 5:30: Study
• 5:30 to 11:00: Chill by meeting girls, explore the rolling hills and lakes of Austin, listen to live music, etc.

Here are two things I noticed about Nathan:

First, he’s not necessarily working less than his peers. His schedule includes 40 hours of studying per week, which is about right for his course load. He simply consolidates this work better.

“But he wakes up at 6,” you might complain, “I could never do that.”

Nathan’s out chasing girls before most students have even started their work for the day. Fair trade, if you ask me.

The second thing I noticed is that he’s obsessive about focus. He doesn’t just “study,” he works on the 7th floor of the engineering library: one of the most isolated spots on campus (see the above image). He works in 50 minutes chunks, and does 10 minutes of calisthenics, right there on the library floor, between every chunk. In three hours of this focused studying, he probably accomplishes more work than most pre-meds do in ten.

I don’t claim that Nathan represents a specific system that all pre-med students should follow. To me, he’s just a nice example of a more fundamental observation: the happiest students are those who take control of their academic experience, molding it to fit their own ideal of a life well-lived.

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This post initiates a new experiment I want to try here on Study Hacks. In addition to my regular, in-depth articles, which I post about once every two weeks, I want to also post the occasional short essay, such as this one, when a particular idea or example catches my attention. These short posts don’t take long to put together and won’t affect our regularly schedule programming.

(As the alert reader may have noticed, the titling scheme of these essays is a hat tip to Montaigne, the original blogger.)

I recently received an e-mail from a college freshman. He described himself as “kind of a techie person,” which he then unambiguously confirmed by noting that his productivity system made use of Evernote, his iPhone, a calendar application, and an online to-do list service.

“I like adopting new gadgets and technology,” he told me. “But I feel it’s becoming more of a hindrance than help.”

Fed up with the maintenance of his crowded stable of productivity tools, this student recently tried an experiment in simplicity: he used only a paper notebook to informally organize his day.

“These were the most productive days of my life,” he said.

Does this mean that the student was converted to productivity Luddite? Not quite. Though he had enjoyed immense productivity, he still felt a creeping dread about his new approach.

“I’m afraid that if I only depend on paper and pencil I’ll lose something important or it’d be too hard to navigate after a few days.”

This student’s problem is a common one: how do you balance high-tech rigid solutions with low-tech informal solutions when organizing your student life?

Freestyle Productivity

Having spent the last decade systematically experimenting with student organizational strategies, I’ve found that the following balance produces the most consistent results:

• High-tech and highly-structured solutions are best for capture.
• Low-tech and loosely-structured solutions are best for planning.

I use the term “capture” in the GTD sense of the word: a common place where all of the “stuff” in your life can be reliably stored so that your mind doesn’t have to worry about it. This includes tasks, appointments, and projects.

As the student from above noticed, it can be hard to use simple paper-based solutions for capture. The number of tasks in your life, for example, can be voluminous and soon overwhelm notebooks — transforming them into a mash of crossed out, unclear jottings.

I prefer simple online solutions that can be accessed from any computer. I use google calendar and google tasks because I can use them from my gmail account, which is the one website I know I will return to many times a day.

Though these tools are great for capturing stuff, they also turn out to be terrible for planning what to do with this stuff. Most people who’ve tried a systematic approach to planning know what I mean. (Who among us hasn’t assigned priority-based dates to our task list, only to find that we spend more time resetting deadlines than actually doing the work?)

As the student from above also discovered, a looser approach to planning works better. He used a blank notebook to organize his days. I happen to be a firm believer in the use of a plan.txt file, which is similar. As I explained in this earlier post, each Monday I record in a simple text file a plan for my upcoming week. There are no rules for this plan. Sometimes it includes pages of discussion about changing the rhythm of my work flow, other times it’s short and practical (e.g., “Monday is all about submitting this paper, Tuesday is about experimenting with the data collection tools…”).

The important point is that I trust my mind’s ability to build the type of plan that best suits the current situation. It will always outperform a rigid system.

This freestyle approach provides an answer to the quandary faced by the student from above. The reason he feels conflicted is because neither of his productivity approaches are best in isolation. He should continue to use his iPhone and fancy calendar applications to capture and wrangle the stuff in his life. At the same time, he should allow himself the flexibility to make weekly plans that are not constrained by strict rules.

A blank sheet of notebook paper, as he learned, can outperform even the fanciest scheduling system, so long as the work to be scheduled is held somewhere safe.

The Freesytle Lifestyle

I first promoted this approach to productivity in this post from last November. (I recommend that you read the original post for more detail and examples.) The idea is important enough, however, that I thought it was worth reiterating here.

Before concluding, I want to address the most common complaint about this philosophy: notably, the worry that freestyle productivity clashes with my canonical advice on autopilot schedules, time blocking, Sunday rituals, and similarly structured approaches to planning.

Here’s the important observation: freestyle productivity doesn’t eliminate structure in your planning, it just eliminates its status as unchangable. It’s perfectly fine for your plan.txt to say, for example, “I am going to keep using my autopilot schedule this week because it seems to be really helping.” At the same time, it’s also expected that your plan.txt might say, “I need to make the following changes to my autopilot because the timing is not working out,” or even “I’m dropping this approach altogether to instead try…”

In other words, the collection of productivity tactics I’ve presented on this blog can be seen as an arsenal of weapons at the disposal of your flexible and always evolving work plan.

Next week, I’m giving the Theory Colloquium lecture here at MIT’s computer science laboratory. This means I’m facing one of the most common and most dreaded tasks of academic life: writing a talk.

Constructing good talks slides is grueling. The task is not so large that it can become a harmless background task in your life, and it’s not so small that it can be dispatched in a single inspired dash. In other words, like all medium-sized hard projects, it’s a catalyst for procrastination.

Here’s how I’m handling it…

A Morning Brainstorm

This morning, I brought a notebook, a cup of coffee, and my dog, Bailey, out into the courtyard of my apartment building. I spent a half hour under the shade of a tall maple tree working out the big ideas of the talk while simultaneously frustrating Bailey’s life ambition to fully devour a tennis ball.

Then I put the work aside and did something else.

Later this afternoon, when I arrived at my office on campus, I spent another hour building the slides for the first 10 – 15 minutes of the talk.

And that was it for today.

Tomorrow I’ll make a hard push to finish a full draft of the slides, leaving almost a full week for my standard cycle of practice talks and polishing.

The Ice Bath Method

I want you to notice the general structure to my approach:

1. Start with a half hour brainstorming session. Go somewhere interesting, armed only with pen, paper, and caffeine. (Dog optional.)
2. Later that same day, use the results of your brainstorming to set the foundation for one hour of hard focus.
3. Wait until at least the next day to do your first multi-hour push on the project.

I call this the ice bath method in reference to the training methods of cold water swimmers, who prepare themselves for the bracing cold by a series of short exposures to ice water. I claim that it’s a smart strategy for any medium-sized project; i.e., a project too large to knock out in an hour or two, but too small to handle with a regular session in your autopilot schedule.

The first step of the method is designed to overcome your resistance to starting. Staring at a blank computer screen that needs to soon contain a hundred slides is daunting. Brainstorming under a tree is romantic, and therefore much easier to actually do.

Once you’ve taken some action, it’s easier to dive into the second step which requires some hard work, but is limited to only an hour. This limit will help you follow through.

The third step is where the real hard work happens. Because you’ve already made non-trivial progress during step two, however, this work is much easier to start — you’re not staring at a blank screen, you’re instead continuing with a specific set of known next actions.

The ice bath method is simple, but it’s also how I manage to get started on (and finish) terrible projects surprisingly early.

As the back to school season transitions from looming to present, it’s time I turned our attention back to the technical details of becoming an outstanding student. In this post, I want to tackle a topic that’s relevant on the very first day of your new semester: staying organized.

Here’s the thing about student organization: what seems like a smart, comprehensive system to today you, will be later seen as a terrible prison that blackens your heart and steals your freedom by the future you mired in the middle of the semester. As you might have guessed, this future you will abandon your smart system and fall back into unorganized chaos.

I want to help you avoid this fate.

Below I describe a dead simple student organization system. It’s a collection of the three basic rules that I’ve used for the past nine years to keep on top of the information in my student life.

Unsinkable Student Organization

This organization system consists of the following three rules…

Rule #1: One Class = One Notebook + One Folder.

Fans of the red book have heard this mantra before: The simplest way to organize your class materials is to have exactly one notebook and one folder for each subject. Every piece of paper handed out in class goes into the corresponding folder. All notes, study plans, administrative information, or any other original thought relevant to the course goes in the corresponding notebook.

(Note: If the professor allows you to take notes on your laptop, you should still buy a physical notebook to capture study plans, etc. Also, a physical notebook allows you to use the notebook method, which is perhaps my favorite study techniques of all time.)

Rule #2: Settle for Bare Naked Filing

For everything that doesn’t belong in a course folder — from your cell phone contract to the research for a major project — use the bare naked filing system that I introduced in this previous post. The core idea of this system to keep a big box of manila folders next to your desk. Every piece of paper you receive has to go into some folder. If an appropriate folder doesn’t already exist for the paper in question, label a new folder and stick it in. There’s no need to file these folders with some fancy scheme. Instead, do what I do: keep them in a pile. You’re a student, not a dentist’s office — you don’t need complicated filing cabinets to find what you need.

Rule #3: Use a Calendar Backup Notebook.

As I’ve pleaded many times before, you must keep a calendar that you check at the same time every day. (I like Google’s calendar, but anything works.) This simple addition to your student life will save you significant stress.

In addition to this calendar, however, my unsinkable organization system asks that you keep a small spiral-bound notebook with you at all times. When you encounter a date, appointment, or deadline, record it in this notebook. When you next review your calendar, add the dates from your notebook. (If you use a time management system like GTDCS, this can be the same notebook you use for task capture.) This ensures that you’re never scratching your head to remember what you’re responsible for and when.

In a talk given at the University of Virginia, soon after his famous Last Lecture, the late computer scientist Randy Pausch tackled an apropos subject: time management. Early in the talk, he revealed an interesting tidbit:

“When I meet with my new grad students,” he said, “I ask them how much their time is worth.”

His goal was to get them thinking about their time as a valuable commodity. It costs a university around $80,000 a year to support a doctoral student (sadly, only a small fraction of that is passed on in the student stipend). If you follow the standard grad student schedule, showing up in the afternoon and working into the night, then your time is being valued at around 30 to 40 dollars an hour.

As a wise advisor, Pausch wanted his students to realize that to justify this cost, they needed to think carefully about what they did with their day. Academic work should be dispatched efficiently. Research efforts should be focused on making real progress on important projects. Distractions, from long e-mail exchanges to installing the latest and greatest software (a curse among computer science types), should be left for non-work hours.

A similar cost equation exists for undergraduates. It costs a good university around twice the tuition cost to keep a student on campus, so, for an undergrad, a combination of parents, the school, the government, and perhaps the bank, are valuing his or her working hours around this same amount.

With this in mind, think about how you spent your time this past week. How many of your work hours were worth what they cost? How would your schedule and habits change if you eliminated low-value work from your life altogether?

I’m having an interesting time trying to answer these questions for myself. What I do know is that they’re intriguing ideas raised by someone who knew a little something about the scarcity of time and how to get the most from it. 

Earlier this year, I made an important improvement to my infamous 9 to 5 student work day. Instead of treating these hours as one undifferentiated mass, I added the following simple structure:

1. Writing
2. MIT #1
3. Midday
4. MIT #2
5. Shoulder

The accompanying rules were simple. The first thing I do when I arrive at my office is write. I wrote my first two books predominantly between the hours of 9 and 10:30 am, and I’ve finished 2/3 of my new book during this same interval.

Next, during the MIT #1 block, I tackle graduate student work. This description is purposefully vague because this work varies. These days, this block is often dedicated to thesis writing. But it also frequently includes reviews, thinking about new problems, and working on other research papers.

The midday block is chaotic. This is when I first check my e-mail. It’s also when I surf the web and browse my RSS feeds. I eat lunch during this time and often also go for a run. Finally, it’s when I take care of the annoying small tasks that tend to pile up.

Once the blessedly distracting midday block is complete I continue with MIT #2, which is the same as MIT #1.

Finally, if it’s not too late, I end the day with my shoulder block which is when I write blog posts. On a good week, I have time for this block 3 days out of 5.

Focusing on Focus

Why did I add this extra structure to my day? I was worried that I was increasingly losing my ability to focus on hard thinking for extended periods of time. Too much of my day would be interrupted by small tasks and inexplicably frantic inbox checking.

I know, of course, that’s it’s fashionable to describe our current fixation on taking in huge amounts of simultaneous information as some sort of evolution of the human mind. Maybe this is true. But for the two fields I’ve devoted my young life to — academic research and writing — the ability to focus is everything. It’s also, I’ve discovered, incredibly rewarding.

So I built a schedule that confines all of my unfocused mental wandering to one, well-defined, midday block. I admit, that junkie-like urge to check e-mail still persists. And I probably violate my structure 2 days out of 5. But it used to be more like 4 days out of 5, and that desperation for immediate novelty is starting to diminish as I reacquaint my mind with the minor aches of mental exertion.

Conclusion

I’m not recommending that you adopt my exact structure. It evolved, over time, to fit the particular demands of my particular situation. But you might want to consider the broader point and reflect on the role focus plays in your life. Ask yourself what efforts you’re making to keep this ability from whithering into vestigial disuse.

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(Photo by aldrin_muya)

As longtime Study Hacks readers know, I’m a big promoter of the autopilot schedule. In case you’re new, let me briefly review: The autopilot schedule is a set of fixed times and locations for finishing your regular work each week. For example, you might decide to always tackle your history reading assignments Monday morning, from 9 am to 11 am, in the study carrels found on the 6th floor stacks of the main library.

The shadow course, described below, is a simple optimization to the autopilot schedule that can generate huge benefits.

An Imaginary Course

The shadow course method asks that you adjust your autopilot schedule to include an additional course. This course doesn’t really exist, but you pretend like it does. (The name comes from the fact that it shadows your real courses.) Set aside a reasonable amount of time in your autopilot schedule for handling the work for your shadow course; I recommend allocating roughly one hour per course per week.

Here’s the key point: use the time set aside for your shadow course to begin ridiculously early preparation for tests and papers in your real courses. The key words are “ridiculously early.” Starting from week one of your semester, you have to use your shadow course blocks toward this end.

For example, you might use this time to…

• …reformat your notes into study guides that are ready for review.
• …write mini-textbook chapters that cover the material.
• …fill in holes in your knowledge by going to back to the textbook and preparing targeted questions for your TA.
• …review the big ideas from recent lectures by giving talks on the subjects to imaginary classes.
• …practice the proofs and problems from technical courses to master the insights.
• …work through hard concepts using the notebook method.
• …begin collecting and building a database of sources for a large research paper.

To help cement the habit, and to make it an enjoyable part of your student schedule, I recommend that you choose the most exotic possible location for your weekly shadow course time blocks. For example: in the woods (if you’re at Dartmouth, I personally recommend the cross country trail for doing quiz-and-recall lectures); a quiet cafe; or anywhere else equally contemplative and separated from your daily student life.

The Power of the Shadow

The effect of the shadow course can be immense. Imagine, for example, that you divide your shadow course time evenly among your real courses, giving you an extra hour of preparation per course per week. In a 15 week term, this means that when you arrive at the end of the semester, you’ll have an extra 15 hours of preperation under your belt for each final and major paper you face.

Imagine how much better you would have performed on your last test or paper if you had been able to set aside 15 extra hours to prepare.

To make things even better, because this time is spread out across an autopilot schedule, these hours all maintain a high intensity of focus — a feat which would be impossible if this time was condensed into a small number of long study session.

The result: your performance enters A* territory while reducing the amount of time you have to study or write at the last minute.

But I Don’t Have That Time!

Some students will complain that they simply don’t have enough time in their schedule to add an entirely new class. I’m sympathetic. But let me make the following strong suggestion: if you don’t have time for a shadow course, consider quitting something to make time. The benefit gained from your shadow course hours will swamp the benefits gained from whatever boring club you ditched to make room. And studying spread out over the entire semester causes much less pain than studying crammed into reading period.

The Power of Non-Conformity

To steal a phrase my friend — and one of my absolute favorite bloggers — Chris Guillebeau, there is real power in non-conformity. This holds especially true for students. There’s something about thumbing your nose at the conventions followed by your peers and, instead, doing something completely, ridiculously different, that can help pry you out of a rut and make outstanding things happen.

(Photo by Absolut1)

Welcome to Week 1

This is the first post in a new four-part series I’m calling 4 Weeks to a 4.0. Each Monday, for the next month, I’ll be posting a new weekly assignment. I can’t guarantee that you’ll immediately earn a 4.0 if you finish all four assignments, but your grades will definitely improve and your stress will definitely plummet. If you want to overhaul your study habits, but feel overwhelmed by all the changes this requires, then this series is for you. Your first assignment, presented below, covers some scheduling basics.

Week 1 Assignment: Autopilots and Rituals

The goal of this first week’s assignment is to help you reclaim your schedule. I don’t want to overwhelm you, so we’ll start small with two easy ideas: starting an autopilot schedule and initiating a Sunday ritual. Your assignment for this week is to adopt these strategies, which I detail below.

(1) Create an Autopilot Schedule

Identify all of the regular work generated by your classes — reading assignments, problem sets, lab reports, etc. For each such piece of regular work, set aside a specific day and time when you’ll tackle this work every week. For example, you might decide that the two hours after lunch on Mondays is when you do the reading assignments for your history class.

I want you to follow this schedule for completing all of your regular work. At first, you’ll violate this schedule…a lot. Sometimes work will take longer than you thought. Sometimes you’ll procrastinate and miss a scheduled block. That’s okay. After each such violation just return to your schedule, tweaking as needed.

For more information on autopilot schedules read this article.

(2) Adopt a Sunday Ritual

This simple idea was first described in the yellow book — where it generated enormous amounts of positive feedback. It works as follows: Every Sunday morning, right after you eat breakfast, go somewhere quiet to clear your head. Have a cup of coffee and read a newspaper or a non-fiction book that interests you. Then go for a long walk (in the woods if possible) and think big thoughts. The goal here is to renew the flame of intellectual curiosity.

Once this rejuvenation is complete, retire to a quiet corner of the library and review your week ahead. Remind yourself what’s due and what little things you need to get done. Perhaps take an hour to knock off some of the urgent small tasks that might get lost in the chaos of the week (e.g., booking plane tickets home for an upcoming holiday or requesting recommendations for an internship application.) The key is to refresh and prepare for the new week.

For more information on the Sunday ritual read this article or chapter 2 of the yellow book.

Coming Up…

That’s all for week 1. If you have questions or want to report on your progress, please leave a comment on this post so the other students can learn from your experience. Next week we’re tackling notetaking habits.

Stay tuned…

The Cost of Focus

Here’s a problem I’ve faced recently: my obsessive focus on a small number of important project causes me to fall behind on the annoying little administrative stuff that pops up on a daily basis. I’m not talking about the regularly occurring minutia, like cleaning my apartment or working out: these can be easily handled with an autopilot schedule. I am referring, instead, to the random, unexpected productivity lint that regularly clogs my inbox and emanates a powerful aura of procrastination-inducing annoyance.

Over the past year or so, I’ve tried several failed strategies to rectify this situation, including:

1. Dedicating one day a week to administrative tasks. This failed for two reasons. One, I didn’t have enough stuff to fill a full day. Second, the thought of handling such a large quantity of annoying small tasks scared me, so I tended to morph the day into a pseudo-vacation during which little got done.
2. Choosing a reasonable number of important administrative tasks each morning that I have to accomplish that day. I was still procrastinating. I would work until I was tired then declare it impossible, in my current mental state, to tackle such terrible, worthless tasks. So I wouldn’t.
3. Scheduling mosquito dashes of fixed duration at fixed times each day. I found that it was very hard to shift from my focus mindset to an annoying task mindset then back to a focus mindset.

The Stable Mucking Method

Finally, I stumbled across a techniques that, for some reason, seems to work for me. I call it the stable mucking method in honor of the annoying, terrible, daily task the afflicts stable hands: mucking the manure out of the horse stables. If you skip a day, the manure will pile up, causing an unhealthy situation for the horses. So, as any stable hand will tell you, every day must end with at least some mucking.

(They also have a much more popular, similar-sounding axiom, which will have to remain unsaid…)

I adopted this same mindset for tackling my annoying administrative tasks.

That is: At the end of each day I require myself to do something administrative. Even if it’s really small.

Because the work could conceivably involve only the easiest, smallest possible task on my list, it isn’t scary. This, in turn, defuses the urge to procrastinate. Indeed, some days I do hone right in on the minimum amount of work — think: sending a single e-mail — and then clock out.

But, on an increasing number of days, once I get started down an administrative track I get inspired to knock off a decent amount of tasks. In the end, enough gets accomplished each week that I manage to stay afloat.

Not For Everyone

If you have a job then stable mucking probably won’t work. People who work for a living are required to accomplish a large amount of administrative tasks every single day.

I know. I hear it sucks.

But for students, like us, mucking tends to be enough. Our administrative load is light and non-urgent enough that a little here and a little there keeps us stress-free.

(If you’re new to whole idea of personal organization, I still recommend starting with something simple, like the method outlined in Straight-A, to get used to the idea of actually capturing, scheduling, and doing things. If you’re a fan of GTDCS, you’ll notice that the idea of mucking some tasks off your lists each day fits perfectly into the framework.)

The Return of Freestyle Productivity

Last week I introduced freestyle productivity.

The motivation:

• Our brains are terrible at remembering everything we have to do, which is why good capture and organizations systems are necessary.
• Our brains are wonderful, by contrast, at coming up with short-term plans that balance the subtle demands we face in the near future. Trying to force a one-size fits all action plan to our lives constrains this natural ability.

The implication:

We should deploy good systems to capture and organize tasks, but rely on creative strategies, crafted on the fly, to plan how we actually tackle the work in the short term.

In other words: your brain knows what you need to do, give it a chance to make a plan and it will make a damn good one.

The stable mucking method fits beautifully in this framework. Instead of relying on some constrictive set of rules for accomplishing the small tasks in your life, it’s just a simple a reminder that each day you should face your task list and do something. Your brain will figure out what’s important at the moment.

Trust me. It works…

Productivity can be divided into two main concerns. The first is capturing and organizing all of the “stuff” you have to do.

This is the fun part.

This is where you buy fancy notebooks and configure Remember the Milk to auto-sync with your iPhone. It keeps productivity blogs in business and makes David Allen rich.

The second concern is actually doing the stuff that you need to do.

This is much less fun.

This post is about this second concern. I don’t claim to have a universal answer. But there is a simple technique that I’ve been using since last January, and that has significantly increased my churn rate. This technique centers on a small, innocuous text file sitting on my computer desktop — a file named plan.txt…

plan.txt

Once a week, usually on Mondays, I open a small text file named plan.txt and jot down my action plan for the week.

There are no hard rules for this plan. Some weeks it’s a few sentences. Usually, it’s a few paragraphs. Sometimes it spans multiple pages.

I tend to break down what I want to get done into the major area of my life (grad student, writer, etc.), but not always. I sometimes assign work to different days. Sometimes I don’t. On some occasions I’ll roll out a complicated scheme and on others I’ll just say “work on project X until it’s done!”

Here’s a screenshot of my plan.txt file as of this morning:

You’ll notice I don’t follow a rigid format. This week I’ve broken down my goals between my research and my writing. I have some loose date assignments (e.g., finish draft of a particular thesis chapter by Tuesday afternoon). I’m also linking these short-term goals to my long-term projects. I don’t always do this, but I felt like I needed to encourage myself this week that I was still on track with my big picture goals.

Here’s the important point: last week’s plan.txt looked much different. Next week’s will probably look much different as well.

Freestyle Productivity

My plan.txt strategy is an instantiation of a larger philosophy I call Freestyle Productivity. This philosophy is inspired by the following law:

The Law of Action Planning: No rigid rules or systems for figuring out “what to do when” can work effectively for more than a few weeks before becoming obsolete.

We can come up with task capture systems that work fine for years and years without a major change. But when it comes to planning out what we do each day, my experience is that there’s no magic system that applies to every situation. The realities of our daily lives change too much to be handled by any set rule.

And that’s okay!

Here’s my theory:

• Our brains are terrible at remembering everything we have to do, which is why good capture and organizations systems are necessary.
• Our brains are wonderful, by contrast, at coming up with short-term plans that balance the subtle demands we face in the near future. Trying to force a one-size fits all action plan to our lives constrains this natural ability.

My plan.txt file takes advantage of this reality. It allows my brain, each week, to do what it does best: figure out a very workable short-term plan for making progress on what’s important. This is freestyle productivity in action. My tasks are captured. My goals clear and steadfast. But my short-term work habits are incredibly pliable as I mold and re-mold them to the new challenges I face.