"Plan Tomorrow": Basic Time Management Principles for Designers

Contents:

• Principles
• Urgent - Not Urgent
• Closed To-Do List
• Methods for Effectively Resolving Accumulated To-Do

Mark Forster believes that people's complaints about not having enough time are similar to fish complaining about not having enough water. Time is the environment in which we live. If we had more of it, we still wouldn't be able to cope with things any better than we do now.

In his book, "Do It Tomorrow," Mark doesn't insist on overcoming insurmountable obstacles every day. Instead, he offers recommendations that will help you effectively deal with accumulated tasks and structure your schedule so that each task is completed efficiently.

Published by a studio called "Field."

Mark Forster is a UK coach and writer who has written four books on time management. He has conducted time management training and provided consulting services for the UK Ministry of Defence. In his work "Do It Tomorrow," he criticizes established approaches to time management and suggests postponing tasks until the next day in order to complete each one.

In this article, you will find the following information:

• To determine whether a task truly does not require immediate completion, it is worth paying attention to several aspects. First of all, evaluate its importance and consequences. If the task can be postponed without negative consequences or if you have the opportunity to complete it later without damage, this may indicate that it is not urgent.

  It is also useful to analyze deadlines. If the task’s deadline is not approaching, and you have more priority matters, then you can probably postpone it until the next day. In addition, it is worth considering whether it is possible to delegate this task to another person, which will also free up time for more pressing tasks.

  If you feel that the task does not cause you stress and is not in line for immediate completion, this is another sign that it can be postponed. It's also important to consider your internal state: if you're not ready to tackle a task now, it might be better to postpone it until tomorrow and approach it with renewed energy.

• Why Consider Maintaining a Closed To-Do List?
• Organizing your workflow and dealing with accumulated tasks are important aspects of effective time management. To deal with work overload, it's worth following a few recommendations.

  First of all, start by analyzing your current tasks. Determine what requires immediate attention and what can be postponed. Make a priority list, highlighting the most important and urgent tasks. This will help you focus on the main thing and not get lost in the flow of tasks.

  Next, try breaking large projects into smaller, more manageable parts. This approach will make them less daunting and allow you to track progress. Each completed stage will serve as an additional incentive.

  In addition, it is important to set clear timeframes for completing tasks. Use a timer or the Pomodoro Technique to focus on work for a set period of time, taking breaks to recharge.

  Don't forget about delegation, either. If you can delegate some of your tasks to colleagues, feel free to do so. This will not only reduce your workload but also help speed up the process significantly.

  Finally, regularly review your work habits. If you notice that you're getting stuck, it might be time to change your approach to organizing your time or reconsider your planning methods. Systematically improving your approach will help you avoid situations where tasks pile up again.

Principles

Achieving your goals becomes much easier when you have a clear idea of ​​what exactly you want to achieve and what changes will occur once you do. This is called vision. If your vision isn't clearly articulated, the tasks associated with its implementation may cause significant resistance. Give your mind a specific problem, and it will begin to search for ways to solve it.

"The clearer your vision, the greater the chance of putting it into practice. This vision should serve as a tool for focus, not create an atmosphere of uncertainty around you. Achieving this clarity often requires narrowing the scope of the vision to an extremely narrow format."

Mark Forster

Often, design projects follow one after another, and focusing on any specific one can be quite difficult. In this regard, Mark suggests transferring this approach to everyday tasks. Organizing your routine tasks into a flow will help you more productively tackle large-scale projects.

There is a popular stereotype that losers remain losers because they do nothing. However, the reality is quite different: these people often take on excessive commitments, start many promising projects at once, and ultimately complete none of them.

Mark Forster

Working marathons, which involve completing tasks for more than eight hours straight, are becoming a common practice in the face of unforeseen circumstances. However, making this a habitual work format is impractical. If you need to prepare a monthly report, it is much more effective to work on it gradually and systematically than to put everything off until the last minute. The same applies to learning musical instruments and going to the gym:

"Improving physical fitness follows similar principles as developing mental abilities. The optimal approach to achieving desired results is to exercise regularly but in moderation. English: If you don’t do physical activity for a long time and then suddenly switch to intense training, there is a risk of injury.

Mark Forster

Although it may seem paradoxical, having additional constraints can actually speed up and simplify the process of completing a task. For example, setting a strict time frame for completing a task can make it easier to get started - the knowledge that everything has an end helps motivate you. In addition, developing a quality product becomes more manageable if you define the target audience in advance.

“If you were asked to develop an innovative concept for improving cars in general, you would most likely only be able to come up with a few vague ideas. However, if the question is about improving the steering wheel of your car specifically, you will probably be able to imagine many practical solutions. The more specific the task, the easier it will be to generate creative ideas.”

Mark Forster

This is a truly effective time management tool. You create it at the very beginning of the day, and then do not make any changes; All new tasks are automatically carried over to the next day. This approach helps avoid overload and allows you to filter the flood of incoming requests.

"One of the reasons work accumulates is our habit of taking on too many unimportant tasks. Delete spam without opening it. Unsubscribe from newsletters you don't read. Don't waste time on things you don't need."

Mark Forster

In the next section, we'll discuss closed lists in detail.

Every person combines both interests and commitments. Interests can be countless – these include various hobbies, hobbies, and personal activities. Commitments, on the other hand, are often professionally related and have specific boundaries. Forster notes that a life without interests can be dull, but recommends focusing more on commitments, as they tend to contribute to your development and progress.

Before taking on a new commitment, it's important to carefully evaluate how it will impact your existing commitments. After all, every minute of your day is already taken up with something important! By starting something new, you'll likely have to sacrifice something you currently spend your time on. If this means giving up a wasteful pastime, like mindlessly watching TV, that's perfectly acceptable. It's also good if you free up time by completing another project. However, this can be challenging if you already have trouble finding free time for your own affairs.

Mark Forster

Remember, the key is to set boundaries and avoid overloading yourself with unnecessary tasks throughout the day. If you feel like a new task might negatively impact your personal time, don't hesitate to decline.

Urgent - Not Urgent

Forster uses a metaphor to illustrate human behavior, dividing it into rational and reactive components. The rational brain can be thought of as a manager who continuously coordinates the actions of the entire organism and develops strategies depending on the current situation. While the reactive brain is comparable to a lizard that, without thinking, instantly reacts to the appearance of an appetizing bug and catches it with its tongue.

There are two key examples of behavior in which the rational mind must exercise control over the impulsive mind. These are resistance and procrastination. The main reason we avoid certain tasks is often because our impulsive brain perceives them as a threat. Although the rational mind can endlessly explain to the impulsive mind how important a particular task is, as long as the latter considers it dangerous, it will stubbornly keep its foot on the brake.

Mark Forster

Reactive thinking proves extremely useful in a crisis. However, such a spontaneous reaction can become a serious obstacle in everyday life. For example, when you receive a notification from a messenger, you may instinctively open it. If the message contains a request, you may mindlessly drop everything else and focus exclusively on it. In such moments, an illusion of urgency arises - you can engage in tasks that are quite possible to postpone until later or even ignore.

Mark classifies "urgent" tasks into two main types: emergency situations and tasks that must be completed that day. With force majeure, everything is clear - if something critical happens, for example, a fire, you immediately leave everything and leave the premises. However, tasks that need to be completed on the same day can easily be perceived as something extraordinary - recognizing this difference is crucial to prevent your day from becoming chaotic.

The most effective method for understanding which tasks truly require immediate attention and which can wait is to create a buffer for incoming requests. Instead of immediately reacting to every new request, write down what you plan to do on a piece of paper:

A thought might pop into your head like: "Would you like some coffee?" or "Interesting link." Instead of immediately going for coffee or clicking on the link, write down: "pour a cup of coffee" or "look at the link." Observe how this affects your behavior. If you then decide to go for coffee or visit the website, you will do it less under the pressure of spontaneous desire, but more consciously. However, most likely, you will realize that it is not worth getting distracted by such trivial things and will put them off until later.

Mark Forster

Forster recommends categorizing all incoming requests as "for tomorrow," which will help make your day more predictable. Tasks postponed until the next day are easier to organize and complete without infringing on your personal time.

"Don't rush to react to events immediately unless they require immediate attention or your activity requires such an approach. Refrain from making decisions on the same day if you can postpone them until tomorrow without facing serious consequences. It is important that these consequences are truly significant, since in most cases the benefits of an immediate response are not comparable to the benefits you get by postponing your actions to another day."

Mark Forster

Closed To-Do List

Most often, when people create to-do lists, they turn out to be "open-ended" - new tasks can be constantly added to them, and, therefore, they are never completed. If you've ever used such lists, you've probably noticed that by the end of the day, you haven't managed to complete all the items.

A closed list is the opposite of an open one. It's usually created in the morning before the workday begins, after which a line is drawn under the list, symbolizing its completion and the inability to add new tasks. Mark recommends this approach to organizing tasks, as otherwise, your work will resemble endless "digging" with no clear result until the evening.

Having an open task list is a significant obstacle to maintaining order in your work. When new tasks arrive continuously, completing current tasks becomes extremely difficult. In such situations, only the task that arouses the greatest interest is often selected, while the rest are postponed until later. Ultimately, this leads to the accumulation of unfinished tasks.

Mark Forster

It is not always possible to postpone all tasks to the next day when they are due today. Therefore, it is recommended to first write them down on an intermediate list, and only then add them to the main list below the line. This will allow you to make more informed decisions, rather than act impulsively.

An optimally compiled closed "for today" list should look like this:

• tasks that were planned for this date in advance;
• tasks recorded the day before;
• Tasks that need to be completed today are marked below the line.

One of the key aspects of working with a closed list is the commitment to complete all tasks entered into it. Although Mark admits the possibility of deviating from this rule, it is worth considering that this can lead to problems the next day: new tasks will have to be additionally written down along with those that remain uncompleted. If this situation becomes regular, the number of unfinished tasks will grow, and eventually you will find yourself with a serious task backlog.

Let's say you usually start on the most urgent tasks. What happens to those that don't require immediate action? You put them aside until they become so important that they begin to demand your attention. By focusing on important tasks, you put off less important tasks until something happens that makes them more urgent.

Mark Forster

So, make a list of tasks that you can complete during the day. Start with 3-4 items and gradually add more until you determine your optimal level of workload.

A closed list can be useful not only for planning daily tasks.

Record important dates in your diary so you don't miss the opportunity to prepare for them. It's very helpful when you can plan a gift shopping trip in advance, for example, two weeks before a colleague's birthday.

Working in an organization, you'll inevitably find that your success will depend largely on the actions of other employees. The reality is that many of them act reactively to circumstances, and your job is to take advantage of this. Try to remain visible to your colleagues so that they pay attention to your requests, not to messages from others. To achieve this, it's helpful to create a list of "checkpoints" where you record when, to whom, and on what issue you need to send a reminder.

You can stick to a pre-prepared task list for a long time, but at some point you may realize you're not getting closer to your goal or have deviated from the right path. To prevent such situations, it's important to regularly self-assess your projects. This will help you identify shortcomings early and figure out how to meet deadlines.

If you have an idea but don't know what to do with it, put it aside for a few weeks. When you see it in your planner again, the situation will have changed, and you'll be able to make a more sober and informed decision.

When you're faced with a backlog of unfinished tasks, it makes sense to break them down into smaller tasks each week. This will help you break down one large pile of problems into several smaller ones. This way, you can focus on important projects without losing sight of your commitments.

Note that Notion is a great tool for managing a closed list. Details on how to use this platform can be found in our separate guide.

Methods for Effectively Clearing a Backlog

Using a closed list system can be challenging, especially if you have a significant backlog of unfinished tasks. If you decide to implement Mark's system in this case, you will inevitably find yourself in a situation similar to that of a debtor.

People who find themselves in debt struggle to pay off their debts, but their financial expenses continue to mount, which only worsens the situation. All their efforts prove fruitless. In such circumstances, many begin actively searching for new ways to earn money and get-rich-quick methods, hoping to rid themselves of the debt burden overnight. However, they continue to spend, perceiving each individual amount as insignificant compared to the overall debt. As a result, they only exacerbate their problems, adding fuel to an already raging fire.

Mark Forster

When faced with multiple debts, Mark recommends taking active steps to pay them off as soon as possible. However, before you begin this process, it's important to stop accumulating new obligations: let your colleagues know of your intention and try to organize your work in a way that allows you to handle the tasks that arise. Otherwise, your debts may become endless, and you will never be able to pay them off.

Once you have created the necessary conditions for paying off your debt, collect all the documents in one folder. This will allow you to focus on one main task, which will become your urgent initiative. The principle of this approach is quite simple: you should do this work first thing every day.

It may seem elementary, but Mark's experience shows that many people forget this: to achieve results, you need to actively work. Even small steps towards completing a task matter, as they contribute to its progress.

"If you intend to set a specific goal with a time frame for yourself, make a promise to yourself to devote at least five minutes a day to this task. In most cases, about 90%, you will find that you spend more than five minutes on it, and sometimes significantly longer. However, even these five minutes will be an important step on your path to achieving success."

Mark Forster

In every workplace, you will inevitably face many distractions: at home, these may be your loved ones, in coworking spaces, acquaintances, and in the office, colleagues. The tasks that require our attention are often large-scale and invariably cause resistance. If you do not start working on them immediately at the beginning of the workday, you will be distracted by everything unrelated to these tasks.

"If you do not focus on an important initiative at the very beginning, before distractions arise, you will struggle to move forward. The solution to this problem is to start working on the initiative before distractions arise. Don't worry about other things in advance - they will inevitably find their way into your schedule."

Mark Forster

Everyone can find an excuse not to devote a full hour to one activity every day. Therefore, it is worth agreeing with yourself that you will set aside at least five minutes for this. However, it is not necessary to strictly adhere to the "every day" principle. If you designate in advance for yourself days when you can do without this, such breaks will not be perceived as a failure, but as a normal work practice.

"Remember that in your mind, failure is perceived as a step towards further failure, whereas success often leads to new achievements. Are you striving for significant victories? The key is to give yourself many small opportunities for success along the way to your main task."

Mark Forster

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