Long term planning never worked for me. I can plan my next week relatively accurately but to be honest, it’s not going to be even 80% accurate by Friday.
This can be de-motivational. You start to think, “those plans that I had wanted to get through this week seem to get further and further away”. I’ve discovered this is because I’m not breaking my goals down enough. I’ve started to take what I would call a project, breaking it down into tasks. Then taking those tasks and breaking them down further. Continuing until I’m pretty much left with small goals such as “Write up a document for ” or “Check why this snippet of code isn’t working”.
The majority of these tasks are only about 30 minutes to an hour worth of work.
Don’t assign or pack your day with these tasks to the days over your working week. Instead, only assign the extremely urgent or necessary tasks to each day. Spread them out as much as possible. An average day should have no more than 3 hours or 3 of these tasks assigned to it in my opinion.
When you start your day, get cracking on those three tasks. Once completed, in some instances you’ll find yourself with hours to spare. In others, you’ll have noticed those tasks have taken you the entire day due to unforeseen circumstances. Where you do have free time left over, start getting through the tasks that are not assigned to a day.
You’ll notice that your getting more done. The fact that your ticking of tasks a lot faster and more frequently seems to motivate me a lot more than the thought of never getting to tick of that long term goal.
This has been the most productive method of getting through workloads and projects for me and there’s plenty of task or To Do list managers out there to help you with this.