When I was on the Beyond the To-Do List podcast a while ago, the host offered up an analogy of the Today Card that I found helpful. It’s not a calendar, or an agenda, but more like a game plan. I think that works pretty well.
And as anyone who has ever played sports can attest, having a game plan is great—but it’s often not enough. Why? Once the “game” starts, things happen—things you probably didn’t anticipate. And while you can try to plan for those things beforehand—and it’s good to try (to a certain extent)—you need to have a process for handling those things that come up.
In the case of the “game” of being productive during your day, the process is simple: have a way of deciding whether to stick to your card or change your plan.
You may have been quite confident in the items you put on your card before the day began. You may have been confident in their order, and thus the possible points for each. But when something comes up during the day that you didn’t expect to have to deal with, you need to be able to evaluate what’s worth your time and attention: this new thing that came up, or the items on your card.
We’re often tempted to simply address what David Allen calls the “latest and loudest” things that come up during the day. Sometimes, those things are loud because they are truly important; they need your full attention ASAP—because they’re in line with your values and priorities. But many times, those “latest and loudest” things are not more important than the plan you’ve laid out for yourself for the day. They’re not in line with your priorities; they’re just right in front of you.
That’s the beauty of the card. It’s a way of combatting these things that pop-up by using the same mechanism they do: get right in front of you. When something pops up during the day, and you’re tempted to attend to it right away, pick up your card. Where does this item fall relative to the items you put on your card?
Be careful to think about this in terms of 2 important questions:
- How will this new item help to further your important goals and projects—if at all?
- What is the cost of putting this item below all the other items on your card, and attending to those first? Is that cost going to derail any of your important goals or projects?
Depending on the answers to these questions, you can get an idea of whether you really need to take care of this thing that came up today—or whether it can wait. A good compromise, then, is to put the item at the bottom of your card as an extra credit item. So when you take care of it, you still get some credit for it—but if you don’t, you don’t get penalized.
