Simple Rules to Help Better Fill Out Your Card
The centerpiece of the Today System is the simple daily 3 x 5 index card. It is simple, but powerful. It serves simultaneously as the game plan, reminders, and scoreboard for your personal productivity.
By ’productivity’ here, I really mean intentionality. How well did you make today into what you intended it to be? You have goals, and you recognize that the hours of each day are a tool to get you closer to those goals. So how effective were you at using those hours today?
The score you earn each day tells the tale. The closer you get to 100%, the more intentional your were—the more effectively you used the hours of the day.
Her are some tips to help you better prepare for the day—as you fill out your Today Card.
The top 2 – 3 items should serve important goals
The top items on your card each day should be things that contribute to your big goals. This way, if you don’t work on them, it’s basically impossible to get a good score.
If you don’t have formal written goals (which I highly suggest), you can use a simple exercise. Ask yourself what 2 things you could do today that would make you proud about how you used your day?
Do that each day for a week, then look back at the week’s cards. If you did do most of the top items for the week, what do they have in common? The answer is likely to be one of your goals. That gives you a start.
Follow the 1.25 rule to avoid overcommitting
Time management is one of the most difficult aspects of personal productivity. And while we often think we can get a whole lot of things done in them, we tend to overestimate how many things we can really tackle. What’s interesting, is that this tendency is often worse in experienced and high-performing people.
A helpful rule of thumb is to check your schedule each day. Calculate how many hours you have free. This means taking out any time dedicated to meetings, time eating meals, and other activities. However many hours you have left, multiply that by 1.25. That’s about how many tasks you should put on your card.
Is this a precise rule? No. Is it backed by science? Not quite. But it reflects our tendency to underestimate how long tasks will take us to do. It also allows buffer time for the inevitable “stuff” that pops up during the day.
Favor Push items over Pull items
There are 2 kinds of tasks you can put on a to-do list: push items or pull items.
Push items are ones that you likely wouldn’t do if you didn’t put them down on paper to motivate yourself to get them done. They may be things that are difficult for you to do, or things that you’re a bit scared to tackle. Or they may be items that you might forget during the normal course of the day. In any case, putting them down in writing helps. These are exactly the type of items that should go on the card each day.
Pull items are ones that you do without having to put much thought, intention, or effort. It’s not that they’re easy, but just that they’re habitual, or they’re on your calendar and that works to get you to do them. If you already expertise regularly as a habit, that’s not a good item to put on your card. But if you used to exercise regular, and have since struggled to get back into it—that’s a good item to put on your card. And the more important it is to you that you reinstate that habit, the higher up on the card it should go.
Use the right format for tasks ( Verb | Noun | Details )
Words matter. The words we read have the power to harness the energy of our emotions to either get to work, or give up due to a lack of confidence or clarity. So be clear and encouraging with the way you write your tasks.
Try as much as you can to structure your tasks with a clear verb | noun | details sentences.
What is the verb you want yourself to do? Are you reading something? Are you brainstorming? Do you need to call or email someone? Be clear what the action is.
What is the person, place, or thing involved? Are you writing a report? Are you delivering something to someone? Do you have to go somewhere?
And finally, what are the important details involved? Often, this takes the form of some more nouns, perhaps an adjective, and maybe more specific verbs. Either way, be clear to yourself about what you’re looking to get done. It helps as the day drags on, and you forget what your intention was when you planned out your day.
Following this format also makes it easier to score yourself. You can tell whether or not you competed the task or not.
Make a first draft prior to the card
The card is your guide for how your day should look. And you will be looking to it to motivate you and keep you focused throughout the day. So make sure you spend the appropriate amount of time planning and really get things in order.
This requires some sort of draft prior to laying out your tasks on the card. There are different ways you can do this, and everybody’s preferences are different. At times, I’ve used the back of the card. Other times, I’ve used a sheet of paper. Most of the time, I use the app that holds my S3, projects, and goals. I simply look at what I have queued up, and move them up or down as I think through what’s important, and what I have capacity to do.
But do I really need to plan this much?
Former US president Dwight D Eisenhower said it best: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”
Using these tips to help plan your day out on your card does not guarantee either that the day will go well or that the day will go as planned. But that’s not really the point of planning.
The point of planning is approximately 20% to increase the probability that things go as you planned. The other 80% of planning is fore mentally preparing you for all of the ways that your plan can get blown to smithereens. And that mental preparation is everything. It can mean the difference between making the most of unexpected circumstances, or collapsing into a heap of exhaustion and despair.
So, do you need to deploy all of these strategies when sitting down to plan out your day on an index card each day? Only you can answer that. These things won’t take you an hour, or even a half hour. I imagine 10 to 15 minutes would suffice. And spending 10 to 15 minutes on mental preparation to face the trials of the day seems like a small investment to make—one with a relatively significant return.