Using a list to manage executive function

The Day Plan system

Let me tell you about one of my most load-bearing practices. I’ve refined it a lot, and it works extremely well for me. I expect it to work pretty well for you too, though you may need to modify bits of it to account for the ways in which you are not me.

The Day Plan system

A Day Plan looks a lot like a TODO list. It more or less is a TODO list. But it’s a TODO list that has been optimised for managing anxiety and executive dysfunction, at the cost of not being as good a TODO list.

Day Plan is actually a bad name for it in its current state, but I’ve been calling it that for so long that the name has become part of it and I don’t want to change it. It’s not really a plan though, it’s more like something to relieve your brain of the burden of keeping track of stuff and making decisions.

A Day Plan is a list of things that you could do today. At the end of the day you will throw it away,¹ never to be looked at again. At this point it should ideally still have some items on it that have not been completed.

You’re not allowed to refer to yesterday’s day plan to roll over tasks. If you want to do that, use a separate TODO list or other task management system. You can put a task in your Day Plan at the end of the day to update that system if you want, but the Day Plan is a disposable one-day-only item. This is the most important thing about a Day Plan. Do not violate this rule.

Here’s how it works:

As early as possible in the day, start your day plan. This consists of taking a sheet of paper, write today’s date at the top, and below that write the item “Start day plan” underneath it. Then immediately cross through “Start day plan” to mark it complete.

Don’t skip this step. I know it seems goofy but it’s important.²

This is the general pattern of the day plan: You write a thing you could do today on it, you cross through it. Very standard paper TODO list style. If you like, immediately after you’ve started your Day Plan, you can write down some things you want to do today on it, but you don’t have to.

Here’s how you use a Day Plan:

1. Every time you think of something that might be good to do today, write it down on the Day Plan.

   1. Don’t write a long explanation, just enough of a verbal handle that you know what it is.

   2. Don’t worry if you don’t think you’re going to get around to it. Put it on the Day Plan anyway. It is good and proper to get to the end of the day with your Day Plan incomplete.

   3. Also don’t worry about whether you’re going to do it even without the Day Plan. Put meetings and other fixed points on your Day Plan.

   4. You can and should freely mix different types of work on it. If you need to do laundry today and also reply to a critical business email and also do some coding, all of those go on the Day Plan. The Day Plan is for you, not for your projects.

   5. You can absolutely mix different sizes of tasks on the day plan - it can contain both tasks which will take you 30 second and tasks which will take you hours - but if you put really large tasks on it (say, anything you expect to take more than an hour) you should ideally put some smaller subtasks of that task on the Day Plan too. Don’t worry about explicitly linking them.

2. Every time you do something that you would have put in your Day Plan if you’d thought of it in advance, because it was in some way good or useful to do, immediately write it down on your Day Plan and cross it off immediately.

3. Every time you are unsure what to do next, look at your day plan.

   1. If there’s something on there that you could easily do, do it.

   2. If there’s nothing on there, spend some time (possibly set a 5 minute timer? I don’t actually do this, but if you’re struggling it might be helpful) adding items to it.

   3. If it’s not empty and you can’t think of anything to add, but everything on it looks overwhelming, add a non-overwhelming version. e.g. if you can’t face replying to that email, put “Look at email” on the Day Plan.

   4. If there is no non-overwhelming way to engage with any of the items on your Day Plan, start putting things like “have a shower”, “eat lunch”, “go for a walk”, on it - restorative breaks in the flow of the day.

   5. If after all of this your brain is just totally failing to engage with the day, strike through the whole day plan and take the rest of the day off.

4. If you find yourself doing something you don’t think you should be, take a look at the Day Plan and engage with it as per the previous step.

Why is the Day Plan designed this way?

The Day Plan is designed around two principles:

1. Externalising your task management into a TODO list is obviously useful in all the normal ways.

2. I get massive TODO list anxiety.

It’s been my experience that any TODO list system I use will acquire an ugh field around it that gradually turns it into a thing I’m guiltily avoiding. The Day Plan system is the result of my paring away every source of anxiety from a TODO list.

In particular:

1. The fact that a Day Plan is disposed of at the end of the day means that it can’t hang around as a source of guilt.

2. The specific ritualised starting format of the current date followed by Start day plan fixes the anxieties around starting the day’s TODO list. There are no decision points, and you don’t have to engage with any hard questions about what you’re actually going to do today.

3. The way you engage with the Day Plan as a list of things you could do rather than should do, and the guidelines around updating it, is designed to make it clear that this is something you’re using to externalise state rather than commit to things. This means that engaging with it will usually reduce the burden on you rather than increase it.

Basically, the Day Plan is designed so that using it should always be better than not. It’s here to help you with your day, not to be a stick to beat you with for not doing enough.

The Day Plan as a reflective tool

One of the big benefits of a Day Plan is that it makes it very visible to you when you’re having a bad day.

There’s a concept of “14-step coffee day” that I have from a now-deleted tumblr post:

One of the advantages of building your day around a Day Plan and adding new items to it every time the current items overwhelm you is that you very organically learn how many steps coffee is going to take today. You add “make coffee” to the Day Plan, then if that feels like too much you add “Put water in coffee maker…” and see how it goes from there.

Honestly, even the fact that “make coffee” is on the Day Plan at all is probably a bad sign. Normally I don’t put things like that on the Day Plan unless I’m having a really bad day, but this fits into the same principle: The more small and trivial seeming the tasks you have to put on your Day Plan are, the worse a day you’re having and the more gently you need to treat yourself.

A related question to “How many steps is coffee today?” is “How long is a Pomodoro right now?”

Traditionally, Pomodoros are 25 minutes. Normally I do 45 minute or hour Pomodoros.³ Some days, even a 25 minute Pomodoro is too much to contemplate…

But even on those days, I can probably do a 5 minute Pomodoro. And usually after I’ve done a 5 minute Pomodoro or two on a task I can face doing a 45 minute one.

In general, having the Day Plan allows you to answer the question “What is the largest task I can face right now?” and fill it up with those, and at the end of a day of doing many small tasks that you can face you’ll often find you’ve done a surprisingly large amount.

Developing your own mechanisms

The Day Plan system is good and if you struggle with keeping track of your tasks and/or easily get distracted and zone out during the work day, I’d recommend following it.

I also don’t expect it to work perfectly for you. It’s designed for me. All of the details are designed for what I think are fairly general reasons, but I don’t expect you to have exactly the same sets of needs and anxieties as me, and it’s evolved in response to mine. But I’d bet it works better than a naive TODO list, and starting from it and letting it evolve in response to you is probably a pretty good way to find what works for you in particular.

The Day Plan is also just very good as an example of how much you can design your mechanisms. It’s had a lot of refining over the years, and I find that most practices that I find useful enough to take seriously do.

As a reflective tool, it’s also a very good place to learn about that mechanism design, because it encourages you to make your own work legible to you, and it makes you aware of what you’re avoiding. If you find that something is regularly a source of anxiety on your Day Plan, that’s probably a sign you need to improve your approach to it.

After here is the paid section. There’s not much in it today other than the footnotes, so this is probably not the post to subscribe for, but there’s plenty of other delightful paid content on other posts, so if you’re a free subscriber and were thinking of upgrading anyway…