Patrick Mosher walks through his daily planning system: transcribing calendar appointments into a paper planner, time-blocking his day into three categories with five sub-blocks each, and using the Errands app to cap high-priority tasks at five. He emphasizes protecting these blocks from others' demands, especially for executives.
Chapters
Plan the day. That's the next one. How do you plan your day? And so, I'll give you some of my things with this is, I review my calendar for the day. I, I literally, one of the things that I do, and I, I have my own personal planner, right? But I have all my stuff in Outlook. This is redundant, but I have it in Outlook, but Outlook is an, an ex— electronic thing. And I literally write it on my schedule here. And as I'm doing that, I'm thinking about what's my intention for that thing that I'm gonna do. So it helps me visualize. I, I just, for me personally, I don't do that well when it's electronic on my Outlook, but when I write, rewrite it down, it's like, okay, who's gonna be there? What I'm gonna do with this? So, so that's one thing I do with plan of the day is review my calendar. And then again, Sean, you're familiar with this, is what are my time blocks today? What are my blocks of time for me that I'm going to do? And Amber and Paul, I know being in the Accenture world, it's like there are days that aren't yours at all, right? And you just gave them all away. And part of that as executives is how do you get that back? You know, so, so you have to say no, no, no, I'm going to take this time block because I need this time block. So I know you can't do that every day, but that you should have those worked in. So In those time blocks. Now here's what's a little different than CHPC, the Certified High Performance Coaching, Sean, is I put my time blocks in 3 categories, which you can guess. I put them into relationships, offers and campaigns I put together in one block, and the other block, and the other type of block is infrastructure. So again, on my, on my planner, I have my relationships here and I have 5 blocks for the relationships and I write a name in each of those 5 blocks or a group of people. But at the end of the day, I'm X-ing those things out saying I've hit my relationships for today. Who, who's waiting for me for something? Who am I proactively going after? That's one of them. And then my projects are my offers and campaigns, and I write those down here. And then the infrastructure pieces, I gotta get those right. I have 5 blocks for those too. So if you look at that, that's 5 plus 5, that's 13 things. In a sense, that's a to-do list in a way. But, and I don't always get all those things done. But again, you know, as we do to-do lists too, when I have to rewrite those the next day, I'm like, I'm tired of rewriting this thing. So then I knock that thing out, right? So we all know how to-do lists go, at least mine do. So, so that's my thing. And then I do have a to-do app that I use. It's called Errands. I've been using that for about 10 years. And I'm sure everybody has their own flavor of those too. But I like to record stuff in there. It's like when I end a meeting like this, I go over to the to-do list and write down all the to-dos that came out of today. And that to-do list, it puts them in categories. I can put dates on them and stuff like that, and I can prioritize them so I can Put it that way. And then on any given day, I don't have more than 5 high-priority to-dos for the day that I can get done. But anyway, that's my plan for the day. What do you guys do?
