I wish I started doing that earlier

Improve your day and set yourself up for success

Apr 03, 2024

👋 Hey, it’s Orel here! Welcome to my weekly newsletter where I share my journey and lessons as an entrepreneur who quit his job to chase his dreams.

I am a software developer, and so far I have x3 failed projects, and x1 ongoing.

I am also publishing, along with

Anton Zaides

, tech book summaries and practical tips here.

Takeaways

Plan your day: Planning your day will help you avoid the feeling of “repeating days”
Have a system: In order to improve anything you’re doing, you either wing it and hope for the best, or you build a system.
Plan with specificity: When you plan your day, define your tasks clearly to avoid decision fatigue.
Be flexible: Not everything turns out the way you hope it would. Give yourself some space for error.
Start small: Don’t look to start with planning your whole day. Go for a specific block of time and build up from there.

Background

More than 47 days ago I started planning my days.

Before that, this is how my days went:

Wake up
Go over your to-do list
Do whatever

No structure or order, and I didn’t feel like I was progressing in anything.

And it’s not that I didn’t try to plan before, I did.
I stopped though 3 days in. Every time.

After reading I wish I started doing this on day 0 of my career as an engineer (Paid), I realized that I am really missing out on something here. I need to force myself, at least in the beginning, to stick to it and see how it affects me.

I started planning my days the night before and set goals for the day.

In the beginning I felt like it’s going to be like the other times. I will start and quit soon enough.

A week went by and I felt like I didn’t get the best out of this planning.
I missed my daily goals. Every day

It took me over 5 days to finish a task!
Not only that, I “improved it” as time went by, by adding more to it.

Improving the system

“A bad, flawed system is better than no system.”

The thing about creating a system is not about creating a perfect system.
It’s about building something that you can use and improve over time.
How? Through repetition and iterations.

After I figured out that I was not making the best out of spending my time planning the day ahead, I thought to myself: “What can I improve?”

So I decided to cut the daily goals and be a bit more specific. See how things are going.

As you can see, I still didn’t manage to hit the goals, but at least I did manage to progress!

Yet I kept on struggling with the writing tasks. I couldn’t find the right way to get those tasks done. And I blocked 3 hours every morning for that!

Still, something just did not work out.

Being more specific

“Define your tasks with clarity and precision, for in specificity lies the antidote to decision fatigue.”
- ChatGPT

Every morning I would wake up and spend the first hour considering what I should write about.

Then I would feel bad that 1 hour has passed and I still have no concrete ideas, so I would either stop and move on to something else with the great excuse of:
”Ideas will appear during the day and I’ll attend to writing then”.

Either that or I would just crawl back to bed.

Then it hit me: I can plan what to write about when I plan my day, in the evening.
I don’t have the pressure then of writing something and I am filled with the day’s events and ideas.

The writing went much more smoothly and I got things done! Finally!

But the LinkedIn posts were still a very hard task for more. And it took me weeks to finally realize that I need to be specific with that as well!

Ever since then I don’t struggle with writing anything anymore, and I have a google sheets full of ideas!

Yet I still struggled with finishing the day satisfied with what I did.

Staying on top of my schedule

I planned my days in a way that I keep no free minute from 5am to 8pm.

Note: I am about to reach max email size (102KB), and this one is quite heavy, so you’ll have to take my word that I did that consistently 😅

Every day I would end up feeling exhausted and stressed that I didn’t finish everything that I planned, even though I was specific, with relatively small tasks to which I gave a lot of time.

One day, I accidentally forgot to add tasks between before and after a meeting with my partner

And the day went by much better.
I was calmer, I had time to finish everything and I felt like I had some real progress!

I used the free time for days when I didn’t wake up on time, to finish tasks I didn’t manage to and to connect and hang out with my girlfriend.

The system is almost good!
1 thing is still missing. To this day.

Keep tabs on my tasks

The only way I knew what I need to do is through copy and pasting the goals from day to day and changing them according to what I did and what I want to do.

I used to have a system, using David Allens Getting Things Done method.
I used to use Trello for it, but it just didn’t feel right. It was not comfortable enough.

This is where I ask YOU come into the picture!

I would love to get your recommendations and tools on how you manage your tasks.
what system do you use to make sure you don’t miss anything?
Any favorite writer/youtube persona that has good suggestions?

Tips:

Keep things you struggle with in the same time

If you have a task that you find hard to do, choose a time in the day when you are going to do it.
Then do it consistently, in the same block of time.

For me it’s writing. So I blocked it in the morning, first time I wake up.
By now my brain knows that the moment I wake up, I am going to start writing.

For other tasks, like coding, the time doesn’t matter. I’ll do it whenever.

Stack same things

I found that if stacking the tasks in a specific time helps you get more done.
If, for example, you have several pieces of content you need to write, you will accomplish more if you write a bunch of them one after the other.

That way you don’t context switch and it will flow more easily.

Plan the night before

Planning the night before removes plenty of stress and fatigue exhaustion to decide what to do from your tomorrow self.

You start your day with a purpose and specific goals, which makes it easier to get out of bed in harder times.

Summary

I will not tell you how important it is to plan your day just because it works for me.

Everybody is different and different things work for different people.
And you are not different (😜).

But what I would tell you is to try. Give it a go for several weeks and see how you feel about it.

You don’t have to plan the whole day if it feels too much to start with.
Go with specific blocks of time and build it up from there.

Good luck and happy planning! :)

📣 Shout-outs of the week

Defining our ICP is the most important thing we ever did by

Andy Vandervell

- Andy here goes in details about how in PostHog they find they find they Ideal Customer Profile.
If you are struggling with this problem, this one is definitely for you!

Web Apps are Native Apps by

Itzy Sabo

- The day old question about whether to go with native apps or PWA(Progressive Web Apps)? I personally had made the wrong choice that might have caused a business I worked for to go down 😅.
Itzy dives deep into how, why and when.
A Fascinating read. great job man!

I look for the best articles that will be beneficial for you, and this week I couldn’t find anything else.
I would love to get your recommendations of related people to follow so I can share with you the best of the week! :)