The Daily Planning Routine For Maximum Creativity & Productivity

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The single most powerful skill you can have as a business owner:

Planning what to work on, then executing that plan.

You can have all the marketing skills, sales skills, and product skills in the world, but if you point them in the wrong direction, you will stay stuck despite being constantly “busy.”

I learned this the hard way two different times in my entrepreneurial journey:

First, back in 2020 when I began to write online as a side hustle while working on Wall Street
Second, when I quit that job in 2022 to go all in on building my own business

Now, what did both of these times have in common?

They both involved:

Me starting a new initiative, with lots of excitement but no real plan
Me having an infinite number of things I could work on for that initiative, but having limited time & energy to invest in them
Me being 100% responsible for whether or not they were moved forward on a daily basis

The only thing that was different was the scope.

While I worked on Wall Street, I only had 6 hours per day to build my side hustle. 3 hours in the morning from 4:30 AM to 7:30 AM, and 3 hours in the evening from 6:30 PM to 9:30 PM. Because of how little time I had, I needed to invest it only in the most important tasks.

When I quit that job, I suddenly had 12 hours per day to build my business. But that made my ability to plan & execute even more important, because I lost the natural prioritization constraint that my full-time job created. Having more time didn’t immediately make me more productive, so I had to adjust my approach.

During both of these times, I remember struggling without a framework for choosing what to work on and when to work on it. At my W2 job, people mostly told me what to do, and my calendar was mostly decided for me. But as a business owner, even if it’s a side hustle, you decide what to work on & whether or not it ends up growing.

As a result, I spent a ton of time either working on the wrong thing, or procrastinating working on the right thing.

But over time, through tons of trial and error, I’ve developed a simple planning system and daily routine that allows me to:

Concisely see all of the things I’m working on
Prioritize those things in order of their importance
Go to bed with clarity on exactly what I’ll do tomorrow
Wake up with excitement to work on what I have planned

And that system is what I’m going to share with you today.

We’re going to cover:

The only 5 types of activities you can do in your business
How to operate your entire business with just 4 bulleted lists
6 mistakes to avoid when planning your day
The 30-minute weekly strategy routine that makes sure you’re working on the right things
The 10-minute daily planning routine that lets you wake up and execute on the most important activities

And at the end, I’ve put together a full weekly and daily planning template + prompt you can use to fully execute what you learn today.

All you have to do to get it is like this post and leave a comment with the word ROUTINES and I’ll send it your way.

Now let’s get into it.

1. There are only 5 types of activities you can do in your business

When you run your own business, there is no shortage of things to work on.

Unfortunately, most of these things are a waste of time. A few of them are worth a little bit of time. And an extremely select few are worth all of your time.

And one of the most important jobs you have a business owner is figuring out where each thing could work on falls on that spectrum.

Luckily, while the number of things you could do is infinite, the types of work fall neatly into 5 buckets:

Produce
Build Leverage
Learn (to do 1 & 2 better)
Deliver
Admin

Let’s take a closer look at each one.

1. Produce

Producing is the first and most important type of work you can do.

I use the word “produce” but you could replace it with:

Build
Make
Create
Advertise
Write
Film
Edit

Anything that puts something out into the world that can help grow your business.

Depending on the business you run, this could be:

Writing ads
Filming ads
Writing software
Taking sales calls
Doing cold outreach
Writing a newsletter
Hosting a live training
Creating a lead magnet
Writing a LinkedIn post
Writing an email sequence
Scripting a YouTube video
Filming a YouTube video
Editing a YouTube video
Recording a course lesson
Making an Instagram Carousel
Creating a slide deck for a presentation

The only criteria for something to be production:

It must directly lead to NEW revenue for YOU
It must create an asset that didn’t exist before

If it fails either of these criteria, it is not production. It may still be worth doing, but it will not be the most important thing you can do to grow your business.

Over time, your goal in business is to focus as much of your time as possible toward production. But you can only produce so much in a day, unless you add leverage. And that takes us to the second type of work.

2. Build Leverage

The definition of leverage is output per unit of input.

So when you build leverage, you are either:

Creating something that will lead to more output with the same input (Productivity)
Creating something that will lead to the same output with less input (Efficiency)

And the most common types of business leverage are:

SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) — Documented instructions that let someone run a process the same way every time. You think through something once, document it, and never think about it again.
Automations — Software that executes a process automatically without anyone doing it.
Employees (or Agents) — People (or AI) you train to produce or execute without you.

Let’s look at a few combinations of each.

Efficiency

SOP → You document your podcast publishing checklist. The episode gets published (the output) but now it takes you 5 minutes to do it without thinking, rather than trying to remember every step and it taking 30 minutes.
Automation → You build a Zapier/Kit automation to add new purchasers to your course directly, send them an onboarding email, and start a delivery sequence. Rather than having to do those manually for every customer, they now happen automatically. Same output, way less input.
Employee → You hire a VA to handle your support inbox & post your social media content. You used to handle both of these, but now someone else does. So you get the same output (emails are answered, content is posted) but without using your time.

Productivity

SOP → You build a repurposing checklist that takes your newsletter and turns it into short-form content, a LinkedIn carousel, an X article, an Atomic Essay, and a YouTube script. Now you get 5-10x the number of impressions and posts from the same amount of production.
Automation → You build an outreach system that pulls each prospect’s recent posts & background, drafts a personalized first line, and preps the message for you to tweak. You used to spend an hour doing outreach and send 10 messages, now in the same hour you can send 50.
Employee → You hire a short-form video editor to pull clips from your long-form YouTube. Every YouTube video or podcast you were already making now also gets you 10 short-form clips.

Now you might be thinking, what’s the difference between production and building leverage?

Production creates assets that generate revenue.

Leverage creates assets that multiply production.

And when you’re running your own business, you need time to work on both.

If you spend all your time producing, but no time building leverage, your production ability will stay capped, which will limit your growth.

If you spend all your time building leverage, but no time producing, you will not have any assets that produce revenue, which again will limit your growth.

These two activities are the most valuable uses of your time as a business owner.

And the third involves getting better at these two.

3. Learn (to do 1 & 2 better)

If producing & building leverage are the two most important activities in your business, learning to do them more effectively is the third most important activity.

Examples of this include:

Reading books
Consuming course material
Reading a curated Twitter list
Watching educational YouTube
Paying for 1:1 or group coaching
Reading newsletters (like this one!)
Talking to people in a mastermind

Anything where you are taking in information that changes your behavior in the future.

Now, this is also the activity that most people get wrong, in multiple ways:

They consume something, but then do nothing different as a result. This is not learning, as learning requires you to do something different than you would have done before learning it. If this does not happen, you were simply being entertained.
They spend time “learning” before they produce or build leverage. They open up YouTube, or a course, or Twitter, telling themselves “I’m learning, this is productive!” But this is nothing but procrastination disguised as productivity. Before you start learning new information, you need to spend time acting on the information you already have. Then, once you have produced and built leverage, you “earn” the ability to learn something new.
They “learn” something that is not directly helping them get better at producing or building leverage. Again, this might as well be entertainment. There’s a time and place for it, but you should make sure what you’re consuming directly leads to better production or more leverage.

Learning is an important daily activity. But only once you’ve produced & built leverage. And only when you’re being intentional with what you’re learning.

4. Deliver

The first 3 activities we walked through are the only 3 things you can do to grow your business.

You can produce something that leads to revenue
You can build leverage to better produce things or free up time for production
You can learn how to build leverage or better produce things

Everything else we will cover from here simply keeps the business running.

And if you only ever spend time doing things that keep the business running, your business will not grow. And if your business is not growing, it is slowly dying.

So the first thing you must do to keep your business running is to deliver on the product or service you sell.

Depending on the type of monetization method you’re operating, this could look like:

Hosting a live cohort session
Fulfilling on a client deliverable
Writing client emails or social posts
Onboarding a new client or student
Holding 1:1 coaching / consulting calls
Answering questions in your community

Importantly, not all methods have a “delivery” block. And that is a feature of the method (and a conscious choice one could make in their method selection).

(Delivery-intensive) Agency services, 1:1 consulting, hybrid group coaching, cohort-based experiences, and paid communities all require you to take calls/answer questions from clients.
(Delivery-light) Software, paid newsletters, digital products all require almost no delivery, other than engaging with customers’ comments & questions.

Ideally, you are able to “batch” these delivery activities during certain days of the week, or during certain times of the day, AFTER you have produced, built leverage, and learned something. If you do not block time to batch your delivery, it will slowly expand to eat all of your time.

For example, I take 90% of my calls on Mondays. I try to batch as much delivery as possible onto those days, which frees up the rest of my week. If I absolutely must take another call, I have a two-hour block on Thursday afternoons. The rest of my week stays completely free of live delivery, so that I can focus on production, building leverage, and learning.

Delivery is a required part of running your business. But do not let it consume every part of your day. If you’re a morning person, batch it at the end of the day and spend your morning producing. If you’re an evening person, batch it at the beginning of the day and spend your afternoon producing.

If you want your business to grow, you need to build your delivery AROUND your production, not the other way around.

5. Admin

Last but not least, the Admin bucket is where everything else falls that:

Doesn’t produce new revenue
Doesn’t make production easier
Doesn’t teach you anything new
Doesn’t deliver on a product or service you sold

It’s all of the boring stuff that no one wants to do, but someone needs to do.

Examples include:

Sending invoices
Booking travel plans
Filling out forms of any kind
Answering your email or DMs
Updating passwords and logins
Bookkeeping & categorizing financials
Scheduling meetings with other people
Responding to your lawyer or accountant
Confirming a podcast guest appearance

The best practice for these Admin activities: if it must be done, batch it at the end of the day. And if it can be done by someone else, it’s an opportunity to build leverage.

And that covers the 5 core types of work. But there are two more bonus activities that don’t belong on the daily list: one that directs all five, and one that makes all five sustainable.

(Bonus) Strategize

I’ve broken this one out as a bonus because it’s not something you need to do every single day, but it is important to do often.

Strategic allocation is deciding what you should produce, what to build leverage on, and what to learn. It sets the direction for how you will spend your days. Without it, you can spend weeks, months, or even years working on the wrong thing.

However, strategizing is not something to do constantly. If you’re rethinking your direction on a daily basis, you are giving up the compounding benefits of choosing one direction and working on it consistently.

Strategizing is ideally done:

Outside of a normal working session
Away from your normal working environment

It requires a completely different type of thinking than the work you most often do at your desk. So I like to switch the context & environment entirely for my strategic thinking, usually on Friday afternoons in a new cafe.

When we get to the Weekly Planning section, I’ll walk you through exactly how to do this strategic thinking.

(Bonus) Rest/Recovery

Lastly, you are only able to produce, build leverage, learn, deliver, and keep your business running when you have enough energetic capacity.

I don’t need to turn this piece into a full guide to rest & recovery. But I’ve been someone who had seasons completely deprioritizing it, which was a mistake. Do that for too long and you end up burnt out, unable to operate at your best, all while running a business that is 100% dependent on you.

Rest & recovery best practices will differ for everyone, but I have a “recovery routine” that allows me to fully recharge my brain, motivation, and ability to think.

To build that routine, I started with inversion: what is something I would find very unrestful?

That would involve:

Having a swirling list of open loops in my brain that are hogging all of my mental bandwidth
Having even more information thrown at me that further overloads my brain with information

So for me to rest & recover (on both a daily and weekly basis), I simply:

Make sure all of my lists and tasks are up to date
Remove myself from technology entirely

And the planning routines we walk through later are designed specifically to make my weekends and my evenings as restful as possible by getting everything out of my head and onto the page.

Now you understand all the types of work you can do inside your business. You know the types that grow it, and the types that maintain it. And on any given day, you’ll have dozens of possible tasks across all 5 buckets competing for your attention, plus a hundred or more swirling around in your head. So now, you need somewhere to put them all.

And to do that, you only need 4 lists.

2. You can operate your entire business with just 4 lists

I’ve read every type of productivity book out there.

And I always come back to the simplest version of Getting Things Done, which involves making 4 lists:

Project List
Later List
Next Actions List
Open Loop List

Let’s look at each one, what goes on it, and how they work together.

List #1: Project List

This is a list of everything you’re working on inside your business right now, that requires more than one action to complete.

Looking at each part of that definition:

You can define right now however you’d like, but I think of my Project List as anything that I will move forward this week.
And something that requires more than one action is mostly just to keep short, easily-completable tasks off your Project List.

When you make your Project List, every project should start with a verb that signals action.

For example, my current project list looks like:

Write weekly newsletter
Film weekly YouTube video
Build new CRM workflows & documentation
Build new SOP for repurposing my weekly newsletter
Set up new AI Writing Skool Sprint infrastructure

Each of those are projects that start with a verb, take more than one step to complete, that I will work on this week. And they should map to one of the 5 categories for types of work you can do. However, the majority of your projects should be Produce or Build Leverage. If your project list is dominated by Deliver or Admin, you need to audit your priorities.

It’s fine to keep “recurring” projects on this list as well, as you’re going to repeat (and complete) them every week.

In terms of length, having more than ~7 active Projects at any given time likely means you are unfocused. It’s hard to move forward that many things in a given week, so I would use that as a rough prioritization guideline.

And one last reminder: the first list you make will be roughly 3x too long, and it’s only through making this list that you realize how thinly spread you’ve been operating.

To focus in on the few projects that matter, you need to move some to the Later List.

List #2: Later List

The Later List has the same “types” of work as the Project List, except you’re not working on them right now.

This is a “catch all” list where you can put anything that is:

Coming up in the next few weeks
Something you might want to pursue in the future

Reviewing your Later List is part of the Weekly Review, during which you can promote something to your Project List if you plan on working on it that week.

Importantly, your Later List should be significantly longer than your active Project List. If that is not the case, chances are you are trying to do too many things at once.

For example, my Later List includes:

Run End of Month finance reporting
Run a webinar for AIWS free trial/$800/year combo
Run a bootcamp on Personal Finance
Hire a new short-form video editor
Build segmentation into my Substack newsletter
Build and setup a LinkedIn Newsletter
Build an AIWS internal referral program
And lots of other things I just check on there.

At the end of every week where I update my Project List, some of the things on my Later List get promoted. Others sit there for a while just in case I may want to do them in the future. And others get removed entirely after realizing I don’t actually need or want to do them.

And once I’ve fully built these lists, it’s time to move them forward by defining their Next Actions.

List #3: Next Actions List

The Next Actions List (or to-do list if you want to keep it simple) is the list of actions that drive forward each of your projects.

For simplicity, I define a Next Action as something that can be completed in one sitting or work block. The “Getting Things Done” version says to make it the smallest possible next action, but I find it annoying to write so many small things down.

Every project has a set of tasks that move it closer to completion. And each of them goes on the Next Actions list. You can put 7 Next Actions for a project on the list if you’d like, or you can just put one (the literal Next Action).

This is the list you will pull from when sitting down to figure out what you should do on any given day.

For example, going into this week my Next Action list looked like:

Write weekly newsletterBrain dump 10 bullets on newsletter Create full newsletter outline Draft newsletter from outline Copy edit newsletter Publish newsletter Run lean writing distribution flow
Film weekly YouTube videoTweak script from written newsletter into YouTube script Record video Document editing ideas, title, and posting logistics
Build CRM workflows for AI Writing SkoolDocument current zap system
Build repurposing SOP for my newsletterReview Cole’s current SOP to see what I can tweak/add
Set up Sprint infrastructureWrite out list of elements to include in this Sprint Create infrastructure hub with full build order

As you can see, for some of these (where I know all of the steps), I can put all of the Next Actions on one list. And for those that will be a bit bigger of a lift, I just put the first Next Action that would allow me to build momentum on it.

And as I take action on each of these, one of two things happens:

I complete the action and move onto the next one
Completing the action creates an Open Loop that is blocking me from moving forward

And those Open Loops get their own list, our last and final one.

List #4: Open Loop List

The Open Loop List is anything that you are waiting for before you can take the Next Action.

This is by far the most important list to get out of your head and onto the page. Otherwise, these Open Loops will hog all of the mental bandwidth that you could instead spend on producing or building leverage. By putting these loops on a separate list, it gives you a place to scan at the end of the day to see if there’s anything that has been open too long. If you’ve been waiting for something longer than necessary, you can add a Next Action to follow up on that thing the next day.

For example, let’s say this morning you had a Next Action that was Film YouTube Video. Once you’ve completed that and sent it off to the editor, there is nothing you can do to move the project forward until the editor gets back to you with a V1. If you let that “open loop” float around in your head, you will operate with slightly less cognitive bandwidth because your brain is trying to keep track of the status of that project. Instead, you want to “close the loop” by adding “Waiting on editor to return with V1 draft” to your Open Loop list. There’s a good chance they will come back to you without you having to check in, which is why this goes on Open Loops and not Next Actions.

A few of my recent Open Loops included:

Waiting to hear back from VA staffing agency on contract
Waiting for V1 of my next YouTube vid
Waiting for response from tax lawyer on structuring question
Waiting for VA to respond with software cancellation confirmation

Each of these “opened” immediately after I took an action. And until they are resolved, I cannot take another action. Once they’re resolved, I get a new thing to work on, and I remove the Open Loop from my list.

Alrighty, so far we’ve covered:

The types of work you can do in your business
How to organize that work into projects & next actions

With these frameworks covered, we can now get tactical with how to turn them into a daily plan that drives your business forward.

But before we get into the step-by-step process, let’s talk about a few mistakes to avoid.

6 Mistakes To Avoid When Planning And Executing Your Day

What follows is a list of hard-earned mistakes I’ve made after 6 years of running my own business, plus multiple years of consulting my students on running theirs.

And those 6 mistakes are:

Not planning your day at all
Doing something other than producing first thing
Building leverage on things that don’t need leverage
“Learning” something that isn’t directly growing your business
Having more than one thing to produce the next day
Adding everything to your project list & everything to your next action list without any prioritization

1. Not planning your day at all

If you’re reading this, you’re already on the right path to avoiding this mistake.

Too many business owners go to bed with no clue what they will do tomorrow. And as a result, they wake up and lose their day to the whims of clients, admin, and algorithms telling them what to do. 10 hours go by, they spent the entire time “working,” and yet nothing got done.

And if you want your business to grow, this is not a sustainable way to operate.

So take the 10 minutes each day at the end of your work day to plan the next day. When you define the day, and what winning the day looks like, it will be much easier to wake up and execute. And the momentum of one day feeds the next, and then the next, and on and on you go down the path of progress.

2. Doing something other than producing first thing

Production is what allows your business to keep growing.

And as your business grows, more and more things will pop up that compete with production for attention. The second you stop making this the main thing you focus on accomplishing each day, your business will slowly stop growing. It won’t stop growing overnight, but a year will go by where you’ve filled your most creative and productive hours with things that do not move the needle.

So do not make this mistake.

Build your entire day around making sure that something is produced. Fight to protect this time. Otherwise, the endless list of tasks that feel productive but don’t grow your business will dominate your working hours, and your business will slowly die as a result.

3. Building leverage on things that are unnecessary

Before you build leverage on something, you should first ask if it’s something worth doing.

Too many people waste time automating, organizing, or hiring for things that are not critical functions in their business.

Again, this feels productive, which is why it’s dangerous.

You’re hiring someone, that must mean you’re growing!
You’re building an AI dashboard, that must mean you’re saving time!
You’re creating a zap that sends you notifications, that means you’re being more efficient!

Unfortunately, most of this is a waste of time.

Before you spend time building leverage, ask yourself: is this going to directly make my ability to produce more productive or more efficient?

If it isn’t, move it to the Later List and get back to work on things you know will lead to growth.

4. “Learning” something that isn’t directly growing your business

Here’s a harsh truth:

Most of the time you think you’re learning, you’re actually just being entertained.

Once again, these activities feel productive, but they are not driving your business forward.

So make sure what you are learning is something that is directly helping you produce more, or build better leverage. Otherwise, you are engaging in “productive procrastination.”

And also, make sure you are not “learning” before you’ve produced & built leverage on any given day. Starting the day with YouTube will feel productive, but it’s better to start with acting on the information you already have on the activities you already know will grow the business.

Then, once those are completed for the day, you can start to consume new information.

5. Having more than one thing to produce the next day

This is by far the biggest mistake I’ve made personally, and therefore the one I fight hardest to avoid.

The most important part of my productivity routine is having ONE thing to produce the next morning. Not two. Not three. Not zero. ONE.

Having one thing allows me to go to bed with one problem for my subconscious to think on overnight. And this overnight subconscious thinking time is where all of my creative breakthroughs come from.

As I am writing this newsletter, I went to bed with the ONE thing to produce the next day being this section of the newsletter.

Every single time I do this, I wake up with elite clarity on exactly what I want to say. I drop into flow state significantly faster. Social media and other cheap sources of dopamine are not appealing to me because I’m itching to write down the ideas that came to me overnight.

So please, trust me on this one. When we get into the planning section, take the ONE BIG THING part seriously.

Watch your creativity & productivity skyrocket as a result.

6. Adding everything to your project list & everything to your next action list without any prioritization

Finally, the last mistake to avoid is thinking you can do everything.

The Later List exists for a reason. We only have so much time and attention to invest on a daily basis. Therefore we should be intentional with the select few things we invest them into, putting everything else on a different list for us to revisit later.

So as we get into the planning section, be ruthless in protecting the few slots you have on your Project List and Next Action list, and be liberal with moving things off of them.

Now let’s get into the tactics of setting up your day for success.

To do that, we need to start with one Weekly Planning session that gets your lists up to date. This is your strategic thinking time where you step out of executing and step into deciding what to execute.

Once we’ve done that, we can execute the Daily Planning routine for the rest of the week until we need to reset with more Strategic Allocation.

Your 5-Step Weekly Planning Routine

The goal of your Weekly Planning routine is simply to get your lists up to date.

Having these up to date is what allows you to only spend a few minutes per day planning your day. When these are stale, you’re constantly spending time each day figuring out what to do and if you’re working on the right things. By separating this type of thinking out into its own container each week, you can be more efficient with your daily planning.

I like to do this on Friday afternoon at the end of the work week, which lets me go into the weekend without any open loops swirling around in my brain. Then I can hit the ground running on Sunday (my favorite work day) with a clear list of actions to take.

The whole routine is 5 steps. The first time you do it, it might take you an hour. Once you’ve done it a few times, you can do it in 30 minutes or less.

The 5 steps are:

Recap what happened last week
Clarify your current bottleneck
Update your Project List & Later List
Update your Next Actions list
Update your Open Loops list

Step 1: Recap what happened last week

Make a quick brain dump list of everything you completed and moved forward. This helps you recognize what is done and what is still open as you go into the next week.

Step 2: Clarify your current bottleneck

To make sure you’re aligning your projects on the right things, ask yourself:

“What is the one thing that is most limiting the growth of my business right now?”

Depending on your business type and your business stage, this could be:

I am not generating enough new leads
I am not getting enough email subscribers
I have no backend product to sell my current customers
I am spending all of my time in delivery and have no time for production
No one on my email list is buying my product
I am not converting any of my sales calls

Importantly, this needs to be ONE thing. By definition, you cannot have more than one bottleneck. You can have lots of problems and lots of opportunities within your business. But you only have one thing that is limiting the growth, and that is where you need to invest your time & energy.

For example, the bottleneck in our business right now is the number of new people on our email list each week. If that number was 3x what it is right now, our revenue would 3x. Nothing else matters except making this number go up.

With your bottleneck identified, you can now update your Project List & Later List.

Step 3: Update your Project List and Later List

Starting with your Project List from last week:

Remove anything that is completed
Add anything that you’ve recently started
Review your Later List and add anything that needs to be worked on this week
Demote anything that is not either working on the bottleneck of your business, or keeping your current business running, to the Later List

This should take no more than a couple minutes. And you should feel a sense of clarity looking at the few things you are responsible to move forward this week.

Step 4: Write Next Actions for every active project

Every active project gets at least one next action.

Again, if you have full clarity on all of the steps, you can add all of them. Or if you just know the next action you can take, add that one.

Step 5: Sweep your Open Loops

Lastly, run down your Open Loops list to clear it out:

Resolved → delete it, no longer needed
Still waiting on it → keep it
Open too long → add a next action to follow up on it

This should take under two minutes and leave your brain feeling calm and focused without anything hogging bandwidth in the background.

Your entire Weekly Planning routine might take an hour or more the first time, but over time you will get more efficient with it.

And once completed, you head into the next week with:

A clear, high-impact Project List
All other things you could pursue on the Later List
A clear list of actions you can take next time you work
An organized list of open loops that allow you to focus on the things you can move forward

Just doing this exercise on a weekly basis will lead to you being more productive and effective on a daily basis.

But where it gets even more powerful is connecting it to the Daily Planning routine.

Your 5-Step Daily Planning & Execution Routine

Everything we’ve covered so far comes together in the last 10 minutes of your workday.

We’ve covered the 5 types of work, and you know that production comes first
You are armed with 4 types of lists that keep all of your work organized

Now, all you’re going to do is allocate them in the order you’ll work on them.

Looking at all 5 steps, you are going to:

Fill in your Gameplan section
Fill in your One Big Thing section
Fill in your Build Leverage section
Fill in your Learn section
Fill in your 1-off section

So before you begin, you start with 5 separate headers:

Gameplan
ONE BIG THING
Build Leverage
Learn
1-off

If you’re doing this by hand, you can space them out across a page like this:

If you’re using the computer, you can just start with them as a bulleted list and add sub-bullets under them.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll see these almost perfectly map to the types of work you can do. The only differences:

I make “1-off” hold all admin & delivery activities, because I always batch them
I have a “Gameplan” section which is my way of listing out all of the scheduled activities I have, giving me another thing to check off throughout the day

With your page prepped, let’s build the plan.

Step 1: Fill in your Gameplan

This is a bullet list of everything you have scheduled tomorrow, in order.

This should include:

Wake time
Morning routine
Work blocks
Scheduled meetings
Workouts
Meals
Family time
Anything else you have scheduled

This lets you see the entire day at a glance and how it will unfold before it starts. If something happens at a certain time, I like to put the time in front of it. But if something is a bit less structured, I just put the name of the block.

As the day goes on, I like to check these off as a simple way to feel like I’m making progress just for showing up for the things I already have scheduled. This gives me an extra bit of dopamine throughout the day to keep my momentum high.

Once you have all of those listed out, you can slot in the type of work you’re going to do.

Step 2: Fill in your One Big Thing section

This is the single thing you will produce first thing the next day, and the last thing you will think about before bed tonight.

Importantly, this is one thing and one thing only. It gets its entire own section to make sure there is nothing else competing with it. The only objective of your deep work time is to complete the thing you said you would produce.

Completing your One Big Thing is all it takes to win the day. If you define this activity, and knock it out without letting all of the other competing things rob you of your focus, you have won the day.

This is also a natural prioritization forcing function. You must choose, every day, the single most important thing you can do. And stacking days with that One Big Thing completed will deliver a shocking amount of progress over weeks & months.

Step 3: Fill in your Build Leverage section

After your One Big Thing, you want at least one thing you can do to build leverage.

As a reminder, this will fall into one of three buckets:

Documenting an SOP
Building an automation
Training an employee or agent

Some days, this could be three or four things, and it’s fine to list all of them here. Other days, you might not have any leverage to build and can instead spend more time producing.

But if you can wake up and spend your morning producing something valuable, and building leverage to help you better produce value in the future, your stack of assets will compound.

Step 4: Fill in your Learn section

This is one thing you will intentionally consume tomorrow. This comes as a reward AFTER you have produced and built leverage.

This could be:

Specific (like reading 2 chapters of a certain book)
Vague (like 30 minutes listening to a podcast)

The point is choosing some of your inputs the night before rather than letting the algorithm dictate them to you in the moment. And just like being intentional with what you’re producing & building, being intentional with what you learn will compound your knowledge much faster than you expect.

Step 5: Fill in your 1-offs

This is everything else that needs doing across your Delivery/Admin/follow-ups that aren’t already scheduled in your Gameplan section.

For example, I wouldn’t put a scheduled call in this list, I would put that in the Gameplan section. But if I needed to send an email to my accountant to track down an invoice, that would go in the 1-offs.

I also always have a 1-off task that is “sweep open loops list” to make sure there is nothing time-sensitive there that I need to deal with. I keep this as one task rather than rewriting my open loop list from scratch every day.

I also always leave a little bit of extra space in this section so as the annoying 1-off items pop up throughout the day, they have a place to go. And they are kept separate from the important work that actually moves my business forward.

And just like that, you have a complete gameplan for the next day.

This will take a few reps to nail down, and you will find the best way to adapt it for yourself and your business.

But stick with this routine long enough to feel the euphoric benefit of waking up with ONE THING. Then, after a few days of knocking it out first thing, you will quickly find this type of planning addicting. And when you stack together days, weeks, and months of producing and building leverage, you will ask yourself how you ever possibly went so long without it.

What this routine looks like for me

The only reason I write this post is because I love this system and it works great for me.

I use it every day and every week to organize my entire life. And so I want to briefly take you behind the scenes of how I implement all of it. Feel free to take what is useful, discard the rest, and adapt the system for what works best for YOU.

I am currently living in Amsterdam, but operating a business with a co-founder on the west coast of the US & primarily US clients. That means my daily schedule will look different than someone who operates completely in one time zone.
Because of the time zone, my work day starts around 9 AM and ends around 8 PM.

I split my day roughly into 4 blocks:

9-2 is for production and building leverage. This is 5 hours of clock time with about 4 hours of actual deep work done. I have an office in a social coworking spot here that allows me to work in different environments depending on how I feel that day.
2-5 is for eating, learning, and training. I break my fast around this time, throw on a podcast, and walk to the gym, hit some cardio, or sauna/cold plunge.
5-8 is for delivery, admin, calls, and talking to my team. This is when I relay anything I worked on to my team, hold calls with my community & co-founder, and knock out any admin.
8-11 is for rest & recovery. The last thing I do before heading home is complete my daily planning routine so I can be fully present with my girlfriend when I get home.

Over the course of a week, I try to take calls just two days, ideally one.

I have several recurring calls on Monday, and anything I can’t fit into Monday I will push to Thursday afternoon. That gives me 4 days per week (Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday) where I know I could spend the entire day producing if I wanted to, and 5 if I end up working on Saturday.
I try to do my weekly planning on Friday afternoon before the workweek ends. This allows me to be fully present on Saturdays and hit the ground running with deep work on Sunday. If I can’t do my planning on Friday, I try to do it first thing on Friday morning.
I do all of my planning work with pen & paper. Muji A5 notebook & Muji 0.5 clicker pen. I’ve done it this way for as long as I’ve been working as an adult, for a few reasons: It forces me to slow down and deliberately write and rewrite. This naturally prevents me from keeping a list that is too long, or leaving things on the list for a long period of time because of the forced copy/pasting. It allows me to still work & plan without any technology on me. There is no more freeing feeling than walking to a cafe with just my notebook, knowing I can move forward a bunch of my projects without needing my computer or phone nearby.
In terms of recovery activities, I try to have one day per week without any structure or work. Saturdays work best for me to be off the grid, in nature, with my family, and letting my brain recharge for another effective week ahead.
And then all of the other recovery basics — eating well, sleeping well, getting sunlight, exercising, staying off my phone in the morning and evening, I am consistent with all of these as the foundation for everything else.

[FULL SETUP PROMPT + TEMPLATES] Build Your 4 Lists & Plan Your First Week

Now if you made it this far, you might be thinking:

“All of this sounds great. But this sounds like a lot of work to get set up.”

That might be true - unless you have a quickstart guide.

So I’ve put together a full interview prompt that will build your entire planning system with you, based on your business, everything currently on your plate, and everything swirling around in your head.

Then, based on your answers, it gives you 2 things:

Your 4 lists. It takes your brain dumps and organizes them into your Project List, Later List, Next Actions List, and Open Loop List. It also helps you cut down your Project List to a more manageable length.
Your current bottleneck. It asks you to identify the one thing limiting your growth right now, then checks your Project List against it and tells you directly if none of your projects are attacking it.

I’ve also included a full Daily Planning template you can either print out or copy to your note-taking app of choice to help with your daily planning session.

To get all of these for free, all you have to do is:

Subscribe to AI Operator
Leave a comment on this post here with the word ROUTINES and I’ll send it over to you

And if you have any questions about any of these routines, feel free to leave a comment or hit reply to let me know. I read and reply to every one of them.

Thanks for reading - I hope it was valuable.

Dickie

PS: If you want my direct help building your very own productivity system, come join us inside AI Writing Skool free for 30 days.

PPS: If you found this valuable and know someone else who would benefit from this system, I’d appreciate if you forwarded it to them to help the newsletter grow.

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