Right now, you’re reading these words. What will you do after that?

I know what I will do. I decided that last night and wrote it in my plan for today.

The habit of planning my day before it begins, in the morning (good) or the night before (better), has made me much more productive. I know what I will do first each day, and what I will get done before the day ends.

The habit of planning my day not only helps me to have a full day, it helps me get my most important tasks done.

When we don’t plan our day, we tend to fill it randomly. Sometimes, we get important tasks done, often we waste time with unproductive activities. Or we spend a good portion of our day “reacting” to whatever is in front of us—calls and emails and requests for our time and attention. Our most important tasks get pushed to the end of the day, when we may be too tired to do them, or pushed off to another day when we repeat the cycle.

I know. That’s what I did before I started planning my day.

Long-term planning has value. So does planning your week. But I’ve found that nothing is more important than planning my day because that’s when the “doing” takes place.

When I’ve checked off the last item for the day, I feel a sense of accomplishment and look forward to planning tomorrow.

If you’re not doing this consistently, give a try. Take 10 minutes at the end of the day to plan your tomorrow. Do this every day for a week and you’ll never look back.

Do you have a plan to get more referrals?

You know how you find a new app you want to use, only to find (a few days or weeks later) that you prefer the old app?

Happens all the time, doesn’t it?

The thing is, when you start using the new app, it’s tempting to port all your data to the new app and delete the original.

Yeah, don’t do that.

Keep using both apps, in parallel, until you’re sure the new app is the one you want to keep.

It’s more work to use two apps, but if you decide to switch back, you’ll be glad you did.

For the last few years, I haven’t used a regular calendar to track appointments, due dates, reminders, and so on, I’ve used another app I use for other things.

It works well for me, but I recently decided to go back to a regular calendar.

I set up calendars for each Area of Focus (Work, Personal, etc.), added notifications, repeating tasks, reminders, and started using it daily.

So far, so good.

But I’ve been down this road before, so instead of removing all my dates and data from the original app, I still use it alongside the calendar.

If I decide not to continue with the calendar, switching back will be as simple as giving it up. If I find the calendar works better for me and I want to stick with it, it will be just as simple to stop using the original app.

The next time a shiny new object catches your eye and you’re tempted to switch, before you do that, think about all the time you have invested in your current app or method, and remember that at one time, it was the shiny new object.

Are your calendar and task manager filled with due dates and deadlines you regularly fail to meet? I’m not talking about statutory or contractual deadlines; I’m sure you have these under control.

Because you have to.

Bad things happen when you miss “hard” deadlines.

I’m talking about “soft” deadlines, dates you assign to your tasks and projects that you would like to meet but often don’t.

There are ways to turn a soft deadline into a hard one, making it much more likely that you’ll meet it. Tell a client when you’ll have something ready for them, for example, and they (and your fear of losing the client) will usually hold you accountable to getting it done as promised.

But there’s something else you can do to prevent yourself from missing soft deadlines.

Stop setting them.

Many “experts” advise scheduling due dates for everything. The problem is, most people aren’t very good at estimating how long things will take, or what they will be working on weeks or months in advance, and wind up missing many of their due dates.

When you routinely miss soft deadlines without penalty, your brain learns that it is okay to miss due dates, and eventually ignores them.

It’s dispiriting to continually move tasks from one (missed) due date to another. It makes you feel like your tasks are in charge of you instead of the other way around.

A better system is to reserve “due” dates for hard dates only (meetings, filing deadlines, appointments, and things you’ve promised to get done). For everything else, use a “do” date or “start” date.

“Do” dates and “start” dates are aspirational. You plan to do something or start something on a certain date, but there are no negative consequences if you don’t. They’re not deadlines, they’re reminders.

For long-term projects, or projects you’re not sure you’re ready to start, you can also schedule periodic reminders or “review” dates.

Or you can do what I do.

I only record hard deadlines.

Everything else I need to do, or want to do, I keep on lists, and schedule hard deadlines to review those lists.

Once I week, I go through my lists and decide what I want (or need) to work on that week (or soon). I move these to another list.

I go through that list every day (or the night before) and decide what to work on that day.

I may not know what I’ll be working on next week or next month, but I get things done and never worry about missing a deadline.

If you use Evernote for your lists, check out my Evernote for Lawyers ebook

The most important list on our list of lists is our ‘today’ list.

We have things to do tomorrow, next week and next month, and we can plan for these, but all of our “doing” takes place today.

Many people overload their Today list with too much to do.

Not only does this mean that some important things don’t get done, an oversized list tends to cause anxiety because you always have too much you haven’t done.

I know. I used to bite off much more than I could chew.

Awhile back, I found a solution.

Instead of one big Today list, I break it up into two.

The first part of my Today list are my MUST DO’s. These are (usually) the 3-5 most important or urgent tasks (MIT’s) for the day, tasks I cannot leave for tomorrow.

If they are on my MUST DO list, I must do them today. If something is still on that list at the end of the day, I don’t move it to tomorrow, I keep working on it until it’s done.

Because it is a MUST DO.

My MUST DO list includes appointments, tasks with a deadline or due date today, and things that are due soon I need to start working on today.

The second part of my Today list is my TARGET list. This includes tasks I could do or want to do today, but don’t have to.

When I start my day, I start working on my MUST DO list. This might only have one or two tasks on it and often doesn’t have any.

When I’ve completed my MUST DO list, I move on to the TARGET list and work on those items.

If I’ve completed both my MUST DO and TARGET lists and I want to keep working, I’ll dip into my other lists to find something else to do.

Unless I don’t want to.

I might take the rest of the day off.

I’m good with that because I know I’ve completed my most important work.

Bifurcating my Today list this way has made a big difference in how I plan and approach my day. I get my most important tasks done each day and never panic about things I didn’t do.

It’s made me a mellow (and productive) fellow.

I use the iOS app Productive to track habits. Things I do (or want to do) every day, 3 times a week, once a week or on another schedule. I enter the tasks, create a schedule, and the app reminds me when to do them.

If I don’t do them, if I “break the chain,” it reminds me to get back at it.

I wonder if it also goes on my “permanent record”?

There are things I’d like to do again that don’t belong in a habit tracker, however. I don’t want to do them every day or week, but I may want to do them someday.

It’s been a long time since I went to a museum, for example, but how do I track something like this?

This morning I saw an app that’s supposed to make this easier. It’s called, Recur! The Reverse To-Do List. It helps you keep track of things you’ve done and how long it’s been since you’ve done them. It also has repeating reminders.

One comment said, “This app is great for tracking work on any open-ended projects where progress is best measured by time repeatedly devoted to it: learning an instrument or a language, writing a book or music: anything where breaking the project down into discrete action steps would be too artificial and constraining.”

Most of the comments, however, convinced me to pass on the app, but I was intrigued by the concept.

As I thought about it, I realized using an app for something like this isn’t necessary. All you have to do is create a list of “things I’d like to do AGAIN” and schedule regular dates to review that list.

We just had a new water filter delivered, something we do every six months. I wouldn’t track that in a habit tracker, or on a “Someday” list. It belongs on a calendar, and that’s where it resides.

A place for everything and everything in its place.