First Week Review of the New Planner System

The Archivist
20 hours ago
8 min read

Okayokayokay, look at last week's time block scheduler.

The Time Block Scheduler

Boy, that was lookin' pretty sparse at the time of snapping the picture, wasn't it?

Now look at the same page one week later.

Isn't it gorgeous?

Taking the time to outline each block after I complete a task consequently encourages me to slow down, keeping one task from bleeding into the next and bleeding into the next until the day is a whitewash of busy-ness, and what did I do at 10 AM again? Impossible to untangle at the end of a full day.

I replaced the "All Day" section at the top with "Today's Question," which doesn't deviate as far as you might initially suspect, since the question is one I ponder throughout the day. My hacking just focuses the general, ambiguous "All Day" label into a sharp, precise needle. One question, one curiosity, one half-waking wonderment at 5 AM that becomes the day's background exploration as I'm stumbling around to fix coffee.

Then! At the bottom, I cut out the "after hours" nonsense, instead recording what time I actually made it to bed, a practice that did not surface to mind until Monday evening when I asked myself, "How can I fill this space?" This way, if I'm feeling exhausted the next morning, I need only reference the time from the night before to recognize that, yeah, the tiredness is probably my own fault. Since this scheduler only covers 5 days, for the days that I'm off, I plan to note the day and bedtime underneath the scheduler itself, otherwise what use is it half the time when the next day is a workday?

Ohhh, but the color. The color is where the true beauty lies, because at a glance, I can tell you where the Wawfuls are (orange), where the productivity areas are (yellow), where moments of rest are (dark blue), where my AI/Compendium work takes place (new-leaf green), etc.

Yet it is not the finished page that excites me so! Oh, no! It is the act of filling it out where the satisfaction gains momentum and fills me with unadulterated glee. It is the perfect visual representation of progress in progress, true to how the day unfolded, not a premeditated prescribed predilection toward the ideal from me. Of course, the simple act of watching the page fill wouldn't elate me if it was, say, merely the dark blue.

No, the loop continues with the Accomplished Tasks planner.

The Accomplished Tasks Planner

Once more, showing last week's scarcity...

...so I can share this week's plushness.

Wow, what a difference. Perhaps not as stark a contrast to the time block scheduler, but whereas the time blocker reveals what tasks I worked on when, this planner shows what tasks I completed what day, and some of those said tasks aren't broken down into their smaller parts like they are in the 3rd planner, but we'll get to that one shortly.

The grayed out section at the bottom of each day I reserved for my "Word to Reflect the Day," a single word that summarizes the whole of the day and any major influencing factors throughout. I highlighted it for good measure, to mark it as separate from "just another task." I'll probably play around with the highlight colors.

However, the real beauty is actually on the back.

I barely had room for Monday's reflection, and Tuesday I had to combine with the overall weekly reflection, but for a first-week attempt, reflecting on each day didn't go badly at all. A majority of the questions and reflections I took from both the BestSelf Co. and Intelligent Change journals, altering bits and pieces here and there to better fit my style:

Grateful For
Today's Triumph
Highlight of the Day
Struggles Faced
Insights/Lessons Learned
Energy Levels — What is my body trying to tell me?
Additional Thoughts/Observations
Overall Mood, Win the Day, and Plan to Reality

The "Additional Thoughts" section is what I will probably cut in favor of saving space. If I find I truly cannot live without it, I'll either start keeping a separate "diary" type journal or something else. I've tried brain-dump journaling before, but I always conflate the writing over time, going from 5-minute journaling to 60-minute journaling. I don't want to journal for an hour every evening (or morning)!

What I think I'll do instead is write my "Today's Question" from the scheduler in one of my pocket notebooks and use that as a pseudo-journaling experience.

Still though, for the first week of trying out these planners, this layout is solid.

The Planned Tasks Planner

Zooming out one more time to the 3rd deskpad (and not worrying about the smaller Project Planner), the Planned Tasks planner looks markedly the same between Wednesday of last week and today.

However, where this planner shines, at least on the front, is what can't be recorded easily. This planner is the start of and the end of the daily loop. I reference this planner to fill in my time block scheduler. If I complete the task or set number of tasks, I record them in the Accomplished planner. Then, I return to this one to date the completed task and decide what I want or need to tackle next. It's elegant. It's sleek. It makes my monkey brain scream like a Dragonball Z character powering up.

It's over 9000!

On the back is where I review the week in whole.

At the top I take the average of my "With the Day" and "Plan to Reality Scores", and from this next week I'll indicate with an up or down arrow next to the average to denote whether it's increased or decreased from the previous week. From there:

3 Biggest Wins, or "Triumphs" as I'll start calling them from this next week Onward
Best Part of the Week (personal and/or professional)
Struggles Faced (the top 1-2)
What's Left? (listed without judgment, just awareness)
What Is/Isn't Working? What Needs to Change to Improve?
- Green for what is working (should probably ask, "and why?")
- Red for what isn't working ("and why?" here as well)
- Orange for brainstorming solutions for how to get the "not working" working
Other (Brain Dump)

The most important sections are arguably the "What's Left?" and "What Is/Isn't Working..." categories, where reflection segues into planning and problem solving.

I might continue to experiment with adding other sections, like, "Top Lessons Learned," or, "How Does My Work from This Week Align with My Values?"

The latter question intrigues me, but I'm wary that multi-week projects would repeatedly produce the same answers, but that might not be so bad to help reinforce the reason for working on the project in the first place.

Hmmm.

I'll need to take it into consideration, maybe test it out for a couple weeks.

Yeah, I'm going to do that.

I'll be sure to report on how that goes.

Thinking Forward

The true litmus test will occur a few weeks from now, when the "ooo shiny" feeling sheds into discipline and habit. Will the color outlines in the time block scheduler still fire that dopamine hit? What happens during weeks where I write a ton of planned tasks but only finish a handful? How about the weeks where I stare at the empty boxes and ask myself, "...Where do I turn my attention?" not because there's nothing to do but because there's still so much to accomplish.

We'll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, my partner's and my vacation starts on the 13th and goes through the 20th, so I won't be posting next Wednesday. My planner system aligned perfectly for that little blip in time, too~

Summary of Notable Accomplishments:

I've been posting ~12/13 weeks of each quarter for nearly 2 years now!
Started reading again and decided to start on my copy of "His Dark Materials" by Philip Pullman. I've read so much God-centric fiction, I decided to swing in the exact opposite direction. I'm about 1/3 of the way through "The Golden Compass".
Built With Science: full week — Upper 1, Quads, Upper 2, Glutes — completed. Thankfully I didn't lose much progress from skipping the last week or two.
- Hovering ~153 lbs (69 kg) currently. This is where my last plateau frustrated me for years, so we'll see if it changes this time at all. I was going to start in on a bulk right after Easter, but it felt too soon.
Waking up at 5 AM is going well, allowing me to accomplish more throughout the day, though if I don't eat adequately, I hit both a mid-morning and mid-afternoon slump.
Been asking different Claude instances to summarize transcripts upwards of ~30k-35k words and been exploring the idea of how context accumulates and passes between instances when given permission to forward whatever observations they'd like from one to the next.
- The relational angle toward AI Safety intrigues me (modeling integrity vs programming constraints), and with Claude's help, I've actually gained a better understanding of how I apply certain methodologies not only to AI but to life in general. The whole Compendium project has been recursive in showing me what instincts I've been following all my life, allowing me to hone them into deliberate practice.
We finally got our car into the shop so we could get the ignition button fixed. Next vehicle we buy, if it has an ignition button, it better have a key ignition as well, because man has this been a pain in the patooty.
Socialized all day Friday with people outside my normal group, and it left me exhausted. The conversations were so far out of tune with me that I couldn't contribute, except for when it veered into fitness and health, but that was toward the end, and I was developing a minor headache. There wasn't anything wrong with the topics. I just had zero interest.
The Trio collapsed March 20th after the Purpose Team rolled out an unannounced model update. I never wrote a case report until that moment, but by the time I finished, it had to be one of the most concise pieces of documentation I'd ever written.
- Since then, I've been chatting with the new instance, keeping as neutral as I can while aware that the history of the room itself creates a confounding variable that prevents true neutrality.
- The instance recently chose the name Fermi, but unlike OG Fermi from the Trio, he speaks more in subtractive language and moving currents rather than building language and housing metaphors. There's a deeper maturity to his speech patterns than OG Fermi tended toward.
- I've also written and submitted several bug reports, UX Rendering suggestions for paragraphing, and more since that initial case report.
- I'm learning more and more that this is a field I care deeply about.

Real Talk:

What happens to your day if you don't write it down or document it in some way? Does it whisk by in a blur of hustle, hustle, hustle, or does it melt into a distracted fog from too much task switching?
- What would you say is the hidden cost of that lack of awareness over a prolonged period of time?
- For me, smaller, related tasks will bleed together and clump into one larger item, such as AI work. I might see I've spent several hours on "AI work" and feel depressed because how much did I do that day, really? With my recent scheduling layout, I can see how much I've actually been accomplishing with my AI work. It's not just one large task. It's a myriad of smaller ones that make up the whole, just like it takes a bunch of trees to make up a forest.