Planning Your Day
A document structure for regularly planning your day to support rapid learning and improvement, especially in estimation and implementation.
Structure
We suggest the follow main sections in the doc, in order:
- Backlog (optional)
- Learnings
- Daily Plans
We give more detail on each section below.
Backlog
This is Backlog of your specific tasks.
:::tip You don't need to duplicate stuff in a board – if something is already in board then leave there. This is just for extra things or for a quick braindump. Regularly empty it! :::
Learnings
For bigger longer-term learnings. Recommend grouping these by date e.g.:
2018-07-02
- What I learned X
- What I learned Y
Daily Plans
These are plans (and outcomes for each day). Fast and simple to do.
Intention: every day you have a list of planned tasks with estimates and you see how you do => you strengthen your planning muscle, you identify blockers/questions early
Each daily plan:
- Gets its own subsection with a heading with the date.
- Most recent day at the top.
- Two sections to the daily plan:
- Plan for the day (usually done previous night or first thing in the day).
- End of day note including a score.
- Percentage of planned tasks that got done + summary score out of 10.
- Quick retrospective on learnings from the day – what worked and what did not work so well.
- Add major ones to the learnings section.
:::tip You can use Todoist or similar todo app for this if you wish. But you must be able to share with your coach or scrum-master. :::
Scoring your day
Points out of 10
- 3 points for doing prep and analysis (3 out of 3 = perfect, no corrections, on time, etc.)
- 7 points for performance =
- 4 points for percentage you got done
- 3 points for how you felt (you were well and balanced, content, challenged (positively), and not too tired)
Plan for the day
In setting out your plan suggest two groups:
Big items (try and get specific so you easily evaluate whether this happened or not). Example:
* [ ] Work on email sending, specifically complete research on options and post in issue
Misc (small) items e.g.
* [ ] Call xxx
* [ ] Email yyy
* [ ] Do plan and review
Template
Full (annotated) markdown template for a Planning your Day doc
# Backlog
*Note: you don't need to duplicate stuff in a board -- if something is already in board then leave there -- this is just for extra things*
# Learnings
*For bigger longer-term learnings. Date these*
# Plans
## {yyyy-mm-dd}
* X% (Done)
* Y/10 (3 = plan, 4 = % done, 3 = experience)
*End of day comments go here* [copy major learnings from this to main learnings at top]
* Worked:
* Did not work:
* Learnings:
### Plan
Big items (try and get specific so you easily evaluate whether this happened or not)
* [ ]
Misc (small) items e.g.
* [ ]
Copy and paste-able daily section (without annotations):
## {yyyy-mm-dd}
X%
Y/10
* Worked:
* Did not work:
* Learnings:
### Plan
Big:
* [ ]
Misc (small):
* [ ]