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.

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.

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):

* [ ]