Guidance: Plan for Life

This will guide you towards setting up an eternal (lasting or existing forever; without end or beginning) plan for your life.

Tools:

• Todist

Sections

• What To-Do NOW?
• Create A Blueprint
• Create Weekly To-Do List
• Create Today's To-Do List

What to do NOW?

I am adding this section based on the fact that I run into this problem a lot of times. Where I am working on something and asking myself, "Should I be working on this right now, or maybe something else?", or when I am questioning what I should do at this moment (usually after I finished doing something pretty productive).

It seems that this may be my biggest problem and most likely the reason that pushed me into writing this whole article and doing what I am doing today.

So, let me think this out for a minute. I have trouble coming up with what "direction" to go in. My mind is cluttered with all these ideas and possibilities of what to do next. My first step to solving this was to write it all down with the idea of getting it out of my head and onto something that I can plainly visualize and hopefully better sort/organize.

I feel that this is a great first step in the right direction. Now I need to focus on untangling this mess that I just threw up, and figure out what is worth keeping and what to throw away.

Being somewhat of a hoarder (along the lines of, "I don't know if I will need this later, so I will keep it for now") I will probably save the task of weeding through it for later. Let's just focus on finding the right direction for now.

I have everything (mostly) that I am currently thinking out of my head and down on something I can look at and visualize. Now, I am going to pick the first thing that excites me the most, the thing that I can see myself doing for a long period of time and not worrying about getting tired of and dropping all the sudden. Because another problem I have is sticking to a specific goal instead of juggling a bunch of things around and usually dropping them all one-by-one.

Now that I have finally picked one thing, I am going to focus on this singular idea for the most part of my days. Starting NOW, I will use this idea as the sort of blueprint to start up my day. How can I break down this idea into specific tasks and short-term goals? This is the question I will ask myself.

To better give some practical advice for this article, I will show you exactly what I am using to follow along with this "junk-of-information".

I picked the idea of learning flutter out of the other ideas I had spit out from my head, as my focus.

If you pick something that is making you think "I don't know if I will be able to stick with this for very long, or has you feeling at unease", then you probably didn't pick the right thing. Although I will say, the thing I picked I am feeling a little anxious about, but it is not a concern for me at this moment since I am doing this all as an experiment and learning process

Now, let me take this idea, and start devising specific tasks and goals that revolve around it for my everyday to-do lists.

First, I am going to put together a basic to-do list for my day tomorrow, then I will be able to insert my specific tasks into my day.

Here is my basic list, with typical tasks that I do every day. I put this together using the blueprint section.

This gives me something to start with and an idea of how my day will look so far. Now I can begin incorporating the other tasks into this list.

My over-arching focus is learning flutter, so I am going to come up with things to do that embrace this idea. To start, I want to reflect on my current status, such as what I have at my disposal.

Luckily, I recently purchased two courses that teach flutter. Also, I happen to be working on a couple of projects with some other people which involve me building a flutter app.

So, at this point it appears that I have the resources necessary to begin putting together specific tasks related to learning flutter. Let me go ahead and add some specific tasks into my list NOW.

Here are the two general tasks I came up with.

I decided to pick the Udemy course as my focus right now since it doesn't require other people's involvement and I can work on it at my own pace.

Also, I know where I am currently at in the course is building a flutter app, so I wanted to add a specific task for that as well. Even though these two tasks are so related, they help define my actions for the day, which is what I am trying to do.

This is just the start, I now need to break these tasks up into even more specific actions that I can take.

Here is what I came up with

Not going to lie, this part was difficult for me, and I am still not fully satisfied with it. Nonetheless, it is a starting point and will do for now.

I have broken up the general tasks into more specific actions. Tomorrow, I will be able to go through my task list with little to no thinking involved, just taking action.

Also, I have added some comments to each task, forcing myself to explain why I am doing this, and the reasoning involved (just in case I need a reminder).

I feel satisfied with my current progression at this point, and believe my process will only get better over time and practice. I foresee myself running into some issues tomorrow, with some specific tasks I have put in the list, but plan on tackling that when the time comes.

For now, I will focus on the end goal. Whenever I encounter a problem, I plan on documenting it and going over a possible solution.

To be continued...

Create A Blueprint

Put together a general to-do list blueprint with things that you need to do repeatedly

This one is pretty obvious, but here are some ideas and tips to help you - this blueprint can apply to daily to-dos, weekly, monthly, etc.

How a blueprint list may look

1. What is something you always end up needing to do? Wake up, shower, eat, sleep, pay bills, etc.
2. Try to add tasks that you want to start doing into your blueprint. This will force you to build better habits
3. Set times and reminders for tasks to get into a routine.
4. Play around with different times to see what works best for you. Maybe you study better around bedtime instead of the morning
5. No task is too small to add to the list. Pretend you are a computer and you are writing out a daily algorithm for your body to follow and make it through the day, every second counts

Create Weekly To-Do List

Let's create a weekly to-do list.

I would recommend setting up a blueprint that you can use.

1. Ask yourself - What is something I end up doing every week?
2. Are you working on something at the moment? Break up that project into specific daily tasks, which can then be more detailed the day of or before. The idea is to start breaking up the project at a high level
3. Have something you've been meaning to get done? Look through your current daily to-dos, and pick one that seems pretty open to add that task to
4. When making up a weekly to-do, it is also a good idea to start looking at upcoming events/plans and organizing them better for your schedule.

Create Today's To-Do List

Let's create today's to-do list, or preferably tomorrow's if you want to stay ahead of the game!

I would recommend setting up a daily to-do list blueprint that you can use.

1. Ask yourself - What do I need to get done this day?
2. Are you working on something at the moment? Start breaking up that project into small tasks, don't worry about overloading your day, just write it down so it can get done
3. What have you been thinking about lately? I really want to clean my room. I wish my truck was clean. Ughh, when will I finally make time to read that book
4. Is there anything you wish was better organized in your life? Clean up and organize your cluttered phone screen of apps. Go through your digital files and clean out / organize them
5. Are there any activities/habits you should remove from your life? Identify and replace those with literally anything that is better for you

Goals:

• Stop asking yourself what to do every day
• Have a concrete guideline of what to do now
• Stop questioning what's next or looking ahead
• Focus on the important things in life
• Declutter your life
• Attain (succeed in achieving something that one desires and has worked for) a clear mind

Comments

[James Schleigher]

Great read! On the weekend, I like to create my weekly to-do list. This helps me to map out my day for the following week. Also, I can easily plan my day when something changes on the current day. I like to use task management software like Trello or Quire.

[Daniel Vera Trallero]

thank you man, for real, just what i needed

[Colton Ehrman]

Glad you like it, it's a WIP (work in progress) right now. I literally got frustrated today, and decided to finally sit down and do something about it. So I started making a to-do list, and then I said "a guide to use this list would be great" haha

[Nguyễn Minh Tuấn]

Good blog :D