Power Habits - Daily Action Plan
Want one thing to achieve success and be a high performer? Use the power habit of the Daily Action Plan — commit to and do daily your three most important tasks. Sounds simple. Surprisingly difficult.
This is the third in my series of “power habits” - routines when practiced consistently over time provide a strong compounding effect. The Daily Action Plan is a simple one — each day you will determine the three most important things you can do, commit them to writing, then do them. Sound simple? While powerful, actually crossing these three tasks off your list is extremely difficult for successful people.
Power Habits - Daily Action Plan
Here are my best lessons learned on implementing this system over the years.
1. Selecting Three Most Important Tasks
When people start out on this habit, they often pick easy tasks, sometimes even process tasks like “entering time” or “getting organized.” The real value in this habit lies in picking your highest value tasks to the exclusion of all the lower value activities. To pick high value tasks, you need to be crystal clear on what your priority is for a particular role. For example, if you are a lawyer that leads a team of other lawyers and service professionals, your role should be developing a high performing team that creates results. This means your priority should be working through others (the team) to get the results. The daily three then should be focused on team-centric tasks such as project management, providing strategy input and review of work, recruiting and developing professionals, customer relationship management, etc. If your Daily Action Plan is consistently focused on individual performance as opposed to team performance, you have a conflict between your role and your daily performance.
When selecting the three tasks, I recommend picking one that is a “must do” and your two next most important tasks. Your goal is to get the “must do” one done no matter what. Focusing your “must do” tasks on building habits and systems that compound over time is one of the best ways to produce more and be successful.
2. Time Blocking — Making Space for High Value Work
Despite what any of this think, the world is at best indifferent to each of us. That means we each face a constant stream of interruptions, other people’s crises, and new potential opportunities. I have found that if you are not proactive about the time devoted to your daily three tasks, it is very difficult — particularly for successful people — to get them done on a consistent basis. A great tool for production is called time blocking, where you devote a set amount of time to your daily three. This is an interruption free zone and best if you can devote at least two hours to your most important work. Successful time blocking may require putting the time block on your calendar, empowering your admin to protect you from distractions, turning off email and text messages, and may require physical isolation from others.
3. Accountability Tools for Daily Action Plan
We have used the app called CommitTo3 with success for this habit. It allows you to set up a team of participants, each person is allowed only three tasks, and the app shows you when people add tasks and complete tasks. This has the obvious advantages of transparency and allows teammates to see what others are working. But one of the best advantages is the app allows for productive discussions about whether teammates are doing tasks consistent with their role as perceived by other team members. This has lead to some great conversations about workload, priority, and roles.
4. Writing the Tasks for Success
A word of caution on this exercise. It is important to draft your tasks in language that you can control. Otherwise, your success will be dependent on the actions of others or circumstances outside your control. This will position you to lose too often. For example, if one of your daily three is lunch with a client and you draft the task as “meet Jane for lunch to discuss new project,” you could be setting yourself up to fail if Jane cancels on you. Best to draft it in more positive language like “ready for lunch with Jane to discuss new project.” You can control your preparation and therefore score a win even if there is a cancelation.
Final Thoughts on Daily Action Plans as a Power Habit
This power habit is maddening hard. But it is one of the most effective tools to high achievement. To maximize this tool, you will likely need to pair it with the time blocking power habit to prevent intrusions and make space for this work.
Putting the Daily Action Plan Power Habit into Action
What: Each day, you commit to one “must do” and two other high value tasks. Your game plan is to organize your day to leverage your ability to achieve these high value targets. Your Daily Action Plan is your weapon to fight off intrusions.
Why: Committing to doing your highest value work is one of the best ways to become a successful, high achiever.
Apply: For the next 30 days, commit in writing to your daily three tasks and don’t stop working until you get each of them done each day.
Additional Evening Routine Resources
Organize Tomorrow Today by Dr. Jason Selk. See Chapter 1.
The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.
I hope you have found this blog post helpful and welcome comments from readers.
Read on LinkedIn.
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In addition to Thriving Attorney, Darin M. Klemchuk is founder of Klemchuk LLP, a litigation, intellectual property, and transactional law firm located in Dallas, Texas. Click to read more about Darin Klemchuk's practice as an intellectual property lawyer as well as IP mediation services. For more on the latest developments in IP law, see Ideate blog and IP Questions Answered blog.
Power Habits - Evening Routine
What’s one of the single best ways to improve performance? An effective evening routine consistently practiced. Read for a discussion of this power habit and in particular what activities make a powerful evening routine and what activities kill productivity.
This is the second in my series of “power habits” - routines when practiced consistently over time provide a strong compounding effect. In my first post, I discussed beginning the day with a powerful morning routine that generates energy that pushes you through the day. In this post, I discuss the evening routine, where we bookend the work day, transition to personal time, examine the day to look for valuable lessons learned, and prepare for sleep.
Power Habits - Elements of a Successful Evening Routine
1. Close the Professional Day — A key step to ensuring good sleep and an interruption-free transition to your personal life is to close out the work part of the day. The focus in this step is to know what you are not doing so that your mind can let go. Here are my typical steps to get this done:
Collect Incoming Communications — I use the Getting Things Done (GTD) organizational method made famous by David Allen. I highly recommend that system to organize your world at a high level. One of the central themes of GTD is being comfortable not doing things, which requires you to have a handle on all the things you could be doing and making a conscious choice not to do any of them. A critical first step in that process is to corral all the incoming inputs like emails, phone calls, texts, mail, etc. Before I leave the office, my goal is to survey all of those and summarize them in one place so I am comfortable with not working on them that night. See my post Project Planning for Lawyers — Upping Your Game in a Chaotic World for more on project management.
Inbox Zero — I am one of those odd professionals that operates on a “zero inbox” system each day. What that means is that every email I have received will either be handled or filed away in a variety of email folders such as “Action Needed,” Action Needed - Low Priority,” “Read-Review,” “On Hold-Waiting,” or “Someday-Maybe.” I find this discipline gets me along way toward the collecting step.
Review Daily Action Plan and Weekly Action Plan — Anyone that has any degree of success will presented with more opportunities than they have time to entertain. That means success is largely based on choosing the right actions in the face of endless interruptions. Some of the best tools I have found are to set a Daily Action Plan and a Weekly Action Plan to keep you focused on those high-value opportunities. The Daily Action Plan is your one “must do” task plus your next two most important ones. The Weekly Action Plan is your four most important targets for the week. The action step for this power habit is to review what you committed to do today (Daily Action Plan) and what you are committed to do the rest of the week (Weekly Action Plan).
Set Tomorrow’s Daily Action Plan — To truly let go of the day and plan tomorrow, I select my Daily Action Plan tasks for the next day in light of my weekly progress. I enter those tasks into my workflow management tool called “Things” as well as enter them into an app called “CommitTo3,” which shares my three commitments with my team to get peer accountability. Note - for lawyer’s due to our confidentiality concerns, I write my tasks at a high general level.
With all of that done, your day is complete and you are ready to begin transitioning to your personal time.
2. Transition to Personal/Family Time
Back in the early 1990s when I was an engineer at The Boeing Company, I had an early morning work schedule that allowed me to be at the gym by about 4:00 pm each day. In the military, unless we were on a mission, we had a clear break in the day between training and personal time. However, as I became a professional in a highly competitive service industry (law), technology evolved to constant connection and communications, and my role as managing partner/business owner became more prominent, my professional life blurred with the other areas of my life. In high-stakes litigation, there really isn’t much end to the day.
This creates an obvious problem of closing the professional part of the day and starting the personal part of the day. Email is one glaring example where work can be an omnipresent intrusion. I have found that picking an activity, preferably physical, is a helpful interruption between work and personal life. If you can’t engage in a physical activity, then I have found an activity that uses another part of your brain is also effective in breaking up your day. For example, if you work involves heavily left brain activities like law, switching gears to a right brain, creative activity can help the transition.
Another important step in the transition is to cut off business communications — emails, social media, Internet surfing, voicemails, etc. It’s nearly impossible to make the shift to your personal/family time while holding an iPhone. In fact, even having an iPhone in the same room, I have found to intrude on my attention. Best to put electronics away when you make the shift to personal time.
3. Examine the Day
As explained in Power Habits - Morning Routine, I think journaling is an invaluable activity. The evening routine is a great time to examine your day to look for lessons learned, areas of improvement, celebrate wins, reflect on helpful insights. As part of my evening routine, I do the second half of my journaling, which includes another round of gratitude, celebrating wins, and identifying lessons learned/areas of improvement. The compounding effect of this last step is enormously powerful. It is easy to justify not journaling for a day or two since not much value is to be gained from this. But 90 days of journaling in a row generates large gains.
4. Prepare for Sleep
Some advocate setting your mind in a positive direction before going to sleep as a means of getting your subconscious mind to work on your success while you sleep. I do not know if that works or not. But I do believe that right before going to bed, these activities have powerful effects:
Quick review and positive visualization on tomorrow’s Daily Action Plan tasks,
Set something you are looking forward to doing in the morning (helps with an early morning routine), and
Repeat a set of positive mantras or future me visualizations.
Final Thoughts on Evening Routines as a Power Habit
As I explained in my morning routine post, the focus for the morning time period is to earn wins before you start your day as well as engage in activities that have a strong compounding effect over time. Evenings can be devoted to protecting the morning routine by eliminating as many choices and tasks as possible that typically have to be done in the morning. For me, I set out my clothes for the next day, pack my gym clothes, pick my Daily Action Plan tasks for the next day, and generally have lined up the dominoes for success — the night before to minimize distractions in the morning. Evening routines like morning routines are flexible, and there clearly is no right way to do one. See additional resources for ideas on other activities.
Putting the Evening Routine Power Habit into Action
What: Dedicate 10-20 minutes to close out your professional day, begin a transition to your personal/family time, reflect on your day to uncover lessons learned, and prepare for sleep.
Why: A commitment to an effective evening routine, consistently practiced, is one of the most impactful changes you can make to increase productivity, reduce stress, and develop self mastery. A consistently practiced evening routine sets you up for success in your morning routine.
Apply: Commit to perform an evening routine Monday through Friday for at least 10 minutes per day for the next 30 days. Make it a priority over checking work emails when you get home.
Additional Evening Routine Resources
Unbeatable Mind and Way of The Seal by Mark Divine.
I hope you have found this blog post helpful and welcome comments from readers.
Read on LinkedIn
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In addition to Thriving Attorney, Darin M. Klemchuk is founder of Klemchuk LLP, a litigation, intellectual property, and transactional law firm located in Dallas, Texas. Click to read more about Darin Klemchuk's practice as an intellectual property lawyer as well as IP mediation services. For more on the latest developments in IP law, see Ideate blog and IP Questions Answered blog.
Power Habits - Morning Routine
What’s one of the single best ways to improve performance? An effective morning routine consistently practiced. Read for a discussion of this attorney power habit and in particular what activities make a powerful morning routine and what activities kill productivity.
This is the first in my series of “attorney power habits” - routines when practiced consistently over time provide a strong compounding effect.
Power Habits - Producing Power Through a Morning Routine
Before I started the morning routine power habit, mornings typically involved checking email before leaving the house and possibly surveying the news and social media. More often than not, I would go to the gym, then rush to the office to “get things done,” which typically was impacted by the priority of others usually through emails, phone calls, and office stop-bys. Scoring “wins” in this chaotic environment is difficult, and often, I would get to the end of the day feeling like I got nothing done — at least nothing on my list.
I’ve always been a morning person and fairly quickly figured out that my time before lunch was best used on analytical projects while after lunch I focused my time on people activities such as calls, meetings, and other communications.
By adopting a morning routine years ago, I positioned myself to start each day with a “win” before the world started imposing its will on me. Below are the various elements I found to be most effective for my business, which involves three distinct and competing roles — Managing Partner, business developer, and practicing lawyer.
Elements of a Successful Morning Routine
A little bit of research will uncover a vast universe of activities included in morning routines. The following is a list of my preferred activities developed through years of experimentation:
Hydrate with a large glass of water.
Checking in with my “why” (purpose) and my core values. Takes about two minutes. See Lessons 9 and 10 for a discussion of ethos in my post 10 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Practicing Law.
Writing down 3 things for which I am grateful. Takes less than a minute. I have tried several journals and planners over the years. My overall favorite is the BestSelf Journal, which is a paper journal. For digital users, I recommend the 5-Minute Journal. Starting the day with gratitude puts you into a positive mindset.
Exercise - at a minimum working up a sweat. I usually commit 30-90 minutes for this. An added advantage of the morning workout is you can couple that with doing something really uncomfortable, which has significant psychological benefits. In addition to hard workouts, you can do a cold shower or extended plank hold until muscle failure. The key is scoring a “win” by overcoming adversity early in the morning before your day starts.
Read 5-10 minutes of educational content. I usually have a theme for a quarter and read material around that theme. I string four quarters into a “personal PhD” for the year. Podcasts and emails subscriptions like the Daily Stoic are other great learning resources. Podcasts are particularly good because I can listen to them while working out.
“Future Me” visualization - pick a future time frame and visualize success real time. Takes less than 2 minutes. Visualizing completion of quarterly goals is a common application.
10 minutes of Box Breathing. Boxing breathing is a focus exercise developed by Mark Divine and taught in his Unbeatable Mind Academy. Put simply, you inhale for 5 seconds, hold it for five seconds, exhale for five seconds, hold for five seconds, then repeat the cycle. The goal is to keep your attention on the breathing. When thoughts intrude, you let them go and bring your attention back to the breathing cycle. This exercise develops awareness and focus simultaneously.
Review top three targets for the day, determined in my night routine. Takes less than 2 minutes. If I miss my night routine, I write the targets down at this step. See my posts Power Habits - Evening Routine and Power Habits - Daily Action Plan for more detail on this.
“Mental Workout” - centering breath, state a positive mantra, visualize success on your top three targets from the previous day and success on your targets for today, positive mantra, and centering breath. Takes less than 2 minutes. This was developed by Dr. Jason Selk and discussed in his book Executive Toughness.
“Daily Hooyah” is a practice a group of us from the Unbeatable Mind Inner Circle developed that involves sending a positive text message or email to someone expressing our gratitude, sharing appreciation or honor. Takes less than a minute and is significantly impactful to relationships. See my post on Building Relationships Through Emotional Bank Account Deposits for more information on why this is a powerful relationship-building tool. If you can only do a few things each morning, this is one of the best and will produce noticeable results within a week.
Morning routines like night routines are flexible and there clearly is no right way to do one. See additional resources for ideas on other activities.
Final Thoughts on Morning Routines as a Power Habit
Don’t get too wound up on all the possible actions you can include in your morning routine or if you miss the routine or a few steps. I am not always able to do all of these activities each day. As with any power habit, if you miss more than twice in a row, that should raise a red flag.
Here is a short list of things I have found to be unhelpful in your morning routine:
Checking email first thing,
Surfing the web, reading social media, or other “electronic” activities,
Watching/reading the news,
Thinking about work,
Telling yourself you don’t have time for a morning routine, and
Failing to set an intention the night before.
A missed evening routine the night before heightens your need to nail the morning routine. As observed by the team at the One Thing, it takes on average 66 days to form a power habit before you start nailing it without thinking.
Putting the Power Habit into Action
What: Dedicate a set amount of time before your day starts to activities that provide a compounding effect on your personal development. Even 5-10 minutes per morning will work. The key is consistency over time to get the benefits of compounding.
Why: A commitment to an effective morning routine, consistently practiced, is one of the most impactful changes you can make to increase productivity, reduce stress, and develop self mastery. Additionally, a consistently practiced morning routine provides you with a “win” before the day starts creating momentum throughout your day — all while the rest of the world is sleeping.
Apply: Commit to perform a morning routine Monday through Friday for at least 10 minutes per day for the next 30 days. Knock out your routine before checking your electronics and thinking about work.
Additional Morning Routine Resources
Unbeatable Mind and Way of The Seal by Mark Divine.
The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod and Miracle Morning Millionaires by Hal Elrod and David Osborn.
Executive Toughness by Dr. Jason Selk. The “Mental Workout” is provided in Chapter 8.
The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. Note - this is one of just a few books I have read over 10 times. It is well worth the investment.
Warrior Book - “Balance” element of the “Core Four.”
I hope you have found this blog post helpful and welcome comments from readers.
Read on LinkedIn.
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In addition to Thriving Attorney, Darin M. Klemchuk is founder of Klemchuk LLP, a litigation, intellectual property, and transactional law firm located in Dallas, Texas. Click to read more about Darin Klemchuk's practice as an intellectual property lawyer as well as IP mediation services. For more on the latest developments in IP law, see Ideate blog and IP Questions Answered blog.