The basic day planning workflow is a great place to start if you are relatively new to optimizing your productivity. It is simple to understand and will give you great insights into your current pain points.
These pain points will act as motivators to adjust the workflow to make it better suited to you or to take additional measures to tackle a productivity hurdle you are facing (e.g. Procrastination).
Key concepts
With the basic day planning workflow you have a place where you store all of your to-dos, which is the Master List.
Instead of just going into the Master List to work off tasks, each day you make a list of the tasks you want to tackle today - your to-do list for the day.
Each day you only focus on this list.
Master List
Add all your tasks and projects to their categories in the Master List.
Planning your day
When you are ready to plan your day click the date on the left or press X on your keyboard.
This will slide in a sidebar with your Master List on the left.
You can then drag and drop tasks and projects into your day to schedule them for that day.
Once you have your to do list for the day you can get to work on it. 👍
Any tasks you do not finish on your planned day will stay on that day and you can move them to a future day or unschedule them anytime.
You will see a reschedule dialog in your day that alerts you when tasks are left behind on previous days, so you do not forget about them.
Extras
As you can see the basics of this workflow are quite simple. But don't overestimate how effective this workflow can be! 😀
There are always extra steps you can add to this workflow to make it work better for you.
Here are some ideas:
Use the drag and drop to arrange them in the order you want to do them.
Use section strategies to break your list down into groups
Use stars to prioritize which of your tasks are most important for today
Add duration estimates to tasks to make sure you don't overschedule your day
Turn on a workflow (e.g. super focus mode) and use this for working off your list