My approach to multi-scale planning
Summary
Cal Newport’s “slow productivity” philosophy advocates for multi-scale planning at the quarterly, weekly and daily levels. While Cal recommends his excellent time-block planner, I’ve found my humble calendar to be an effective tool for this way of working.
As a corporate worker, I use a spreadsheet to plan my goals for each performance review cycle. This helps me identify my long-term goals.
I use a dummy event to log my weekly goals each Monday and I conduct a weekly review each Friday to hold myself accountable to those goals.
Based on the weekly goals, I block focus time each day, so I can complete the tasks that help me achieve my goals.
I support this multi-scale planning approach through a few behaviours.
I capture all my work in relevant systems to reduce my anxiety and stress.
I avoid unnecessary meetings to reduce context switches.
I reclaim empty slots in my calendar and time-block them.
Instead of back-to-back meetings, I plan time between them so I can reflect on the previous meeting and prepare for the next one.
In his book, “The Psychology of Money”, Morgan Housel writes about the end of history illusion.
“The End of History Illusion is what psychologists call the tendency for people to be keenly aware of how much they’ve changed in the past, but to underestimate how much their personalities, desires, and goals are likely to change in the future.”
I write this post deeply aware of this illusion. Many things, including my work situation and career direction, can likely change in a short time. So some of my recommendations from this post may be down to the affordances of my work situation. They may or may not reflect how I’ll work in the future.
With that caveat out of the way, let me introduce what I want to share with you today. Cal Newport will soon publish a book about “slow productivity”. It’s a concept that resonates with me, because at its core is the philosophy of festina lente - to make haste slowly. Or if you like, the Navy Seals slogan of “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.” While you should read Cal’s book when it comes out, let me summarise what I’ve learned from reading his past work and listening to his podcast.
The idea of slow productivity
Slow productivity rejects the hustle culture that burns us out. We context-switch ourselves across many tasks with differing priorities and by the end of it all, we’ve achieved precious little. There’s another way to live our lives.
Do fewer things. Instead of trying to do everything, focus on a few things that are most important to you and that you’re good at. Less is more.
Work at a natural pace. Work at a pace that is sustainable and allows you to do your best work.
Obsess over quality. Focus on producing work that is of the highest quality. Ship often, ship quality stuff. If you do that, it’s ok to ship less each time.
Having done this for a while, I can tell you that doing a few things well helps establish your credibility and productivity far more than if you spread yourself thin and say “Yes” to every piece of work that comes your way. But slowing down is a structured process, as Newport explains.
Enter multi-scale planning
Cal recommends a multi-scale planning approach to bring this philosophy of slow productivity to life. At its core, it’s a straightforward concept. But I must warn you that it applies more to people who have some autonomy over their work lives. If you have a manager who stands over your shoulder telling you what to do, multi-scale planning will not work. That said, here’s how I paraphrase Cal’s advice.
Make a long-term plan. Newport suggests thinking about what you want to achieve, in say, the next quarter or semester. You can adopt whatever time horizon works in your context. It should be long enough for you to pick substantial goals and short enough that you have a feedback loop.
Plan each week. Once you know your longer-term goals, you must plan each week in their service. A quarter has 12 weeks. So you must make small, but visible progress each week. Spend a few minutes at the start of the week, to make this plan, and a few minutes at the end of the week to review it.
Plan each day. It helps to start each day by reviewing how you’re doing vis-à-vis your weekly plan and to figure out what are the most important things for you to complete that day. Plan your day to complete those tasks, by time-blocking your calendar. And protect those time-blocks!
No biggie, right? Now Cal recommends his time-block planner for bringing this approach to life, but I prefer an approach that’s tightly integrated with my calendar and the tools my employers provide. So let me tell you how I implement Cal’s advice.
Planning for a performance review
If you work for a corporation, you likely have performance reviews. A big part of your performance review is about agreeing with your manager, on what you must achieve in the next cycle. Most companies have two such review cycles, so it makes sense to align your long-term plans with these reviews. I suggest building a spreadsheet with the following mandatory columns.
Focus area. This is a broad responsibility that you may have on your team. For example, if you’re a team lead, then “application architecture” might be one of your focus areas.
Goal. Related to the focus areas, what are the goals that you and your manager agree you must achieve? Steer the conversation by focusing on objectives that you have the skills and influence to accomplish.
Priority. I’ve often found that the first two columns lead to a laundry list of goals. You’ll need to prune them down. I apply a simple, high-medium-low scale to each goal, to surface what we agree are the most important goals. Prioritisation also helps you identify stretch goals. For example, if you’ve achieved all your high-priority goals, then you can move to the medium-priority stuff and so on.
My spreadsheet also has a few more columns. These are optional, but I recommend you consider adding them if you follow my approach.
Activities. Goals can be too high-level. It helps to break them down into activities you expect to complete so that you achieve these objectives. For example, if I were to commit to building an online course for going async-first, what activities would that goal involve?
Evidence for success. If your manager had to say that you’ve successfully achieved your goal, what would they be able to observe? I recommend listing tangible outputs and outcomes here.
Support needed. It’s rare that in a team, or a company, you’ll be able to achieve anything all by yourself. You may need your manager’s support or support from colleagues or stakeholders. It’s important to recognise these assumptions upfront, because let’s say you cannot achieve your desired outcomes because of a lack of support, you don’t surprise your manager.
At my current employer, I’m able to log this spreadsheet and the conversations I have about it, into our performance management system. I review it every few weeks and add a status column to the sheet, so it’s clear how I’ve progressed. BTW, it doesn’t hurt to do this exercise for your personal life as well, though I must confess, I haven’t been as disciplined about my life goals as I have been with work.
Managing the calendar
In a company, your calendar broadcasts your availability to others. When your calendar is out of sync with how you’re working, you become prone to interruptions. So I prefer being transparent about my weekly schedule, by putting it up on the calendar.
I begin each week by listing out my weekly goals. I represent it as a dummy event on my calendar at the start of Monday. It includes both my work goals and life goals for the week. As I’ve told you earlier, I have a fairly standard work calendar. In my current role, my mornings and Fridays are meeting-free. But it doesn’t help to have these blobs of focus time on your calendar. You must complete a substantial piece of work in each time block. So at the start of each day, I decide what I’ll do with each focus time block.
And finally, at the end of the week, I have a scheduled time block for a weekly review. I look back at my week’s goals and give myself an honest ✅, ❌ or 🤷🏽♂️ for each of my weekly goals. Here’s a simplified view of what my weekly calendar may look like.
How I use my calendar as my time-block planner
Supporting behaviours
The approach to multi-scale planning that I just described, doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I’ve been able to follow it religiously enough, thanks to some other behaviours I practise. You may find these practices useful too.
Nothing sits in my head. Ever. Whether it’s a task that my colleagues want me to do, whether it’s a blog post idea I have for this website or whether it’s an errand I must run for my parents, I keep nothing in my head. It all goes into a task management system. I use an app called Nirvana for my ad hoc commitments, though there are better ones like Things, Todoist or OmniFocus. I put my choice of the app down to inertia. I have no good reason to change just yet. My project and team commitments usually sit on our team’s task boards, which we maintain in Trello. I organise my notes, snips, links, files and other personal knowledge resources in Notion. These systems help me avoid stress because I’m not anxious that I may have forgotten something. If it’s important and time-sensitive, each of these systems will give me an alert, at a time that I configure for it.
I avoid meetings like it's my job. You’ll notice that my calendar has meetings. So I’m not anti-meeting at all. I’m anti-useless-meetings. To achieve my goals, I need a lot of time to work head down, without interruption. An async-first way of working comes in handy for that. So when I get a request for a meeting without an agenda, I decline it and ask for an agenda first. Often, just thinking about the agenda helps the organiser articulate what they want to achieve. This can sometimes help me achieve the outcome of that meeting asynchronously. I also opt out of meetings that I won’t add value to or derive value from.
I reclaim empty spots in my calendar. I already reserve my mornings and Fridays for deep work. In addition, at the end of each week or the start of a week, I block all the empty slots in my calendar too, for deep work. If these are small slots, then I use them to complete minor tasks or transactional work.
I avoid back-to-back meetings. Back-to-back meetings leave you no time for reflection. A meeting is usually a means to an end and not the end itself. So I need some time after a meeting, to reflect. This is when I note down any action items, next steps or what I learned from that interaction. Pauses between meetings also give me the time to take a breath, shake off the context of the old meeting, and prepare for the next one. Google Calendar’s “speedy meetings” feature is a counter-intuitive ploy to implement such pauses.
Those three behaviours put together, help me create the supporting framework for my multi-scale planning approach to work.
I hope this article has helped explain my approach to multi-scale planning. As I mentioned at the start, this approach works for me in my current role. However, I recognise that every individual and every situation is different. What works for me may not work for you, and what works for you today may not work for you tomorrow.
That's why I encourage you to experiment and find what works best for you. The key is to be flexible and adaptable and to change your approach as needed. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to productivity, so don't be afraid to try new things until you find what works for you. I wish you all the best in your slow productivity adventure.