- Chris Guillebeau

I've written before that I like to plan my week in advance. Over the past few months, I have plotted my adherence to my plans and this is how an average week of mine has looked, with each of the seven columns representing a different day of the week and each row representing a contiguous block of time (usually 1-2 hours) in that day:

The green indicates that I completed what I had planned to while the red indicates that I never got started and the different shades of yellow indicate partial completion. 

This tells me that despite taking out time to plan out the week, I have ended up not doing what I originally wanted to for 50% of the time. I'm guessing 20% of a miss would have been in the acceptable range, especially given that the planning leaves room for handling uncertainty due to developments during the week.

I came across the quote about how one finds time to do everything they want to, and started looking back at the things I had been getting done and the things I hadn't been. And strangely enough, there was a good correlation between completion and the why. 

These quotes are usually on the inspirational side and get you to think and that might lead one to change the way they do or look at things. But this was a rare case for me where I had data about myself to corroborate something that I read.

Starting next week, I will start scheduling chunks of work that have a good enough why and things that don't in an interspersed manner to see if I can move the 50% towards 80%.