On Planning and Execution

I’ve iterated on this Notion template for a couple of years, which you can see and duplicate here.

I’ve found two core concepts do the trick to help me organise and execute my priorities effectively:

1️⃣ Prioritise weekly over daily

If I prioritise work daily, I’m reactive to others’ demands and typically fight urgent and unimportant things.

But when I sit down for an hour Monday morning to calmly assess what’s truly important for the week, I can carve out time to focus on big problems and higher-leverage tasks. I write down the goals for the week and schedule time for those on my calendar too. Classic “first things first” stuff.

2️⃣ Split into Leverage, Neutral, and Overhead tasks

But what do those important tasks look like? As a PM, it’s easy to be busy and stressed without being effective.

Shreyas Doshi’s LNO framework is useful here, so I group the goals and tasks for the week into these:
10x Leverage: do a great job. Perfection.
1x Neutral: do a strictly good job. No better.
0x Overhead: just get it done. Try to do a bad job.

And that’s it. Works for me. Maybe it will work for you too.