D4 – Plan your next day


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The review stage ends on 2025-11-01.

What

The last thing to do in your task management system each day is to plan the next day so that you know what you want to do when you wake up the following morning.

Why

The first question is whether to plan each day at the end of the previous day or at the beginning of the day itself. Usually, planning a day doesn’t take as much energy as doing the usual tasks of that day. Therefore, your relatively low level of energy at the end of the day is enough for planning, and you don’t have to do it at the beginning of the day when you’re well rested. You might be more realistic at the end of the day as well. However, if you think that you generally prefer to plan at the beginning of the day rather than the end of the day, feel free to experiment.

Secondly; normally, we plan one day at a time. This is a good idea because we have too much uncertainty to plan longer periods, and collecting the information required for proper planning of longer periods is usually not justifiable in a setup like this. However, in some cases, you need longer term planning; for example,

In these cases, make sure that the extended postponing of tasks won’t cause problems, especially when other people are relying on the output of your work.

How

Go through the list of tasks that were postponed to the next day as well as the remaining tasks from the current day and see which one you can or want to do the next day. You should also check the meetings and other fixed events in your agenda, because they affect how much time you have left for your tasks. For certain people, it may be necessary to check the weather forecast and other information as well.

When picking tasks for the next day, have your goals that were set in A1 in mind.

In a healthy setup, the timing of some tasks will be dictated by your environment, and the timing of the rest is up to you. If you don’t have enough say, it means that you’re overloaded by the environment, and you should find a way to lower that pressure.

Your option to decide about the timing of tasks is how you optimize your selection of tasks to match personal preferences; for example,

When postponing a task that impacts other people’s work, make sure you’re aligned with them in your postponement decision and that you inform them of the new date.

Optionally, you can create a recurring task for planning the next day. Then you can add your tips and tricks, steps, or a checklist for the perfect way of planning for you.

Common pitfalls

Don’t keep too many tasks back for the next day, because seeing a long list can be overwhelming; keep it to a number of tasks you can realistically do. Don’t worry – on the mythical occasion that you’re done with all the tasks, you can always pick an extra postponed task.

Sometimes, you may feel too bored or tired with what you’re doing or even feel blocked and incapable of doing your tasks. In such cases, if possible, you might benefit from postponing all of your current tasks to later and instead bringing in a new, different set of tasks for the next few days.

When you don’t want to keep a task for the next day, you should postpone it to the future. When doing so, however, don’t automatically postpone it to the next day, because if you do, tasks will pile up and it will become too difficult to work within the system. Instead, be realistic and postpone each task to a proper time when you have a reasonable chance of doing it.