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CHAPTER 9

SIMPLIFY STRUCTURE

Sometimes it helps me to wake up in the morning and tell myself, “Today, I’m going to believe that showing up is enough.”

BRENÉ BROWN

The thunderous rush of water could be heard long before we approached the bend in the river. The sound of water slapping against the rocks, rolling like a fast-moving snake, roared loudly, warning us of the danger ahead. We were rafting for five days on the Arkansas River, and we were used to the rapids. We had acclimated to the rhythm of the river, but this rapid sounded different. It sounded ferocious and angry. Looking around, I could see the edges of worry on everyone’s faces.

Our guide, however, looked blissfully unconcerned as she paddled confidently toward the bank. She lightly hopped out of the raft and motioned for us to follow. Scrambling up a rock face, we stood and viewed the raging river from above. Our guide explained to us that while the boulders don’t shift, the river itself is a living thing—each day the water flows in a slightly different pattern, revealing new, menacing obstacles and challenges. With the running of the river that day, she pointed out the hidden rocks that threatened to suck our boat under and several treacherous spots with potential to capsize our group.

Looking at the water from above, the path we should take to safely navigate through the hazards was clear. The river lost its power over us. We confidently made our way to our boat and excitedly sliced our oars into the cool water. Paddling as one, we swirled the boat to the right to avoid the jutting rocks, then dug our paddles in to quickly twist to the left where the river made a gradual drop. Shrieks of laughter pierced the air as we high-fived our successful run. It felt easy—it felt fun.

How did the river go from intimidating to entertaining? All it took was structuring our run. We took some time to create a plan, and suddenly the crushing power of the river didn’t seem so out of control. We owned the river that day, and it felt good.

OWN YOUR DAY

We want to own our day, not the other way around. But when we spend all day putting out fires—running from task to task, working through lunch, squeezing in every last drop of the day to get work done—we end our days feeling exhausted and unsatisfied.

Hustle is one of those buzzwords people like to use, especially when it comes to business. In truth, hustle isn’t about business; it’s about busyness. Hustle is just a more aggressive word1 for busy, meaning “to jostle” and “to crowd and push roughly”—and often what we crowd is our day. We jam-pack our schedule from start to finish with activities, tasks, projects, and errands. We don’t give ourselves the space to breathe.

Despite what social media tells us, life is not about the hustle. But we have this learned helplessness that tells us we cannot own our day, that it does not truly belong to us. If this is true, who does our day belong to? Our bosses? Our families? Other people who push their agendas and priorities on us that we accept out of guilt?

Remember our locus of control we talked about in chapter 2? Let’s build it back up and remind ourselves that we are in charge. Because when we feel in control2 of our schedule, we don’t just survive; we thrive.

Creating structure for our days can be beautifully simple and takes only minimal effort. Like all good systems, the effort is small but the rewards are great. I’ve created a system that you can easily personalize and customize to you and your life called the 5 Ps of planning: We need to be present in our lives, accountable for where our day takes us and responsible for our choices. Without presence, productivity can become busyness, where we find ourselves performing task after task that has little meaning to us in the long run. When we can act upon our North Star on a daily basis, accomplishments will follow.

Being present simply requires filtering out the minutia, purposely choosing not to do everything, and instead intentionally planning our day. That’s where a system like the 5 Ps helps make it easier to focus on what’s important. Let’s unpack this together and go through each of these steps.

PURGE

We have to take the thinking out of it. Doing so is key to all good systems, and planning is no different. We have short-term working memory that allows us to focus on the information we need to successfully complete our tasks. This memory, though, is limited and can easily be overloaded with too much information.

When everything we need to accomplish is swirling around in our heads, it can take up a lot of space. Space we need to complete our tasks instead of fretting or stressing about whether we’ll remember to do the task! Studies show that our work suffers3 when we have distracting thoughts, and just like decision fatigue, distraction wears out the brain.

Using our brains like giant filing cabinets for our tasks is simply not effective. Purging our task list from our heads creates the space we need. It’s as easy as doing a brain dump so we can move it out of our brains and onto some paper.

This first step in the 5 Ps is taking time to think through the entire week. We can look ahead at the big picture of what we want to accomplish over the next seven days. I do a weekly purge on Sundays for my home and on Mondays for work. I purposely keep these planning sessions separate because I want to make sure that in my head, these two sections have their own boundaries and space.

This first step—purging—can take place on your own or with a team. Most of us know what planning alone looks like, so I’ll share with you how I do this first step for home tasks with my family.

Every Sunday afternoon we have an automation called “team planning.” You see, we refer to our family as Team Dalton. We started this when our kids were very little to help build a sense of unity for the four of us. We all work together to make things happen, and if one member doesn’t do their share, the whole team can fall apart. Team planning reinforces this for us.

The four of us sit around our kitchen table and brainstorm everything we need to do or accomplish in the week ahead: homework, chores, meals, sports practices, and so on. You can do this on a sheet of blank paper, but I have a notepad called the Weekly Kickstart that is designed to help make this first step even easier. There’s room for us to write down our brain dump list, and it has space to plug in any timed appointments (like dentist appointments or carpool times). This then becomes our master list, which I post in a prominent place in our kitchen for everyone to reference.

Every one of us is responsible for making our team work. My family knows to check the Weekly Kickstart to see what needs to happen (when they need to be ready to go for activities, what chores need to be completed, and so on). They don’t need to ask me, and I don’t have to use up precious brainpower reminding them. Even when my kids were little and couldn’t read, we used this system. I would use stickers and drawings to convey tasks, and I set up a digital clock so they always knew the time. I’m setting up my little birds to fly, and this is one of the ways I do that.

This first step of planning not only helps life run smoothly but it can also begin to feel like a beautiful tradition.

Kim, in my Facebook group, is in a high-stress time of life. She’s working on her graduate degree and has recently dealt with a big life change of moving. She shared, I love planning at the beginning4 of the week by making it a ritual. Grab some coffee or tea, look at my goals—what actions can I take to keep moving forward? Maybe listen to a podcast or review notes from one and find something I can put into practice. I love it because it makes me feel centered.

For Kim, taking the time to think ahead, which is what we are doing when we complete this first step, helps her feel more focused on the life she wants to live. Planning doesn’t have to feel too rigid or constraining—it can become a highlight of your week if you allow it.

PROCESS

What we don’t want to do, though, is make our daily lists during weekly planning. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is planning out the entire week in one sitting, slotting in what they’ll do Friday afternoon even though it’s still six days away. They purge but don’t take the time to follow up with step two: process.

We need to process each day as it comes, making a daily plan for the greatest impact. This is the secret to making our days achievable. Why? Because let’s say Monday is a great start to the week. You feel good and have a productive day. But then Tuesday happens. Tuesday starts out with a child crawling into your bed at 3:00 a.m., followed by a morning with you downing allergy meds like Tic Tacs thanks to the pollen in the air. Your head feels like it’s chockablock full of cotton, and you never seem to recover.

Unfortunately, if you’ve already planned every single day of your week, Wednesday opens with you feeling ten steps behind because you have to make up for that hot mess of a Tuesday. You have Tuesday and Wednesday tasks to complete. You feel underwater and it’s not even 8:00 a.m. Before you know it, it’s Thursday and it feels like you’ll never get ahead.

We need to treat each day like a new opportunity. Some days will be amazing and we’ll get twice as much accomplished as we hoped, and some days, well, some days are just Tuesdays. And that’s okay.

The purge we do at the start of the week gives us a bird’s-eye view of what we want to accomplish, so we need to pull from this list to process what we want to accomplish each day. Ten minutes at the start of every day to focus solely on that day gives us the grace and flexibility we need for those “Tuesday mornings.” Break down the big tasks and choose what is most important to get done, and then focus only on those steps you can accomplish today. Think through your energy level, mood, and expectations, and then set your intention for what you will accomplish that day—and that day only. That’s the biggest secret to setting ourselves up for success: making sure our days are actually achievable.

We want to make sure our daily list doesn’t just focus on the urgent tasks; we want to ensure consistent movement toward our North Star by spending time cultivating the important work—the tasks without a screaming deadline. Similar to eating our elephant, we can break down the bigger goals for our week and work consistently throughout our days to move us closer. Build up small wins, start small to build momentum, and use the confidence you build from those small wins to move you on to bigger tasks.

Think about it: If your goal was to run a marathon, you wouldn’t go out and run all 26.2 miles—you would start with one. It’s the same with your daily tasks. Take your time to determine the steps that are achievable today. I think that’s the big issue—we often set ourselves up for failure by putting far too much on our plates. We have to ask ourselves: What can I accomplish today? It’s okay to start small and allow your capacity to grow. Small steps are better than no steps.

Take your goals and break them down into monthly pieces, which can be broken down into weekly focuses, which then can be broken down even further into daily actions—small steps. I believe so strongly in connecting with your goals each month that I designed my inkWELL Press planners with Monthly Mission Boards to help you check in and keep you heading toward your North Star.

Jennifer is a writer and editor who dreams of starting her own business. Like all of us, she has a thousand things pulling on her every day. She has found success, though, through regular checks-ins using the Monthly Mission Board. In my Facebook group, she shared, “I use the focus [area]5 to break down my monthly goals into weekly tasks. . . . I jot down tasks that need to get done that week.” Then she pulls from her weekly task list—her purge list—and focuses on what she can accomplish each day.

One of her goals is to tap into her love of reading by making time for two books each month. She was happy to report, “I’ve exceeded that goal every month.” To help her stay on track, Jennifer said, “I divide up the number of chapters by the number of weekdays and use the habit tracker . . . to keep me honest on reading one to two chapters a day.” If we make small steps every day toward our bigger goals, toward the life we want for ourselves, that’s where happiness lies.

For me, processing is simply an extension of my morning routine—it’s a habit. Every day, once I arrive at my office, I begin with ten minutes of focused processing time. Before checking in with email, before other people have the opportunity to fill my calendar with their priorities—first things first. I draw from my purge list on my Weekly Kickstart, choosing the tasks I plan to accomplish that day, and plug them into my planner.

Taking the time to process and select our daily tasks sets us up for success. It allows us to be present and accountable, and it keeps us moving toward our North Star.

PRIORITIZE

We can use the CLEAR framework and the priority list as our guide to structure our day. I want you to start giving yourself permission to prioritize the work that will move you forward. If we are hyperfocused solely on results, we can lose sight of our North Star. Opportunities for growth and learning are often seen as an indulgence because they focus on the long-term benefits rather than immediate results, but this is the work that will ultimately drive us toward our ideal life. This is the important work we need to prioritize more.

We have to limit the amount of time we are giving unimportant items. And, yes, I used the term giving here very intentionally. We are gifting time to tasks and activities as if our time were infinite and we can generously hand it all away.

We will always have tasks under Accommodate on our list, but we have to make sure to contain them. We can’t let them dictate our day. We need to own our day—and the first step is taking charge like you are the boss of your time . . . because you are. Even if you don’t think you are the boss, you own your time. As Greg McKeown said, “If you don’t prioritize your life6, someone else will.” One of my favorite systems to help create space in my day is batching. Batching is intentionally collecting similar activities for an intentional block of time to maximize time, energy, and focus. Did you notice a word appearing again and again? Batching our tasks is working with intention. And if we are working with intention, it means we are focusing on priorities—we are getting important work done.

This is true even if we batch unimportant tasks because then these distractions are done at one time, allowing us to spend the majority of our time on our priorities. It helps declutter our days. Instead of doing the same tasks again and again, we streamline them and do them in fewer sessions so they disrupt less of our day. I’ll show you what I mean: When we create larger pockets for important work, we accomplish more in our day.

One of my podcast listeners, Vinnilaa from Malaysia, works full-time and juggles the roles of wife, mom, worker, daughter-in-law, and more, making her feel stretched thin. But, by batching her tasks, she shared, “I accomplish a lot more tasks7 than before and at the end of the day, I feel so happy. Batching tasks gave me extra time to have ME time.” Tasks, whether important or not, can be batched together two ways:

BY ACTION: grouped by similar activities: repetitive tasks like calls or emails, reading, packaging products

BY CONTEXT: grouped by situations, tools, or surroundings: prepping lunches for the week, running errands, writing blog posts

Once we group our activities together, we can set aside an amount of time to work on the batched tasks. I call this amount of time a container—it gives me boundaries and a structure from which I can work and tells me when I need to walk away. This is key, especially when batching unimportant tasks.

Batching works with the way our brains work: it moves with our ultradian rhythm, so it uses our energy effectively. It takes over twenty minutes for the brain8 to get into the zone of doing deeper work. Batching allows us to get into that elusive flow, a deeper state of thinking, so we get higher-quality work using less time. Sounds like the definition of being effective, doesn’t it?

PROTECT

Over the last eight chapters I’ve been preaching to you about not filling your day, but now I’m going tell you just the opposite. I’m warning you because I don’t want you to think I’ve lost it—just stick with me here and I’ll explain. Ready?

I want you to fill your calendar. Fill it up in the morning during your process time, slot in your important tasks, schedule your batches, block your time. Use your ultradian rhythm as your guide to make sure you block off time for focus and time for breaks.

Why do we want to do this? Because we want to fill our calendars first. A wide-open calendar is an invitation for others to cram it full with their priorities and demands rather than our own.

Let’s fill our calendar with our priorities before we allow others access to our time. This helps us establish our boundaries and allows us to “burn the boats” just as Archimedes did. Focused blocks of work get placed in your daily agenda first, followed by breaks.

Block out sections of time for you to work on priority items or batched tasks. Higher-ranking priorities should get the lion’s share of your time, so block off those items first in your calendar. These are nonnegotiable time blocks that belong to you, so treat them as you would an appointment with someone else—you wouldn’t cancel your doctor’s appointment or arrive thirty minutes late. Right? This is an appointment with you and your goals.

Here’s the catch: to time block effectively, we need to be careful not to line up our blocks one right after the other. We need to allow for some buffers so there’s some breathing room—to allow for the expansion of ideas. Similar to when we drive our cars, we don’t tailgate and ride the bumper of the car in front of us (at least, I hope we don’t). We give ourselves a buffer of space to allow for sudden braking or swerves in the road.

Giving ourselves buffers provides us the flexibility we need to be proactive. The solution can be as easy as giving yourself a 50 percent buffer. If it takes you ten minutes to get to the soccer fields, leave the house fifteen minutes before you need to get there. You’ll feel less stressed and flustered, and if you arrive early, you can take that time and spend it on something you like to do: read a book for five minutes, call your mom, or do whatever makes you happy. I consider this a hidden pocket of time in which I have focused conversations with my kids—no distractions. It’s amazing the deep connections we can make when we strip away everything else.

Buffers give us the flexibility we need so our systems don’t fail. Remember in the last chapter when I talked about my laundry automation? Tuesday was laundry day, but do you know when my kids put away their clothes? Tuesday? Definitely not. Wednesday’s automation for my kids was putting away their clothes.

A WIDE-OPEN CALENDER IS AN invitation FOR OTHERS TO CRAM IT FULL WITH THEIR PRIORITIES & DEMANDS RATHER THAN OUR OWN

Let’s be honest with ourselves and realize that not every Tuesday is made of rainbows and lollipops. I gave myself and my family the space to allow grace for those Tuesdays that didn’t feel smooth. You know, the Tuesdays when the last load went in right before bedtime?

Finishing the laundry on Wednesday meant we never felt like we failed. If we happened to get laundry done and put away on Tuesday? Bonus! But putting it away on Wednesday was still a win. When we create tight timelines for ourselves, the margin for success is razor thin, and then we feel like we’ve failed because we didn’t stick to our schedules—even if no one is holding us to our schedules but ourselves. Let’s set ourselves up for success by allowing ourselves the room we need.

PROPEL

The last step in this system is what I consider one of the most important—we need to give ourselves a little velocity. We need to set up our dominoes.

When asked about finding inspiration, Ernest Hemingway said, “As long as you can start9, you are all right.” He recommended that, “The important thing is to have good water in the well.” Hemingway’s idea of leaving water in the well means we never want to leave a task or a project without knowing how we will pick it back up. We want to return to our tasks with the same momentum, so when we leave a task unfinished, we simply need to take a moment to leave some water in our wells.

You saw some evidence of the water I leave in my well in chapter 8. I shared my morning routine, and I mentioned my computer sitting next to my chair. Every night before heading to bed, I plug in my computer so it’s fully charged when I get up. Stacked on top are my glasses and notes for what I need to do next. Knowing my computer is there waiting reduces the energy I need to start. It’s a little domino that helps get my morning moving.

We can use this idea in all areas of our day to help build momentum: leaving lunch items ready to assemble on the counter after cleaning up dinner, keeping backpacks by the back door where they won’t be forgotten in the hubbub of the morning, placing a note in your planner with next-action items.

When it comes to leaving water in the well, one of my favorite methods is to create a dedicated folder for projects. You can create a project log to staple on the inside flap of the folder where you write out the date, time spent, and next steps. The benefit of this is not only the water in the well but also the bread crumb trail of what you’ve accomplished. This helps you see how much time you spent on the project (which will help you with planning in the future), and you’ll get a feeling of accomplishment for what you’ve done. I think bread crumbs are important because many of us undervalue the amount of time we’ve spent—always thinking we haven’t done enough or didn’t work hard enough. It’s hard, though, to argue with data; bread crumbs show you your success.

This is why I believe the Daily Download adds significant water to your well. This five-minute activity is responsible for doubling my productivity, and I believe in it so strongly that I created a special notepad for it.* The framework of it is simple, though; you can even use a sheet of paper if you’d like.

MINUTE ONE is spent reflecting on our accomplishments for the day. I find, at the end of the day, it’s hard to think of all the good we’ve done, so taking one minute to reflect makes a huge difference. In fact, one study found10 that when employees spent a few minutes at the end of the workday reflecting on their day, they saw a 23 percent increase in their performance levels. It’s important to count the marbles in our jars.

MINUTE TWO is focused on evaluating our day. Did we put too much on our plate? How was our stress? Our attitude? Our focus? This allows us to make certain we are setting up achievable days. If we consistently score high on stress and low on attitude, we need to make some adjustments.

MINUTE THREE is for assessing what you did to move closer to accomplishing your goals. Check in and ask yourself each day to assess how you are inching closer to your North Star. A little progress each day makes a difference.

MINUTE FOUR is all about gratitude. Find three things you are grateful for every day. The trick is, it needs to be specific to that day. For example, “I am grateful for lunch with Susan because she helped me feel confident about my project.” According to happiness expert Shawn Achor11, if you do this for twenty-one days, you’ll set a pattern of low-level optimism, even if you think you are naturally a pessimist.

MINUTE FIVE is for setting up our dominoes. Write down a few notes about tomorrow’s action items—the important tasks you would like to focus on the following day. Get them out of your head and down on paper. It’s important to recognize we aren’t planning our tomorrow; we are simply giving ourselves guidance on what we can work on next—a little water in our well.

Structuring our time and filling our calendars full of priorities for ourselves requires courage because it means we are clearly marking our boundaries. It means we are intentionally missing out on the rest of the noise that adds clutter and chaos to our lives.

Our days can rush past like the fast-moving currents of the river while challenges and obstacles seem to appear from nowhere. But if we take the time to scout our paths, if we give ourselves the gift of structure and design our lives to work for us, we will be free to enjoy the ride, even when it gets a little bumpy. Let’s enjoy the journey while we paddle downriver—I’m ready to slap you a high-five when we make it through those rapids.