one place. The Cycle gives you a feeling of completion and accomplishment at the end of each day when you complete the day's list.
Systems That Succeed
I've explained why follow-through is important, that we shouldn't trust our brains, and the qualities of systems that fail. Now I'll explain what makes a system that will succeed.
A good system has the following qualities:
Portable. You can take it everywhere.
Reliable. It remembers everything you need, so you don't have to.
Manageable chunks. Not a million little notes, not one List of Doom.
The elements we need to make a good system are:
Calendar. A place to record recurring meetings, appointments, holidays, and so on.
Life-goals list. A few blank pages to keep our long term goals and other notes.
A day-by-day section. For each day we have:
To do list. A prioritized list
Schedule. An hour-by-hour schedule for that day.
The essence of the system is the day-by-day page, which should be big enough for both that day's schedule and that day's to do list. FranklinCovey and Filofax sell stationery like that (see Figure 4-1). Alternatively, you can keep this information in a PDA. We're going to take our organizer with us everywhere we go so that if someone asks us to do something, we can record it right away and not be tempted to scribble it on a slip of paper that will be lost before we can copy it into our PAA/PDA.
The Cycle
The Cycle is the evolution of a system that has worked for me for over 10 years. It's relatively lightweight, yet it includes all the pieces a system administrator needs.
There are four parts in our organizer:
365 to do lists per year. We're going to have one to do list for each day of the year. Today's to do list records the tasks you need to do today. If you know something needs to be done on a particular day, write it on that to do list. Items left over at the end of the day will be moved to the next day's list. (If you use a PAA, you'll only need to keep the next month's worth of sheets with you. Otherwise, it will be difficult to carry!)
Today's schedule. Each day we'll plan our day in one-hour increments.
An appointment calendar. This will be used to record all of our appointments, meetings, social plans, and so on. Events that are further in the future than the current month are written on the calendar until they can be transferred to a particular day's schedule .
Notes. Our organizer will also be used to store other notes and lists. For example, in Chapter 7, we'll create lists of short- and long-term plans.
The Cycle goes like this: each day starts by investing 10 minutes to plan my day. The planning process is simple:
Create today's schedule. On today's schedule I block out time for all my meetings and appointments. All these events should already be listed on my calendar (I cover how this happens in Chapter 6). I count how many hours are remaining. Those are my work hours for the day.
Create today's to do list . On today's to do list, I have a list of all the to do items I have on my plate for that day. These to do items are culled from phone calls, meetings, my calendar, our request-tracking
