Plan less, and place it
Planning was its own scaffold category in my analysis: external systems that take load off your head at the moment of starting. The key move was temporal task-mapping, giving each task a specific day or slot.
- Give everything a slot
- A task with no day is a wish.
- Leave empty space
- Plan for about two thirds of your time. The rest absorbs the surprises.
- Write the first step
- Not "taxes" but "find last year's tax letter".
- Add an if-then
- "After my Tuesday call, I start the report." Cue plus action (Gollwitzer, 1999).
- Note why it matters
- A clear personal reason can be what makes a task startable at all.
Review, do not judge
Once a week, look at what happened: what got done, what slipped, and what got in the way. People described having a system to return to as what made it possible to start again whenever the energy came back.
How Grip helps
Tell Grip's coach about your week in plain words and it places everything as blocks you can see. On Sunday you get a short review of what happened and what to change.