The Importance of Planning for Fully Focused Execution
You have probably seen this idea in sports documentaries: when the moment of performance arrives, champions do not overthink—they trust the plan they built with their coaches and execute. People who sustain high productivity tend to do the same. Rather than dwelling on why they must do a task while they are doing it, they concentrate on the act of execution itself.
That is only possible because there was a solid training plan in place and confidence in the results it would produce if followed. In the same way, the planning phase is an essential prerequisite for high productivity before we dive into execution.
Plans will change, but you should still make them in advance.
Schedules always move. In day-to-day work, unexpected issues appear and sudden meetings get booked. I experience this constantly. We discover an unforeseen bug, schedule a meeting to solve it, and the work I originally intended to do—and even the next development milestone—gets pushed, so the day unfolds differently from what I planned. The same thing happens in personal life. Even so, we plan ahead because we need routines.
Routines make it easier to drop into execution. Without a routine, we forget, miss things, or skip them on days we feel unwilling. The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami is a well-known example of the power of routine. He has written for decades without a long slump. He starts at 4 a.m. and writes for five to six hours, exercises for more than an hour in the afternoon, and goes to bed at 9 p.m. Even on difficult days, he still fills more than twenty manuscript pages. A long-trained routine made him the novelist we know.
Of course, not everyone can live an unchanging life where external factors never alter the plan—especially for those like me who run multiple projects and collaborate with many people. Still, simply putting plans on a calendar keeps you from losing track of what you could not finish. That is why planning with a calendar matters.
How to plan and execute with a calendar
When you execute, execute without extra thinking. When you plan, it is crucial to see everything you must do at once, which means recording your tasks in a single place. Collect everything in one list, plan it on your calendar, and then execute.
Step 1. Record tasks in your calendar Inbox.
When new tasks pop into your head, do you always write them somewhere? In multi-person projects, new to-dos come from many directions. While studying, you may also think of ideas you want to apply to work. If you scatter notes across Slack or KakaoTalk messages to yourself, Notion, or a personal memo app, you often lose important details when it is time to plan and execute. Managing every task in one place matters for this reason. Recording where you look often is also important. Frequent visual exposure helps you remember and prevents misses. In office life, most of us open our calendar at least once a day, so even the “someday” items should live there to clear a crowded mind. For more on this, see the Second Brain article.
Step 2. Plan on your calendar with time blocking.
There are two major ways to plan on a calendar. First, use the All-day area at the top to pin items by their deadlines so you can see them at a glance. If you manage an IT project, for example, you might anchor design complete, development complete, and testing complete to maintain a view of the overall schedule. Then, manage your daily work by placing tasks into specific time slots with time blocking. For details on time blocking, see the productive scheduling guide.
Step 3. Immerse fully in execution.
Once you have cleared the thoughts that clutter your head and planned with time blocking, you have created an environment for deep execution. There are also concrete ways to go even deeper. In the next article, we will discuss methods for executing your planned schedule productively.