Franklin, Planners, The Terminator, My Unlikely But Real Link With President Eisenhower, Star Wars, and Kanban

“No matter who you are, no matter where you came from, you too can become financially independent in just a matter of months.  All you need is strategy.” – Wolf of Wall Street

Amazing how he keeps showing up, right?

For me, it started with lists.  Simple lists.  In high school, when the number of things I had to do was greater than seven or so, I’d put a list together.  It wasn’t really a plan, it was a way that I kept track of stuff I was supposed to do.  On at least one occasion I made a date with a girl and then forgot about it completely.  Poor girl, look at what she missed!  (Amazingly, that girl chased me around like a puppy for years after I stood her up . . . but that’s another post.)

In college I had to get strategic, really for the sake of survival.  My first semester, college work wasn’t at all hard.  I studied a few hours, and got fairly decent grades.  My next semester was not as friendly – Physics I, Calculus II and Chemistry II all had tests on the same week – all semester long.  As a mechanism of sanity I bought one of those huge paper desk calendars and put it on my desk – I took the class and test schedules and laid out the entire semester at the start of the semester.  It helped – now I knew when I would have to spend hours of studying – and it wouldn’t hit me by surprise.  It was also helpful for taking notes.  And for writing down Alice Cooper® lyrics when I was bored.

I can’t get a girl
‘Cause I ain’t got a car
I can’t get a car
‘Cause I ain’t got a job
I can’t get a job
‘Cause I ain’t got a car
So I’m looking for a girl with a job and a car
–Lost in America, Alice Cooper

Where the lists I used to make were just that, lists, the desk calendar was the basis of an entire strategy.  I could plan my day (and night) and beer consumption appropriately.  I could plan in advance, and when I got two weeks out, I could plan pretty accurately what I needed to do and study in order to pass.  It worked.

After graduating from college, the first place I worked handed out . . . a pad of lists.  This was just a simple list that you could fill out each morning to remember the things you had to do each day.  Hey!  I was back to high school.  The lists were handy.  I was shocked, shocked I say, to find out that my employer wanted me to work on lots of different things each day.  The lists were handy.  But I decided that I hadn’t had enough beer and decided to go back to grad school, and got back to my desk calendar.

After grad school I got another job.  On the first day I found on my desk a box of business cards, assorted pens, pencils and offices supplies, a new computer, and a Franklin® Planner, complete with a metal nametag with my name on it.

Talk about an awesome first day!

I opened the planner, and looked at the cool pages – it was as if my old lists had mated with my desk calendar and created a system to manage . . . everything.  I was in love.

There were two pages for each month – so I could do the strategic planning that had gotten me through college.  And a page for each day, so I could create a prioritized list of the work that I needed to get done.  Turns out that these were called Franklin© Planners because they were modeled off of Benjamin Franklin’s daily planner.  He’d write down what he had to do, do it, and then write down what he’d done during the day.

Not a bad plan – especially since he did all this without electricity.  Oh, wait . . . he discovered it!  And bifocals.  And treaties with France.  And was a billionaire businessman.  Sigh.  I got to work without injuring myself.  Does that count?

I took very well to the Franklin© Planner.  It was awesome!  Give me enough pages and I’d have planned my own funeral.  Here’s an example of how you use it:

In the immortal words of Ben Franklin (on a sober day) “If someone asks if you wouldst be Sarah Connor sayeth, nay, I thinkith she livith in another county, or maybe Canada.”

The Franklin© Planner allows you to plan and prioritize your day.  I’ve moved away from the A, B, C system.  I now rank things based on what quadrant they are in, rated by importance.  I think I stole the following concept from Stephen Covey (he wrote the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People), but the idea is this – put your effort where it matters.  (True story:  Covey stole this from Dwight D. Eisenhower.  My grandmother was his grade school teacher.  Did my grandmother teach Ike about importance and urgency?)

See how cool this is!  I took a $500 computer and made a drawing that looks like a 7 year old did it!  Bonus – who doesn’t like Comic Sans as a font?

This breaks most things that you do down into four different categories based upon if they are urgent (have to be done NOW!) and if they are important (HAVE to be done).  Obviously some things are (sort of) in the middle, but on a daily basis, you can put most things in one of the four boxes.

Not Urgent, Not Important.

The first quadrant is the bottom left quadrant – it’s not important, and it’s not urgent.

Why would you ever do it?  It’s like mowing the grass growing in the forest next to my house – sure I could let those hostages I have in the basement mow it, but then they’d just want more food, and I never go into the forest, anyway.  Because no one ever mows there.

Urgent, Not Important.

The next quadrant is stuff that’s urgent but not important.  You have to do this now.  But the world will go on if it doesn’t happen.  My suggestion is to ignore as much of this stuff as you can.  Sure, paying your taxes might not seem important, but don’t do it for a few years and see how excited the IRS gets.  So that’s probably important.  But good examples of urgent but not important?  Most phone calls you get at work.  I now screen 90% of my calls at work, and 100% of those whose number I don’t know.  Why interrupt my train of thought or work that’s important for a phone call?

Another great example of this would be emails.  Most of them don’t require an immediate response.  Save them up and hit them as a batch when you have time to focus on them.

Urgent, Important.

Ever have a boss who was a nervous wreck, who spasmed like an electrocuted spider monkey on meth when upper management said anything to him?  Yeah.  That’s what life is like when you spend your time in this quadrant.  By definition, the stuff is important.  By definition, you have to do it now.

Your life is a never ending crisis if all of your tasks are urgent and important.  Urgent and Important things WILL show up in your life.  If you can deal with them in a cool and collected manner when they do show up, well, you’re probably prepared because you’ve spent your life in the last quadrant:

Important, Not Urgent.

This is where you should spend your time – not in crisis-level activities, but in the planning and work that gets prepares you for success later.  You exercise to be strong for the wrestling match that will take place in two months – it’s not urgent but it’s important.  You save money now so you can buy a car with cash and not have to pay for interest.  Important . . . not urgent.

It’s not entirely possible to live a life free of drama (you will occasionally hit a deer, you will get sick, they will run out of raspberry PEZ® before the feast of St. Thanos) but you can reduce it if you plan ahead.

One other system I’ve used (with meh-level results) is Kanban.  Kanban was developed by an engineer at Toyota to allow collaborative work to take place in manufacturing.  Several consultants and bloggers online are absolutely effusive about it.  I’ve found (personally) it’s only good in motivating me when I’m not feeling enthused about what I’m doing at work.

It’s pretty simple – find a space, separate it into things you have to do, things you’re doing, and things you’ve gotten done.  Then fill in sticky notes with the tasks you have to perform.  Sort of like this:

Something tells me he’ll be disappointed after finding out his DNA test results . . . .

Again, your results may vary, but it’s cheap to try.

I’ve personally also tried several electronic planners, and each time I’ve gone back to pen and paper.  For me, there’s something pretty useful about the book – it serves the purpose of planning my life, and I don’t take phone calls on it.  And I don’t write blog posts on it (though it does hold my blog topic schedule and notes for future topics).  It serves as a planning tool, and only as a planning tool.  The Mrs. refers to it as my “brain.”

There’s something about the crisp feel of a new page each day.  The smooth lines as the graphite of the pencil write down the activities that are planned.  The accomplishment of a check mark to show work well done.  Looking back on notes that you wrote a decade ago.

Dang.  I wonder if anyone let the dog out?  Or if anyone told Sarah that her Austrian friend was looking for her?