Another week of doing the plan of attack. I am doing fine with the planning. If you have read up to this point you know I am picking only 3 things to off of a master collection list of possible items. This week I had a a little more of the same problem as before. I would picks 3 things but then I couldn't do all 3 of them usually because they involved other people.

The good side of this is that I seem to always be the one who is ready to do the job. It has always been the other person who couldn't follow through. I am not picking things that are knowingly un-accomplishable either. These are tasks that are set to occur on that date anyway. The bad side is that even if I go as far as I can with the task, if I don't actually finish it I can't really cross it iff my daily list and it really heads back to the master list. That doesn't make the master list smaller and I get no positive feelings about it.

Since my over goal is to change my habits I am not too worried about this. I am pretty happy that I am still going. IIf things need to be tweaked than I will tweak them. It is my life I am trying to change so I think I have the time to work on things.

The biggest hurdle is that I am going on a 2 week vacation where I will not be doing a plan of attack. I will be getting back in the first days of March so I am not sure if grabbing a new habit is the way to go. I am cheating myself out of a full month of habit building on this first item as it is. If I do go for a new goal it will have to be something simple. Possibly just an extension of this first habit.

Yeah, I think that is a good idea. Habit #1 was to make a plan of attack and then incidentally I picked the 3 most important tasks to put into place. I will make accomplishing those 3 things the habit. Since finishing all of the 3 things has been the problem this week I will need to work on an alternative plan that makes things ok if I can't finish it due to circumstances.

Still going quite well here. I had my first weekend and right before I got there I realized that I hadn't thought about if I was going to do a plan of attack for weekends or not. I didn't do one even though I sat and thought about it before hand. My decision was based on the idea that the weekend is more full with family time. I didn't want a plan of attack or more importantly I didn't want a list of 3 things to do on the weekend.

As it turns out I was quite productive this weekend. More cleaning and purging of things I should have gotten rid of years ago. It made me think that I should do a plan of attack for the weekend because I do frequently have a project or 2 to do then. I will definitely give that more thought.

Although I did plan out my day every night last week I did come up against some obstacles. One was that on Thursday night while planning for Friday I only listed 2 things on my list. My goal was to list 3 things. This wasn't too big of a deal and I know what led me to that result. As the week went on and I accomplished my 3 tasks a day I had left some less concrete items on my master todo list. Besides those items the rest were items that were a little harder to accomplish. With the easy stuff out of the way I procrastinated putting the final item on my plan of attack for Friday thinking that I would fill it in that day. I think I might have done more than 3 things that day but I never got around to listing that 3rd item. So from now on out I am going to make sure to list it.

Now that I can see the nice results the simple plan with 3 things a day works, I will make sure to use it every day during the normal work week. This is approaching the harder phase of habit building. The section where the excitement and initial motivation fade and you have to get through on more willpower. Like I said, the positive results should help me get through this part.

Still at it. Another day of keeping the habit going. I thought I should list the ways I am attacking things.

I use toodledo.com as a place to collect all the little tasks in my life that I might forget. In my mind this is what web 2.0 is all about. I can easily add a task online and then put a priority or due date. It has more features but I don't most of them because it works already for me. I also have an iPhone and they have an entry page designed specifically to fit the screen. Too cool!

There are always items on the list. Right this second there are 12. I then get to the end of the day and before going offline (sleeping) I visit one final time and promote 3 new items to the hotlist. I use the next days date for the due date and then toodledo puts those automatically in a separate page that I have as an icon on my iPhone. So that is pretty simple. Then I just check them off as accomplished.

The course correction I was referring to in the title has to deal with contingency plans. Yesterday it happened once and today it happened on all 3 of my items. Different things happened that made it impossible for me to do them. So what did I do? Well, I promoted 3 other items up to the hotlist and did them instead. Also, something urgent popped up and I got that done. That is a good success but I am not totally happy with it. It is great that I still knocked 3 things off my list. Seeing those 3 things not done makes me feel a little bit of annoyance. It feels motivating however, not a negative at all. I am going to take a little more into account when planning tomorrow. Today it rained and that threw off one of the items. I could have thought that through last night but didn't.

All in all I think things are going swimmingly since my actual goal for this month is not to do 3 things a day but to make the plan of attack for the next day. So I am batting 1000 so far.

Wow, I had no idea that just by doing 3 things a day I could feel so in control. Here it is not even 5pm and I have been done for hours. Granted I didn't have a real freelance workload but that doesn't matter. If I did it would have just been on my list as one of my Most Important Things.

So what did I do with the free time? I did something that I was going to save for tomorrow. I also did a little work on this site. I posted on the zenhabits forums and on 43things to help keep myself motivated and help others a bit. Now I am about to get off the computer and my wife and kids will be home to dinner ready for them! Cool!

I had decided to start this February with a simple new goal. Taking the time to make a plan of attack for the next day. I then read this article about Lazy Productivity and was excited to see that number 1 on the list was doing 3 things a day. Then number 3 was planning those things out the night before. In my last post I thought I was going to plan in the morning but I think with only 3 main things to plan I will easily be able to continue doing them at night.

If you are anything like me you have tried many times to change something about yourself in one big sweeping motion. Did that ever work? Not for me. That is why I am going to start small and try to build my new habit over the course of a month.

Which one to choose? I have a laundry list of possibilities but these are the top contenders. Get up earlier and consistently. Tidy up my physical inbox and process it daily. Meditate. Morning plan of attack for the day.

I am taking a vacation for nearly 2 weeks later this month so I am not going to attempt getting up consistently. My inbox is full, but nothing is super urgent in there. I am not highly stressed ever so the meditation would be more for focus. As nice that would be I imagine the morning plan of attack session will be one of the easier ones (out of those 4) yet will feel rewarding to accomplish.

Okay, February 1st here I come! I plan to try the zenhabits forum again to track the progress.