Plan in a different place

One way to separate strategy from execution

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know I’m always preaching the importance of a designated weekly planning time. This is a recurring time when you think about your professional and personal priorities for the upcoming week. I often recommend people plan on Fridays — particularly if that’s a low-key day for you — or maybe Thursday if that works better for your schedule (for instance, you don’t work on Fridays).

Lately, I’ve been doing this planning on Thursdays to get a little ahead of things and so I can come back to the planning on Friday if I realize I’ve forgotten something.

Every other Thursday morning, our cleaning service tackles the first floor of our house, which is where my home office is. So, I need to leave my office and go elsewhere for an hour or two. Sometimes I just go upstairs, or outside. Other times, I go to the library or a coffee shop.

I started moving out of necessity — so I’m not a nuisance when people are trying to vacuum — but I’ve found that I really enjoy doing my weekly planning during this field trip. Even if I’m only in a different part of my house, I’m not at my desk. So I find myself able to think a little more creatively about what I should do over the next week, or how I should structure my schedule. I come up with ideas for my podcasts and newsletters. I think about potential long term plans and what I might want to tackle in the near term.

Getting in the habit

I’m guessing you might find the same thing. The first and most important thing is to commit to regular weekly planning. It absolutely doesn’t matter if you have a fancy planner, or pen, or where or when you do your planning…as long as you do it. So build that habit first.

But once you’ve made that commitment, you might want to experiment with getting slightly outside your usual execution zone. If you do most of your work at your desk, and you have space in your office for a chair, you might just go sit in the chair. Or go sit in a conference room, or at the kitchen table if you’re normally at a desk in a home office elsewhere. If the weather is nice, go sit at a table outside, or take a quick field trip to a nearby sandwich place where you buy yourself lunch and write down your intentions for the next week.

Minimize the distractions

I think this relocation works at least in part because you’re less likely to be distracted. Sure, you can see emails coming in on your phone just the same as you can at your laptop or desktop computer, but somehow it can feel less like that is what you are supposed to be doing with your time. If people tend to come talk to you at your desk, they might be less likely to do that if you’re elsewhere.

But even just seeing different scenery can put you in a different frame of mind. That matters, because planning and execution are different things. They’re both important, but it makes sense that we draw on slightly different skills and parts of our brain to do them. By separating these out a bit, we can be more intentional about both.