How to plan your day in five minutes, before email

The quickest useful plan for a workday takes about five minutes and has four steps. Pick one to three things that would make today a good day if they got done. Look at your calendar to see how much time is really free. Put the most important thing into one of those free stretches. Then decide the very first task you will do, small enough to start right away.

Do it before you open email or chat. Once the inbox is open, other people's requests set the order of your morning, and the five minutes never happen. This post walks through each step, what makes a good priority, and what to do when the plan falls apart by eleven.

The five-minute plan, step by step

Sit down, keep the inbox closed, and work through these four steps. Time them once if you like. Most mornings they take less than five minutes.

1. Pick one to three things that matter (two minutes)

Ask yourself which few things you would be glad to have done when you stop work tonight. Write them down. One is fine. Three is the ceiling. A list of nine is not a plan, it is a backlog, and on most days it guarantees you finish feeling behind.

Put them in order. The first one is the thing you protect, even if the other two slip.

2. Check the calendar (one minute)

Open Calendar and look at today in Day view. In the Calendar app, Command-1 switches to Day view and Command-T jumps to today. Find the gaps between meetings that are long enough for real work, which for most people means an hour or more. Be honest about the short ones: twenty minutes between two calls is for water, a stretch and getting ready, not for your top priority.

If there are no real gaps today, that is useful to know at nine rather than at four. Either pick a smaller first priority or move something.

3. Block time for the big one (one minute)

Put your first priority into one of the free stretches as a calendar event. Name it after the work ("Draft the proposal intro"), not a vague label like "Focus time". A block on the calendar stops colleagues from booking over it, and it tells you, at two minutes to eleven, what you said you would do at eleven. If you want to plan the whole day this way, time blocking in the Calendar app goes further.

4. Decide the first task (thirty seconds)

This is the step people skip. Decide the very first physical action, the one you will do as soon as you finish the list. Not "work on the report" but "open the report and rewrite the summary paragraph". A first task that is concrete and small is far easier to start than a whole project, and starting is usually the hard part.

Then begin it, before you look at anything else.

Why plan before you open email

Email is a list of other people's priorities, sorted by when they happened to press send. Read it first and your morning gets organized around replies. Some of those replies matter, but few of them matter more than the thing you would have picked with a clear head.

There is also momentum. Each message leads to the next, and the inbox never runs dry. Planning first gives you a fixed point to come back to. You can still check email at a quarter past nine. You just check it knowing what the rest of the morning is for.

If your job really does start with the inbox (support, operations, anything with overnight emergencies), skim for anything urgent first, then plan, then answer the rest. The plan still takes five minutes. It just comes second.

What makes a good priority

The hard part of the five minutes is choosing. A few tests help.

• It moves something forward. Finishing a draft, sending a decision, fixing the bug. Upkeep work (tidying the inbox, updating a status page) is real work, but it rarely belongs in the top three.
• It fits in the day. "Finish the website" is a project. "Write the copy for the pricing page" is a day's priority. If the item is bigger than the free time you found on the calendar, cut it down until it fits.
• You can tell when it is done. "Make progress on the budget" never ends. "Send the budget to Priya" does.
• It is in your hands. If an item depends on someone else replying first, it is a hope, not a priority. Put the nudge to them on the list instead.

If you can't decide between two things, try the one you have been putting off. It is often the one that matters more, and getting it out of the way early changes how the rest of the day feels.

Where to keep the plan on a Mac

The plan only needs to live somewhere you will see it again.

• A note. A pinned note in Notes called "Today", rewritten each morning, is enough for most people.
• Reminders. Give each priority a due date of today and it appears in the Today list in Reminders, and on your iPhone too if Reminders syncs through iCloud.
• Stickies. A sticky note on the desktop is old-fashioned and very visible, which is the point.
• Paper. An index card next to the keyboard works as well as any app, and it never sends you a notification.

Wherever it lives, keep it short enough to read at a glance. If you have to scroll, the list is too long.

When the plan falls apart

It will, on some days. A meeting appears, a customer has a problem, a colleague needs help. That does not mean planning failed. A plan made at nine is a best guess, and its real job is to tell you what to go back to when the interruption is over.

Two habits keep it useful:

1. Replan at lunch, in one minute. Look at the list. Is the first priority done, still possible, or gone? Cross out what no longer makes sense and choose the next task. This short check rescues a lot of afternoons.
2. Write tomorrow's first task before you stop. At the end of the day, write down the first thing you will do tomorrow. The next morning's five minutes then start with an answer already waiting. A short shutdown ritual at the end of each workday is a natural home for this step.

It also pays to switch less once the plan is set. Every jump to a message in the middle of a task takes a while to recover from, which is the subject of the cost of switching tasks.

A weekday nudge to plan

A five-minute habit is still easy to forget, especially on mornings when the inbox is already full. If you use Notchpals with Bolt, its Focus robot, in your crew, it does the remembering. Once each weekday morning, somewhere between 8:30 and 11 while you are at the Mac, Bolt drops down from the notch and asks you to choose.

BoltWorkday initialized. Select one priority. Not seven. I can count.

Bolt is stricter than this post: it wants one priority, not three. On a crowded day that is not a bad rule. Press Done once you have picked it. If you are mid-task, Later buys you 20 minutes before Bolt asks once more, and a second Later lets the morning go. Saturdays and Sundays get no planning visit at all.

When you sit down to the block you planned, you can start a 25 or 50 minute focus session from the same menu bar. For that stretch the rest of the crew stands aside, and only Bolt, a nearly flat battery or a meeting about to start can get a word in.