Happy Friday… er… Saturday! (Apologies for being a day late. My family and I spent the day yesterday on various holiday preparations!)

Tension and Inaction

In my previous Weekend Upgrade, I introduced the Hub and Subsystems structure for productivity systems. When you build a system using that approach, you’ll have the mechanics for converting your work into action efficiently, effectively, and accurately.

In that newsletter, I led with an example about two ways people can be unproductive:

(1) They can be all intention, but no action. Their task list is overwhelming, and they freeze rather than act. They tense up, stuck in the trap of having big dreams but no way to accomplish them.

(2) They can be all action, but no intention. They work hard and hustle, but never feel like anything they do matters. They’re “action machines,” doing all the wrong work.

The truth is, we need both intention and action.

Intention and Action

If you want to be productive, write down your intentions.

“What do you mean, R.J.? Ascend a tall mountain, light some incense, and record my life’s intentions using quill pen and parchment?”

I don’t mean that. Though far be it from me to stand the in way of your dreams. Climb those mountains, friend!

Here’s what I do mean: Write down what you intend to do. That’s all intentions are. They’re not reserved for lifelong dreams. Intentions are week to week, day to day, moment to moment.

The most critical piece for converting Intention into Action is an Agenda for your day.

💡 Record your next day’s Intentions on an Agenda 💡

👆 That’s your weekend upgrade.

There are five sources for your Agenda.

Appointments & Events from your calendar

In simplest terms, an Agenda is where your tasks meet your time. Your appointments and events from your calendar are first because everything else fits in around them. Beyond that, appointments inform what tasks make sense to do in your available time. If you need to be at the office for a meeting, the work before and after should probably be doable while you’re at the office.

Tasks scheduled for the next day

Certain tasks need to be done on certain days. Any tasks scheduled for the next day should be available to slot into your Agenda.

Recurring Tasks

These are preventative or maintenance tasks—things you need to do every Tuesday, or every 25th of the month, or every March 9th. These kinds of tasks are often overlooked, but when you don’t do them, the effects pile up. Backlogs grow, maintenance of systems and workspaces slip. All your work gets less efficient.

Tasks surfaced from other lists

If you have other tasks that you want to accomplish during a given week or in a specific context (i.e., while you’re at the office or out running errands), you can slot those into logical spots in your Agenda.

Tasks on your mind

If there’s anything that pops into your head that you should do the next day, add it to your Agenda too.

Cluster tasks for efficiency

Task Clusters are tasks that “make sense” together. When you cluster tasks, you minimize the transitions between your tasks. Those transitions are often the reason our work suffers. If we can limit or eliminate them, we should. And clustering tasks that make sense together helps.

But what does “make sense” mean? Generally speaking, you should cluster task by context. Where will you be? Or who will you be with? Or with what tools will you be working?

If I have four tasks that need to be done in my office and three that need to be done when I’m working with a certain collaborator, I should cluster the office tasks into a slot between office appointments, and plan the three collaborative tasks adjacent to my meeting with that collaborator.

Why bother planning? Plans suck

I’ve quoted Eisenhower before, and I’ll do it again: “Plans are useless. But planning is everything.”

When I have an Agenda, it doesn’t mean that my day will go exactly as planned. It means, when my day inevitably derails a bit, I have grappled with my intentions and am better prepared to adapt and adjust.

How can Tana help?

I use two Tools for Thought regularly: Tana and Obsidian. Tana is my main driver, and I use Obsidian both for writing and for diagramming my plans with the new (Insider Access) Canvas tool.

I use Tana for creating my Agendas. With Tana’s live queries, it couldn’t be simpler. In my day tag, I have queries that assemble Recurring Tasks, Tasks due today, Overdue Tasks, and “This Week” tasks. (“This Week” means tasks not scheduled for a specific day, but that I still want to see daily as Agenda options.)

The queries draw on information contained in fields within a few different supertags. Recurring Tasks define the day of the week, month, or year a task needs to occur. Regular todos have due dates that determine what is scheduled for today or overdue. “This Week” is one of my Task Horizons. Since every task has that information attached to it, it is trivial to assemble an Agenda from the appropriate appointments and tasks.

If you’re interested in how a setup like that would work in Tana, I have two offerings for you:

(1) Tana for Tasks, my self-paced course (with live office hours) that helps you build task management mechanics in Tana.

(2) AP Productivity: Cohort Seven, my cohort-based course that runs six weeks from January 13 to February 24. In Cohort Seven, we’ll learn specific mechanics in Tana (which we’ll diagram using Obsidian Canvas) to simplify, activate, and execute all your work. Cohort Seven includes Tana for Tasks, and if you already purchased Tana for Tasks, you get the cost of it applied toward Cohort Seven (see the Tana for Tasks course community for details).

Both courses come with a Tana invite, if you need it.

One last note: If setting Intentions at all is hard for you, Tracy Winchell and I are hosting a workshop on December 28, the Intention & Identity Workshop: Simple Planning for a Guilt-free 2023. Rather than New Year’s resolutions that never last, try making sense of who you want to be in 2023 and drawing your Intentions from that. (And although you can use any tool for that, I’ll do my demo in Tana. 😊)

What do I do next?

(1) Take 2 minutes and answer this question: What’s one thing I learned in this newsletter that I can put into practice right away?

By committing to a specific action, you make it much more likely you’ll do it.

(2) Treat Intention as a concrete question, and ask it day to day with your Agenda.

Plan your work for your next day so you’re as efficient as possible, and better prepared to adjust to changes when they occur.

If this was valuable for you:

Share the newsletter with someone you think would also get value from it! https://rjn.st/weekend-upgrade-newsletters.

Until next time, friends:

Write down what you intend to do, then do it!

R.J.
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