When you begin to implement the WorkFlowy timeline, you'll unexpectedly discover that you don't need to engage in weekly planning sessions to plan for the week ahead. The timeline plans your week and month ahead, automatically, in an iterative process.
That's just the way it is. But it does get one to thinking why this is so… how this is even possible. And that's what this chapter is about.
Let me start with an analysis by WorkFlowy user, David Clark…
Many of you will know David Clark from the WorkFlowy Slack group. He decided to give the timeline system a go, and fully immersed himself in the space of a few days.
David has a way of elegantly distilling the background mechanics of how or why something works. Here's an excerpt from a Slack post, giving an account of how it is that his weekly planning session became obsolete.
I have been test driving Frank's WorkFlowy model, which is primarily calendar/ tickler file based. It cuts the need for daily and weekly review down to almost nothing. If you are good at keeping up with current flow, this allows you to cut the batch size of "review" down to almost nothing, so you kind of have a constant "rolling review" with every small and usually effortless decision.
I have found it very interesting and a revelation. I've done a weekly review 99.9% of the weeks since 2006, and this week is the first time I didn't need to do one. I decided to break up my entire WorkFlowy system that I've been using for many years, to do a deep dive into Frank's system. Yesterday, which is the day I usually do my weekly review, I went to do one, and realized it was already done… cumulatively, by the micro decisions I had been making over the last week… a very interesting sensation for someone like me who finds review a natural part of my process.
I went down my Weekly Review/ Planning Flywheel (a set of questions and actions I do each Saturday to plan for the upcoming week) and realized that all of the steps had already been accomplished. I sat and stared at my computer screen, feeling like surely there was something more I needed to do, but "nope", everything was already done by the dozens of small decisions I had already made over the last several days.
In a subsequent conversation with David, he had the following to add:
As you have noted, [the timeline] cuts down quite a lot on overhead and admin work… I didn't do a weekly plan for the first week in probably 15 years… just reviewed what I'd already put into next week and maybe made a few slight adjustments. The rolling review that is constantly and intuitively taking place, replaces not only daily admin stuff, but also weekly planning as a bonus.
It all comes back to the core directive:
Push a task to the next logical, reasonable or opportune time on the timeline.
Weekly planning is there to… well, plan for the week ahead. With the WorkFlowy timeline, you get to plan your days, weeks and months ahead, one micro decision at a time.
If you know what you're wanting to achieve in a typical week—whether it be with a side project or leisure time with the family—anything you've been meaning to get to… as long as you know what it is you need to or want to do, you get to plan those things into your WorkFlowy timeline one micro decision at a time. And then, when you get to the end of the week, you will find that a weekly planning session to plan for the week ahead has become redundant.
You see, the WorkFlowy timeline allows you to adjust the timeline of your life in increments… a micro decision at a time.
Your timeline becomes a rolling review of your life. You get to continue, adjust course, tweak certain things, add things in or take things out. Since you're continually doing this on the go, there is no need for a dedicated weekly planning session.
Your next actions are plotted on your timeline at the next logical, reasonable or opportune time, so nothing is going to sneak up on you – you've also given enough leeway for the start times of certain projects or reminders. You had previously, in multiple moments, made micro decisions as you projected your thoughts ahead in time for each of the things you wanted or needed to get done. You'd already determined how much time you needed to set aside for anything before a certain deadline.
All that remains now, is to live out those things you've plotted on your timeline (since everything's there with an intention and for a reason)… and the planning now boils down to daily planning – the night before you live your next day: at the end of the day you would simply grab the items from the next day up in your calendar and populate your daily-planner time blocks with them.
You get to sculpt your next day from scratch in just a minute or two. You get to shape your day according to the things that you had already planned… the things you'd already decided in individual, micro decisions.
The whole reason that this is possible to begin with, is that you have all the actionable ingredients of your life plotted on your timeline already… and all of those things need to go somewhere – to their logical, reasonable or opportune place, one micro decision at a time. Whenever you add something to your timeline, immediately you need to figure out where it goes… so the planning is constantly happening—all the time, in baby steps—just not all in one go, in the form of an obligatory, weekly planning session.
There's absolutely no lack of planning with the timeline method. In fact, you might possibly spend more time planning, spread throughout a typical week, as you make micro decisions a step at a time – and so, in effect, you have already done your weekly planning ahead of time, but just not all in one go, on a specific day. You're like the teacher's pets who's handed in a project well ahead of schedule.
You get to make your decisions over a period of time. And I'd make the argument that you'd be making wiser, better-thought-out decisions over a period of time, as opposed to limiting the time frame of your planning to a single time slot.
A practical advantage to the timeline method, is that you never need to set aside a whole block of time for planning. Not necessarily – and so there is no way to have a lack of time for planning. There's no way to miss a planning session that is not scheduled. Let's say you would typically do your weekly planning on a Friday or a Sunday… maybe set aside an hour or two… but, it might so happen that on the day, for whatever reason, you don't or cannot get to it…
And so there's always the possibility that a weekly planning session might get sidelined—as life gets the better of you—and then you stumble into the next week less prepared than you would like to be. With the timeline, there is no essential, extended block of time that needs to be set aside – planning is baked into the system.
My wife used to keep every receipt – whether she was buying a loaf of bread, or filling the car up with gas… and then, once a month, she would sit down with this pile of receipts and figure out how much she was spending on certain things. I asked her why she didn't just log these expenses into an app she had on her phone immediately, so that she didn't have to sort through and categorize things at the end of the month.
She ended up giving up on that workflow altogether. But imagine that she was somehow required to do something with that receipt the moment she had it in hand… like maybe it would spontaneously combust in 10 seconds… or maybe she had no pockets or a purse – no place to put the receipt. That would have totally eliminated the hours of paperwork at the end of the month she used to put herself through. That's what iterative scheduling does: it gets things done by relying on one micro decision at a time. It creates a rhythm, as opposed to an entire project – another phrase I'm stealing from David Clark.
There's a highly practical form of planning, which presents itself in the way of reflecting. It borrows from the concept of the "forward log" – and in fact, you've already passed through that chapter on your way here: the one on "reflection logs".
I find that the dynamic of "reflection logs" closes the gap when it comes to the kind of thinking and planning that is needed for us to order and structure our lives according to the bigger picture. The timeline allows us to schedule certain "reflection logs" at any interval we would like to see them. Together with the more analytical "iterative scheduling", "reflection logs" allow for the kind of expansive thinking that is useful in planning at a higher level.
Looking Back: Archiving, Logging, Journaling →Workflowy is a minimalist note taking app that helps you organize your life. Simple enough to hold your grocery list, powerful enough to hold your entire life.
by Frank Degenaar