You hear it all the time. “Do it now”, “Just do it!”, and whatever variation of this you can think of.

Sure. If there is some specific task that you have been procrastinating on… just f*cking do it. But don’t listen to that advice if you are searching for information about how to stay productive over long periods of time.

You need careful planning for that. Very careful planning. Why? A few reasons: First, you absolutely need to know what you are doing, why you are doing it, and for how long. It sounds fairly obvious, but it is not. At least not for my fellow students, or for my colleges at work. Even I fall into reading a book, not sure what I am looking for or why I am doing it. It almost always fails. I end up thinking the book is no good, when in fact I just don’t know why I am reading it.

I put a time limit to almost everything I do (16 minutes left to finish this post — sorry, no picture today), mainly because working in bursts is the only way to keep the work focused.

Second, you want to limit useless work as much as possible. This is best done with careful planning. Spend as much time finding out what needs to be done, and the easiest way to go about it; as you do on actually working. Whenever I am not working, I always keep my todo-list right next to me so I can constantly revise it.

Third, overall picture. This is really simple. You just want to make sure, that whatever you do in your daily life, somehow follows a bigger plan. You need to be going somewhere, or your life will get stuck really quickly. Again… planning.

I hardly think that it is possible to plan in enough detail. As long as you keep your mind open a long the way, and ask yourself, if the work you are currently doing, is getting you any closer to your goal. This is especially important when studying. “Is what I am reading now, actually giving me information I didn’t know about the subject I need to learn? Is it doing so fast enough? Is it going into enough detail?” and so on.

Plan. In the beginning you will find out that you don’t know for how long you should make yourself work. You will probably overestimate yourself and get frustrated with not being able to stay focused for the entire duration. This is fine however. If you find, that after 20 minutes you can’t stay focused any longer; set the time limit to 20 minutes next time. Just be aware that the time you can stay focused varies a great deal from activity to activity. You tend to be able to stay focused for longer if the activity involves physical movement. But just experiment with it…

When time is up, write down what needs to be done next; and stop. What you wrote about what needs to be done next, goes on your todo-list. This way, next time, you will know exactly where to start.

Engineers do the planning, and the construction workers do the actual work. The engineers get paid a lot more because planning is actually the most difficult thing of the two. The same goes for planning your life. It takes skill to plan properly. But unlike for engineers, you actually have a lot of room for failure. You life won’t repeat itself, but the days will. Work will.

Don’t do it now. Plan now, and do it when you know what, why and for how long.