How to Make a Sustainable Planning System
By: Deepti Kannapan
Tags: Project Management, Journaling, Planning, Sustainability, Productivity

I work best when I have a plan I believe in, but as soon as I reach the end of it, I lose all faith in planning and refuse to make a new one. The evidence of the value of planning is right in front of me, but it still takes a few weeks or months of dithering before I conclude for the hundredth time that fine, it’s worth the trouble, and I’ll start now.

A few months ago, I was between plans again. I’d just finished the first draft of my fantasy novel and busy procrastinating on planning the second draft. Plus, the 2020 election was keeping me occupied. I started keeping a daily notebook to navigate my structureless, aimless, befuddled days.

I also started making a master-index, cataloging all my past journals and notebooks. I dwelt on the past and present until I was ready to tackle the future.

However, by doing so, I also stumbled upon some upgrades to my planning system, which I hope will make the prospect less daunting going forward.

Writing every day in my notebook, I figured out that looking ahead at what’s on my plate for tomorrow helps me stay oriented and mentally prepared for busy days. Which, in turn, will build positive momentum, and hopefully carry over to the end of the project.

Paper and the cloud

When I first started writing every day, I wrote in an old college notebook that had some pages left. But it became clear that I was going to race through those in no time, so I bought a big stack of spiral-bound notebooks made from sugarcane paper (also known as bagasse).

I’ve been experimenting with various kinds of sustainable paper, and having plenty of it available removes obstacles to writing prolifically.

There is a range of paper qualities with sugarcane paper, and the one I have is rather thin, so the fountain pen ink I use bleeds through faintly. It gives my notes a rough, unpolished look, which I think suits the type of writing I do daily.

I like to use paper notebooks when writing down ideas, essays, and records that will be interesting for my future self to read. I now have journals that I write in weekly, quarterly, and daily. Flipping through them gives me a summary of my history, either in brief (quarterly) or in granular detail (daily).

Cataloging my old journals into a master index reinforced the value of keeping records at different timescales because they were just as comprehensible as ever, and immersed me in a different time period the second I read them.

In contrast, my planner is digital. The relevance of my daily schedules won’t last long, and they don’t make a good read.

Since I prefer to hand-write them rather than type, I keep my planner on a tablet (a reMarkable in my case, but any tablet with a stylus should do).

My tablet automatically backs everything up to the cloud, which is great for reliability. Storing an ever-expanding number of files to the cloud has sustainability impacts, so I plan to move the obsolete ones onto my hard-drive and delete them off the cloud.

They’ll still be around if I’m curious to read them unless my computer crashes or my external hard-drive fails. And that wouldn’t be a big deal either.

Plans for projects and timescales

There are two types of planning I do. One is for a period of time, like a daily or weekly plan where you decide what activity you are going to do for every section of the time period. For this, I hand-draw a schedule on my tablet, using a method similar to Cal Newport’s.

The second type of planning is for a project, where you break the project down into tasks, and potentially decide the order in which to do them, how many sessions to spend on each task, and how long those sessions will be. An example would be the plan I created for my novel’s first draft.

The two types of planning are initially independent of each other because you can make a daily plan to decide what to do all day, whether you have projects or not. And a project plan doesn’t need to specify which day or week you schedule your project sessions for. Theoretically, the project plan would be the same whether you did the sessions days or years apart. In practice, they would feel very different. (The two types of plans constrain each other if there are deadlines.)

Once you choose your projects, the two types of planning become interdependent. You decide your daily schedule by choosing tasks off your project plan.

For project plans, I use the HB90 planner, created by author Sarra Cannon. I download it onto my tablet and mark it up, and I only use the planning and calendar pages.

Part of the HB90 process is to make a Kanban board, so I have been experimenting with that. I made mine using a corkboard, with construction paper cards for tasks held in place by thumb-tacks.

My Kanban board in the background, with my stockpile of sugarcane paper notebooks in the foreground.

Reviews close the loop with plans

For the longest time, before I knew how to plan, I’d at least write down what I did. I found planning uncomfortable and intimidating because I didn’t have a good sense of how long tasks took, or how much activity I could comfortably sustain in a day. So I started with the part of the process I could handle and collected the information I needed to be able to plan, one day.

Now, reviewing the day, week, or planning cycle closes the loop on the plan, and provides the information I need to adapt it to the future.

Time-based reviews

I turned my bullet journal into a weekly journal, where I wrote down a few highlights from the week and looked at my calendar to see what appointments and deadlines were coming up and what I needed to do to prepare. Eventually, I also added some review questions as described in this blog by Ryan Hildebrandt about weekly reviews.

I don’t review my days, except informally in my daily notebook.

And at the midpoint and end of my planning cycle, which lasts about 12 weeks (as recommended by the book The 12-Week Year by B.P. Moran and M. Lennington), I review my progress in a format similar to the weekly one.

I have a separate notebook for these reviews, and they summarize large swathes of time. I estimated that my current cycle-review notebook will last a decade, which delights me. The compression! The brevity! The heady nostalgia of one day flipping through it!

Project reviews

Recently, I’ve also added a project log for a couple of long-term projects. They are pocket-sized notebooks made of 100% post-consumer waste recycled paper (except the binding, unfortunately, which may be plastic-based) called the Decomposition book, created by Michael Roger.

The project log is where I write down what I did each project session, and what the next task is.

The log preserves the context between project sessions, and also serves as a mini-review. Each entry is about half a page.

I don’t usually review my projects when I reach their end or any significant milestones, but I’m considering trying it this time around. I may use the HB90 planner pages at the end that were created for this purpose.

Summarizing the system

Every time-scale and project has a plan and a review.

Days

Planning: Informally look ahead at what’s scheduled for the next day, each night in my daily notebook (spiral-bound, and made of sugarcane paper); hand-drawn time-blocks on a tablet each morning.

Review: Informally in my daily notebook.

Planning: Informally look ahead at what’s scheduled for the next day, each night in my daily notebook (spiral-bound, and made of sugarcane paper); hand-drawn time-blocks on a tablet each morning. Review: Informally in my daily notebook. Weeks

Planning: Hand-written lists on a tablet.

Review: in a notebook that used to be my bullet journal. I don’t have a sustainable notebook in mind for its replacement yet.

Planning: Hand-written lists on a tablet. Review: in a notebook that used to be my bullet journal. I don’t have a sustainable notebook in mind for its replacement yet. 12-week cycles

Planning: an HB90 planner that I mark up on my tablet

Review: a thick travel journal I bought on Etsy.

Planning: an HB90 planner that I mark up on my tablet Review: a thick travel journal I bought on Etsy. Projects

Planning: a process that begins in the HB90 planner, and ends on a physical Kanban board.

Review: on a granular level, a project log in a pocket-size Decomposition book dedicated to a single project. TBD for any larger scale reviews.

Creating a planning system that uses sustainable paper and responsible use of cloud storage is an interesting design project to me, and I will continue to iterate on it to reach new levels of sustainability when I can.

I experiment with an optimistic and curious attitude and try not to fret over the parts of it that are not perfectly sustainable.

I’ve patched together a few systems I found in books and blogs and tailored them to my quirks, such as wanting my paper books to be a fun read, with the hope that I’ll enjoy the process and waffle less than usual when I have to restart the cycle again.`

I have no financial connection to any product mentioned in this post.

Here’s the workbook I use for researching and selecting sustainable products.