Understanding Executive Function: What It Is and Why It Matters
The Zoom Out, Zoom In Dance: A Foundation for Better Productivity
The Cognitive Foundations of Executive Function: Working Memory, Attention, and Processing Speed
The Daily Aiming Ritual: Putting Prioritization into Practice
In my previous posts, I introduced the concept of executive function, explored the "Zoom Out, Zoom In Dance" that separates planning from execution, discussed how to break down complex projects through Task Analysis, examined prioritization frameworks, shared the Daily Aiming Ritual, and explored how to build sustainable backlog and todo systems. Now I want to address a critical aspect of planning that ties these elements together: designing time management systems that work with your brain rather than against it.
This post completes our exploration of executive function support planning implementation by addressing when and how you'll tackle the tasks you've identified for execution. Effective time management during planning sets the stage for successful execution, creating the conditions that best support your ability to work.
The Planning vs. Execution Distinction in Time Management
Before diving in, I want to clarify an important distinction. Time management occurs in two distinct phases that require different approaches:
Time Management in Planning (our focus today) involves creating realistic schedules based on your energy patterns, developing accurate estimation skills, designing flexible structures for when particular tasks will occur, and integrating your calendar into your task management productivity systems. It also includes thoughtfully arranging your environment to support your time awareness during times you are working.
Time Management During Execution (which I'll address in a future post) involves maintaining awareness of time's passage while you're in the middle of executing tasks, recognizing when you've gone off your schedule, and making real-time adaptations to your work plan as unexpected events occur or as tasks take longer than anticipated to complete.
This distinction matters because the time management skills needed to address the challenges characteristic of each phase (planning vs. execution) are fundamentally different. Today, I'll focus on time management during the planning phase which involves helping you learn how to create structured schedules that will set you up for success.
Foundational Awareness: Setting Up Time Awareness Supports
A frequently overlooked aspect of time management planning is setting up systems that support your ongoing awareness of passing time. Before you can create effective work schedules, you need first to have in place reliable ways to help you accurately perceive time's passage.
Martin, a graphic designer with ADHD, would regularly find himself shocked to discover that three hours had passed since he started work, as subjectively it felt like only thirty minutes had passed. Martin's time perception challenge made it nearly impossible for him to stick to his work schedule, no matter how well constructed that work schedule was.
During our sessions, I worked with Martin to develop and implement "time anchors", which were specific environmental supports he could put in place to help support and maintain his awareness of time's passage:
Sensory anchors: We identified several options that felt right for Martin's workspace and preferences and which helped him better appreciate how much time had passed:
A subtle chiming clock that marked quarter hours
A visual Time Timer that showed time elapsing graphically
Audio playlists of a specific and known duration
Body-based anchors: We also incorporated physical reminders of passing time into Martin's schedule:
A hydration schedule that naturally marked time through the ritual of refilling his water bottle
Brief movement breaks at regular intervals
Helping him pay attention to hunger signals
What made these strategies effective was that they worked with Martin's sensory preferences rather than against them. Martin particularly resonated with auditory cues, so we emphasized including those in his system. For clients with different sensory profiles, I might recommend a focus on visual or movement-based cues.
Helping clients become more time-aware is truly transformative! They typically shift from feeling constantly surprised at elapsed time ("It's 3pm already!?") to developing a calm embodied sense of time's flow, substantially improving their ability to complete work on schedule. Your development of heightened time-awareness will likely also help you to create a better foundation for more effective work scheduling.
The Estimation Challenge: Understanding Task Duration
Even with improved time awareness, you may still struggle with another fundamental challenge: accurately estimating how long tasks will take to complete.
Elena, a marketing executive I worked with some time ago, consistently scheduled herself only one hour to complete a weekly report even though it reliably took her more like 90-120 minutes to actually complete the report. Each week, her miscalculation triggered a cascading schedule breakdown, pushing each subsequent task later into her day and creating a growing, stressful sense of falling behind in her work.
Nearly everyone has some difficulty with this "planning fallacy", or tendency to consistently underestimate how long it will actually take to complete a task. However, the problem is made much worse when the following factors are present:
Incomplete task visualization: Often, people don't take the time to clearly think through every step involved in completing a task. When this is the case, it becomes easier for them to misjudge how long it will take to execute that task.
Transition blindness: Often, people forget to include in their time estimate how long it takes them to set things up, to context-switch from the prior task to the next, and to wrap things up. All of these transitions need to be accounted for if your time estimation is to be accurate.
State-dependent estimation: Often, people fail to take into account that they may not have the amount of energy they initially anticipated having when working on particular tasks. As tasks take longer to complete when you have less energy, failing to accurately estimate your actual energy level at the time you start work may contribute to you making an inaccurate work time estimate.
Optimism bias: Often, people persist in believing that "this time will be different," despite knowing from actual experience that this is unlikely to be the case. Your wishful thinking about how long it may take you to complete a task may contribute to you getting your work time estimate wrong.
Addressing these time estimation challenges will require you to both pay more careful, deliberate and mindful attention to the task time estimation process, and as well, to observe yourself making estimation mistakes and developing systematic methods for correcting those mistakes.
As a way of assisting clients in developing their time estimation skills, I will often ask clients to conduct a simple experiment: for one week, track the actual time it takes you to complete your regular tasks, comparing this actual measurement against your estimates. This data-gathering approach reduces self-judgment and helps you develop more precise awareness of your personal patterns.
Rebecca, a famously absent-minded professor, discovered through this exercise that she consistently underestimated her writing tasks by 50-75% while slightly overestimating how long it took her to complete administrative tasks. This insight helped her apply appropriate adjustment factors to her different work task categories, dramatically improving her scheduling accuracy.
It's particularly important for you to pay attention to your shifting energetic and emotional states across the work day, and to learn how these states affect the accuracy of your estimations. If you engage in your planning session in the morning when you are most refreshed, awake and energetic, it is natural for you to assume you'll continue to feel this way throughout the remainder of your day. This assumption is often false! You are, in fact, more likely to experience fluctuations in your energetic state across the day, for instance, feeling less energetic after eating your mid-day meal. If you don't anticipate that you may feel less energetic later in the day, you are more likely to mistake how long tasks will take you to complete later in the day. Becoming more aware of this bias and intentionally adjusting for it will help you create more accurate and realistic schedules.
Processing Speed and Time Management
As we explored in "The Cognitive Foundations of Executive Function," processing speed, which has to do with how quickly your brain takes in, interprets, and responds to information, fundamentally affects your time perception and time management in ways that traditional productivity systems rarely address.
Individuals who process information faster tend to prefer more densely packed work schedules, and may underestimate how long tasks will take others to complete. They can become impatient when needing to slow down for slower co-workers or when they have to engage with slower-paced work activities. They may excel at making quick decisions but may also be prone to missing important detail.
In contrast, people with moderate to slower processing speeds tend to benefit from a less densely packed work schedule and may become easily stressed when faced with tightly scheduled days. They may benefit from having more buffer time between scheduled activities. They may need more time working before they can arrive at complex decisions. However, they may also end up attending to the information they're working through more thoroughly as a result of them taking more time.
Though there are individual differences with regard to processing speed (some people really do work faster than others!), it is also the case that your processing speed isn't fixed, but rather fluctuates across the day in response to factors like your energy level, stress, and cognitive load. You'll likely have more energy at certain times of day and less at others. Effective time management must account for these natural variations.
Here are some useful time management strategies for people with different processing speeds:
When Your Processing Speed is Variable, you should:
Schedule your complex thinking tasks to occur during your peak cognitive hours
Build in buffer or transition time between your scheduled activities to better help you accommodate processing speed fluctuations
Use visual timers to help you maintain your awareness of time passing
Create and utilize "speed shifting" transition rituals when you need to move between more and less demanding work activities
When You're Usually a Faster Processor you should:
Deliberately build time for quality checks into your work schedule to prevent yourself from overlooking important details
Make use of systematic work process checklists and flow-charts to better ensure your thoroughness
Practice your time estimation skills by comparing your estimates against actual completion times, helping you develop more accurate perceptions
Create a dense but varied work schedule to assist you in maintain attention and engagement
When You're Usually a Slower Processor you should:
Build protected focused work periods into your schedule (to help you remain free from interruptions)
Use time-blocking approaches where you schedule yourself to work on particular tasks for a particular amount of time
Schedule deliberate breaks between complex tasks
Set yourself the goal of becoming more realistic and accurate with regard to making estimates
Accept that some work tasks will take you longer (so that you don't stress about it when this happens)
The best time management system for you will be one that best supports your natural processing patterns while building in appropriate supports to assist your productivity when needed.
Calendar Approaches: Finding Your System
All time management systems require a calendar. Importantly, your choice of calendar system isn't neutral, instead interacting with your cognitive style and sensory processing patterns to either better support or detract from your time management. During work planning, your choice of calendaring system can dramatically affect your ability to create and maintain an effective schedule.
Here are some things to keep in mind when considering what sort of calendar system will best fit your needs:
Digital vs. Analog: Digital calendars are best at synchronization across devices and computers, automation, and automated notifications prompting you to attend to specific work tasks. If you're using digital task management software, you'll also likely find that a digital calendar will best and most seamlessly integrate with that digital software. While paper and pen systems are decidedly lacking in these powerful automation features, they do have their merits. People with sensory sensitivity issues may find that a paper calendar is best for tactile engagement, and as a means of reducing screen fatigue.
Time Horizon: While some people process information better when they can see the 'big picture' of their work plan as it plays out over multiple days, weeks or months, other people find such a broad view of their work plan to be overwhelming and instead benefit from a simpler view showing them only what they need to work on today.
Visual Density: Similarly, some people work best when they can see the 'big picture' of their work plan in all its detailed glory, while other people find too much detail fatiguing and overwhelming and get better results using a calendar that hides detail until it is needed.
Thomas, a consultant with ADHD, struggled with standard calendar formats that showed time in equal-sized hour blocks. He found that using a specialized calendar which used variable-sized blocks to visually represent the actual duration of events, substantially improved his ability to engage in realistic planning and estimating.
Conversely, Jenna, a designer with sensory sensitivities, found digital calendars overwhelming. The bright screens, notification sounds, and dense information formatting all contributed to her sensory overload. Recognizing this was the case, Jenna switched over to using a simple paper planner with a generous margin on each page where she was able to make notes. She used colored pencils to make clear different categories of activities, which further improved her planning experience.
The best calendar approach for you fits your specific cognitive and sensory needs while helping you avoid unnecessary complexity.
Bridging Systems: Calendar and Task Integration
A critical aspect of time management planning involves effectively integrating your calendar system (which describes when things need to happen) with your task management system (which describes what things needs to happen). Calendar and task management systems are often maintained separately (for instance, as two separate software programs, or two separate paper documents), with this separation contributing to the ease with which you can experience a disconnect between your intentions and your execution.
Nathan, a business consultant I work with, maintained an impressive task management system in Todoist and a meticulously organized calendar in Google Calendar. Yet he still found himself missing important tasks and deadlines. As we explored his process, it became clear that Nathan's Todoist and Calendar programs weren't effectively communicating with each other. Tasks with hard deadlines weren't consistently highlighted in Nathan's calendar, and calendared commitments weren't visible when Nathan was making his daily task selection.
Integrating calendar and task management systems is particularly important and particularly difficult to accomplish for people with executive function challenges. Effective integration between these systems requires you to consistently have enough energy to manage keeping two separate systems up-to-date, each with content from the other.
Some time and task integration approaches I've found effective include:
Task-to-Calendar Workflow: Creating your integrated system in such a way as to cause all of your deadline-based tasks to appear on your calendar. This outcome can be automated with software, or you could create a manual process that ensures that each deadline-based task that enters into your task management system also gets appropriately placed into your calendar.
Calendar-first planning: It is also possible to use your calendar as your primary planning tool, in which case your creation of task lists and your prioritization of tasks within those lists are heavily influenced by how tasks appear on your calendar. Given its natural emphasis on the timing of work tasks, a calendar-first planning system might make sense for someone who wants most of all to insure that they no longer miss important deadlines.
Unified tools: Some of my clients have found that using a single tool that handles both calendar and task management reduces their system integration burden. The major problem with this approach is that in most cases there is no single integrated task-management-plus-calendaring tool that matches the features and functionality of the less integrated tools, causing many people to prefer continuing to use separate best-of-breed tools to handle each function.
How you end up managing the integration of task definitions and task timings directly impacts your psychological experience of time management. The less well integrated your calendar and task systems are, the more likely you are to experience uncertainty about what you should be doing at any given moment.
Scheduling Approaches: Timeboxing vs. Timeslotting
When approaching time management planning, I've found it valuable to distinguish between two fundamentally different approaches to arranging your work tasks in your calendar: timeboxing and timeslotting. These techniques serve different purposes and therefore one or the other of them will tend to work better for you depending on the nature of your executive function challenges.
Timeslotting involves scheduling specific tasks to occur at specific times. For example, "Write quarterly report from 10:00-11:30am." The implication here is that you will have completed the work task by the end of the allotted time. The timeslotting approach provides you very concrete guidance on what work to do and for how long. It works well for people who benefit most from external structure and clear expectations, and when the work they are doing is simple and well understood. The downside of timeslotting is that it is quite vulnerable to estimation errors. Your reliance on the timeslotting technique can expose you to significant stress when it becomes the case that the work you've undertaken ends up taking longer to complete than you thought it would.
Timeboxing involves you allocating blocks of time during which you work on specific tasks without necessarily completing them. For example, "Work on quarterly report for 90 minutes in the morning." This approach focuses on input (how much time you'll spend) rather than output (whether you complete your tasks). Timeboxing is the better technique to use when you are working on complex tasks where you cannot easily predict how long they will take to complete.
Katherine, a financial analyst with significant anxiety around task completion, would create detailed timeslotted schedules that inevitably fell apart when her tasks consistently took longer than estimated to complete. She came to work with me in the middle of a rather devastating cycle of perceived failure and self-criticism related to how ineffective she felt she was. Katherine's anxiety decreased significantly when we shifted her to use the timeboxing approach for scheduling her more complicated tasks. Katherine's shift towards focusing on what she was working on at a given time, rather than when she expected to be finished with that work dramatically improved her feelings of psychological safety while still providing her with helpful and motivating structure.
Conversely, Michael, a teacher with ADHD, found timeboxing too ambiguous during his planning. The open-ended nature of "work on grading for two hours" task definitions left too much room for him to become distracted resulting in him ending up task switching and procrastinating. Michael ended up benefiting most from more specific timeslotting scheduling: "Grade economics papers from 3:00-4:00pm, then switch to biology quizzes from 4:00-5:00pm."
Timeboxing often works better for those whose anxiety is triggered by perceived failure or rigid expectations, while timeslotting typically works better for those who struggle with sustaining focus in the absence of defined working periods. You don't have to choose between these techniques. Instead, you can strategically use both approaches based on the type of tasks you are working on and your personal regulatory needs.
Implementation Intention Planning: Bridging Plan to Action
One powerful strategy that bridges time management planning and execution involves setting "implementation intentions", which are specific if-then plans for when, where, and how you'll complete tasks. Creating these detailed plans during your planning phase significantly increases the likelihood that you will successfully complete your plans.
Rather than just scheduling yourself to "Work on presentation" from 2:00-4:00pm, an implementation intention would specify: "At 2:00pm, I will go to the quiet corner desk, close my email, put on my focus playlist, and open PowerPoint to continue working on the sales presentation outline."
Lisa, a researcher with significant task-initiation difficulties, would schedule appropriate work blocks but then struggle to actually begin her planned and scheduled tasks. We discovered that the transition from seeing a task on her calendar to actually starting the work involved Lisa having to make numerous small decisions (where to sit, which materials to use, how to set up her environment) that together created enough friction to stall her momentum.
Lisa managed to dramatically improve her follow-through by developing detailed implementation intentions during planning. The specificity of Lisa's implementation intentions helped protect her from having to make decisions during the vulnerable task initiation phase, and reduced the "friction" she experienced when moving from intention to action.
A useful feature of implementation intentions is that they can include physical state considerations, connecting your physical state to your tasks. For instance, you might create the following implementation intention to help you manage stress associated with executing a task: "If I notice myself getting tense while writing, then I will take three deep breaths and roll my shoulders before continuing." Physical components of implementation intentions can help you better manage the regulatory aspects of task execution that threaten to derail your productivity.
Creating implementation intentions during planning saves your cognitive resources during execution, when your ability to make decisions might be compromised by stress or fatigue. This approach applies the "Zoom Out, Zoom In Dance" we discussed earlier where you make detailed decisions during planning mode so that your execution mode can proceed more smoothly.
Energy-Aligned Scheduling: Working With Your Natural Rhythms
Having covered improving time awareness, time estimation accuracy and choices for how you can integrate various aspects of your productivity system, we can now address perhaps the most crucial aspect of effective time management: aligning your work schedule with your body's natural energy rhythms.
Traditional scheduling approaches focus on logical task sequencing and deadline proximity. The embodied executive function support approach I teach emphasizes the importance of matching the types of tasks you need to work on with your natural energy fluctuations throughout the day. What makes this approach particularly valuable is that it reduces your overall self-regulation burden. When you schedule demanding tasks to occur during times when your capacity is naturally higher, you don't need to work as hard in order to maintain your focus and motivation.
The physical experience of sensing your natural energy fluctuations is often subtle. You might notice physical tension when you try to process too much information too quickly or when your energy is too low to support the type of work you're trying to accomplish. Conversely, you might experience a sense of flow and ease when working at your optimal processing pace at a time of day when you have ample energy to get your work done. Such subtle bodily signals are worth attending to as they provide you with valuable information you can use to adjust your schedule and pacing expectations as you go along.
David, a software developer I worked with, noticed a distinct pattern in his energy and focus. David's mornings were usually characterized by clear, analytical thinking. In the early afternoon David tended to experience an energy dip, with late afternoons bringing out a different energetic state in which he felt less focused but instead more creative and associative. Despite recognizing this pattern, David persisted in scheduling his most difficult coding tasks for early afternoon because that's when the day's meetings ended, leaving him feeling frequently frustrated.
David's productivity and satisfaction improved as we restructured his schedule to better align with his natural rhythms, eg., with him shifting to do more complex coding in the morning, administrative and simpler tasks during his afternoon dip, and exploratory or creative work in the late afternoon.
At first glance, it might appear that this energy-aligned approach to work scheduling is mostly about asserting your freedom to set your own work schedule. While such planning freedom is certainly nice, the deeper reason I recommend energy-aligned work scheduling is that when you implement it, you'll become more productive than you otherwise would. Aligning the type of work you need to do with your energetic fluctuations is most primarily about aligning your effort with your neurobiological reality. For example, we naturally cycle through periods of higher and lower alertness (ultradian rhythms), typically in 90-120 minute waves. These patterns are, in turn, influenced by circadian rhythms, your food intake, your movement and exercise and a host of other physiological factors.
To best implement this energy-aligned approach to scheduling your work, I recommend that you:
Track your energy patterns: Before you make any changes to how you schedule your workday, spend some time up-front noticing at what time of day you naturally feel most alert, creative, focused, social, or fatigued. Look for consistent patterns across days, and then use those patterns to inform your work scheduling.
Assign your tasks to energy categories: Identify which tasks require intense focus, creative thinking, social energy, etc. You'll see that some more complex tasks are best done when you are in a high-energy, highly focused state, while other simpler more routine tasks are best done when your energy is lower.
Match your tasks to energy states: Schedule your most demanding or important work during your peak energy periods; reserve lower-energy periods for routine tasks or breaks.
Honor your need for recovery: Don't forget to include intentional work breaks in your scheduling and/or some alternation of lighter activities you can work on following periods of more intensive work focus.
Recovery and Renewal Planning: The Missing Element
A critical element of time management that traditional approaches often neglect involves intentionally including recovery and renewal periods into your work schedule. While it is possible to get a lot of work done in a short period of time by pushing yourself hard to perform, this approach is not typically sustainable in the long-term. Instead, the most consistently productive individuals I've observed over the years manage to stay productive without working constantly by strategically switching back and forth between periods of focused work and deliberate recovery.
When I first met Sophia, a nonprofit director, she was scheduling her days in solid work blocks starting at 8am and going until 7pm. She was exhausted and quite alarmingly found her effectiveness declining as each day progressed. As we examined her work scheduling patterns, we realized she was ignoring her body's natural need for cyclical recovery throughout the day.
We restructured Sophia's work schedule to include three types of renewal elements:
Micro-recoveries: Sophia started allowed herself to take brief 2-5 minute breaks between her tasks for stretching, breathing, or simply shifting her attention
Periodic breaks: Sophia further allowed herself to take longer 15-20 minute recovery periods roughly after each 90 minute period of focused work she completed
Full recharge blocks: Finally, Sophia started taking 30-60 minute rest periods for complete mental shifts (walking, meditation, social connection) when she noticed she was experiencing one of her natural energy dips
The introduction of rest breaks into Sophia's busy work schedule did not reduce her productive output. Instead, these changes actually increased her output by helping her ensure she began each new work period with renewed energy and focus. These changes also dramatically reduced Sophia's perceived stress and improved her subjective enjoyment of being at work.
Rest and recovery cycles aren't just optional kindnesses you allow yourself. They reflect your underlying physiological reality. Your nervous system, attention networks, and glucose metabolism all operate most optimally when you allow appropriate recovery periods to occur between periods of intense work. Ignoring your need for physiological recovery would be like trying to drive a car cross-country without stopping for gas. If you did that, you'd quickly find your car out of gas and unable to move forward until its gas tank was refilled. Similarly, you'll also find yourself depleted and "out of gas" when you don't allow yourself sufficient rest and renewal breaks between periods of intense work.
External Constraints: Navigating the Reality of Commitments
One of the more challenging aspects of time management for planning involves navigating the tension between externally imposed time constraints (like meetings, deadlines and commitments to others) and your internal rhythms. This tension creates significant stress for many of my clients, particularly those with executive function challenges.
James, a marketing manager, found himself constantly torn between his organization's meeting-heavy culture and his need for blocks of uninterrupted focused time scheduled during his energy peaks. This tension left James feeling perpetually out of sync, unable to complete complex work at his most optimal times.
I worked with James to develop several strategies for managing his external constraints:
Protected work blocks: I encouraged James to identify when (at what times of the day) his normal peak energy windows occurred and then to assertively advocate to keep those times as meeting-free as possible so that he could instead engage in productive work.
Transparent communication: I encouraged James to share his daily energy fluctuation patterns with selected colleagues and supervisors, encouraging him to seek out permission to align his most difficult tasks with the times of day he was most able to perform them.
Strategic attendance: We analyzed James' meetings, dividing them into those where he really needed to pay close attention and participate actively, and those where he could more easily contribute asynchronously.
Preparation shifts: To help James manage immovable meetings occurring at non-ideal times, we encouraged him to develop pre-meeting routines to help himself shift his energy state to one more in sync with the needs of each meeting
Recovery buffers: I encouraged James to schedule a brief buffer for himself after each draining meeting to help him reset before attempting renewed focused work
One noteworthy aspect of the tension between externally imposed time constraints and your internal rhythms is how often you will know this is happening because of how it manifests physically, for instance as painful symptoms like headaches, digestive issues, and sleep disturbances. While these physical signals are stress responses, they are also an important source of information that can help you judge how well you're managing. When such symptoms are urgently present, it's a clear sign that you have some alignment work to do.
Backwards Planning from Deadlines
Now that we've explored the foundational elements of time management for planning, let's look at how they come together in perhaps their most powerful application: backwards planning from deadlines. This approach combines task analysis, estimation, calendar integration, and energy alignment to create realistic timelines for complex, deadline-driven projects.
Backwards planning involves starting with your end goal and deadline, then working backwards to determine when each component task needs to be completed. This creates a road map that distributes work intelligently across the available time rather than leaving everything to be completed at the last minute.
Amanda, a writer with ADHD, struggled with meeting book chapter deadlines. She would either start too late and face impossible time pressure, or begin too early and lose focus as she was distracted by more immediately pressing tasks. Using backwards planning transformed her approach:
Starting point clarity: We first identified Amanda's final deadline and specific deliverable requirements
Milestone identification: We broke the chapter into logical and sequenced component tasks (research, outlining, drafting, revising, final editing)
Duration estimation: For each component task, Amanda estimated how much time she needed to get it done, applying her known adjustment factors while doing this (she typically underestimated her writing time by 60%)
Buffer allocation: We added appropriate buffer time to schedule for Amanda's milestones, scheduling more buffer for higher-uncertainty tasks
Energy alignment: We arranged for Amanda to work on first drafts during her creative peak times of the day and separately, to engage in editing during her more analytical periods
Recovery planning: We explicitly had Amanda schedule recovery periods following intense writing sessions
Calendar integration: Amanda added all milestones and working sessions to her calendar, complete with implementation intentions
Visualization: Amanda created a visual timeline showing the full path of the work she needed to complete from start to deadline
One of the most significant benefits of backwards planning is how it redistributes deadline anxiety. Rather than procrastinating while your deadline remains far off, experiencing mounting dread as it approaches and finally getting to work at the last minute, the backwards planning method spreads out the emotional energy associated with the deadline across multiple smaller milestone deadlines which are closer in time than the final deadline. Each milestone you complete provides you a sense of progress and relief, creating momentum that helps you avoid procrastination.
The execution aspects of managing deadline anxiety will be covered in a future post. For now, it's enough to know that investing your time creating this sort of distributed milestone project plan can pay off in terms of helping you experience better emotional outcomes later on as you execute. For many of my clients, especially those prone to procrastination, this method for deliberately managing and spreading out deadline anxiety is a motivational lifesaver.
The backwards planning approach requires all the skills we've discussed: task breakdown, realistic estimation, calendar-task integration, energy alignment, and creation of detailed implementation intentions. It represents the culmination of effective planning-phase time management.
Integration with the Daily Aiming Ritual
Time management planning doesn't exist in isolation, but instead integrates directly with the Daily Aiming Ritual. During your morning planning session, time management becomes a key component of deciding what to work on and when.
The Daily Aiming Ritual provides the daily reflection point where you:
Review your calendar to see the day's commitments
Check your energy level and adjust task selection accordingly
Identify priority tasks and assign them to appropriate time blocks
Create implementation intentions for key transitions
Ensure recovery periods are present, acknowledged and protected
Make adjustments based on the previous day's learnings
Your regular practice of the Daily Aiming Ritual helps you shift your time management skillset from an initially quite effortful and theoretical exercise towards a spontaneous and embodied daily habit. Over time and with practice, the approaches I've shared become more intuitive and require less of your conscious effort. The Daily Aiming Ritual provides the structured space in which you maintain and refine these planning practices.
Implementing Your Personalized System
Bringing these concepts together will require you to experiment and personalize. The most effective time management system is one you create to best align with your unique patterns and needs. I encourage my clients to approach building your system more as a continuous practice and ongoing process and less like a static solution.
Start with awareness of your patterns: your time perception tendencies, estimation accuracy, energy fluctuations, and transition needs. Use this awareness to design a preliminary system, then refine it as you use it so that it improves over time.
Remember that the purpose of a time management system isn't to guarantee your perfect adherence to a plan. Instead it is about creating the supportive structure that helps you best direct your energy toward getting done what you think matters most. Some days will go according to plan but many won't. That's normal and okay. The goal is for you to build a system resilient enough to adapt to reality as you find it while still providing you helpful guidance.
In my next post, I'll introduce "The Rhythm of Productivity: Managing Transitions for Optimal Focus" – a framework for understanding the different types of transitions needed to facilitate productive work. This will begin our exploration of the transition rituals that can help you navigate smoothly between different modes of work.
This is the eighth in a series exploring executive function and productivity. In my next post, I'll introduce "The Rhythm of Productivity: Managing Transitions for Optimal Focus" – a framework for understanding the different types of transitions needed during productive work.