Build Your Day Backwards

Here's how almost everybody does whenever they are planning out their day.

They build their day forward.

They wake up, and then they look at what they wanna do today, and then they go, "Okay, here's my to-do list.

Let me put my schedule together," and then they go, and they try to do it.

And they push into the day, and you just kind of hope that it adds up to something.

Hopefully, you cross off a few things from that to-do list that you just made.

And that's the actual problem, and I did this for years, mind you.

I completely screwed this up for years.

But there's been some really interesting research done recently on this.

So there's researchers on productivity that study the difference between forward planning and backward planning.

So forward planning is what you would expect.

It's what everybody does.

They wake up, they make a to-do list, and then they go, "This is step one.

This is step two, third step, fourth step," and then they just keep going.

Backward planning is you actually start with the finished outcome that you want, and then you work your way backwards right into it.

And what they found is that people who planned backwards, like with the end in mind, were actually more motivated to take action.

They felt less pressure with time, and they were more likely to actually complete the thing they needed to complete.

Let me put that into plain language for you.

When you plan forward, you're kind of guessing, but you're kind of hoping today's effort will eventually turn into something, right? And that can feel more stressful because there's a lot of unknowns that are gonna be happening throughout the day.

But when you plan backwards, you're basically following a map that already exists.

Like, you set the destination, and then you work backwards to come up with a step-by-step plan.

Think about it like this.

You can't build a bridge from just one side, right? You have to know where the bridge actually lands, otherwise you're just laying concrete into water hoping that you're gonna get to the other side.

And so, like, the way you actually wanna look at it and dive into it is quite simple.

Step number one: you want to start at the end of the day, not at the beginning, okay? At the beginning of your day, I want you to ask yourself one question, "What has to happen today for me to lie down tonight and feel like today was a success?" And so you're basically starting today by looking at tonight when you're going to bed and asking yourself, "What has to happen today for today to actually be a success?" And notice what the question is not.