Using the Tools

In Section 1, we suggested creating an Essentialism Plan and a Daily Action Plan. The Essentialism Plan is a wide-scope perspective of goals you’d like to achieve in the near future (roughly two weeks). The Daily Action Plan is a detailed day-to-day breakdown of tasks that need to be accomplished to complete the goals of the Essentialism Plan.

Think of this as “Backwards Planning,” meaning you’ll begin this process with the end in mind: your 9 -12 month essential priorities. Once your hell yeah priorities are identified, you can then look at your daily activities with a new perspective, one that helps you determine whether your daily to-dos are helping you move toward your essential priorities or not.

In the DHOS workbook, you will create your first Essentialism Plan by prioritizing 4-6 things that are hell yeahs instead of 20 items of mixed importance. Once your priorities are in place, the overwhelming feeling of an endless to-do list begins to dissolve, and we can start budgeting time in our Daily Action Plan.

This section of the Developer Health OS corresponds to Cerebral Calisthenics #3 Burnout Recovery & #4 Burnout Prevention in the DHOS Workbook.