Overview #
The Planning feature is used to define, capture and report on the capacity of the user to make the most of their time.
A plan within Good Day is a set of tasks and habits that are set to be completed within a given timeframe. The planning features are designed to allow the user to learn from experience and make the best plans for what can be achieved in the available time.
What is the purpose of a plan? #
Whilst goals provide focus, the primary purpose of a plan is to ensure that the user makes a realistic assessment of what can be achieved over a given time duration.
The sensible use of planning will ensure that the user schedules work that can be genuinely achieved within the given timeframe, and that the workload over an extended timeframe is kept at a level that the user can sensibly support.
Planning cycles #
Good Day supports multiple planning cycles, allowing a plan to defined at a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, half-yearly or 12-week interval.
The user can choose to use all or just some of these cycles. The Good Day recommendation is that the user focus on planning in three cycles: quarterly, monthly, and weekly.
Planning – key concepts #
The planning process involves a number of concepts.
- Plan cycle: The plan duration, which can be either daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, 12-week or half yearly.
- Plan lifetime: Each plan will have a start date, a duration, and a finish date. For example, a weekly plan may start on Monday, 3 March 2025, have a week duration, and a finish date of Sunday, 9 March 2025.
- Plan content: When a plan is saved, it is associated with all tasks and habits that are scheduled to be completed within the plan lifetime.
- Plan score: Once it is complete, each plan will be given a score to help measure planning effectiveness. If the user completes all tasks and habits that were part of the plan content, then the plan score will be 100%. If none of the tasks and habits are completed, then the score will be 0%.
- MIT (aka ‘Most Important Task’): Not all tasks are equally important. Within a plan, the user should be looking to complete a MIT, rather than others that are not. Within Good Day, a MIT is defined as a task with a top level priority rating. By default, this is any task that has a priority value of ‘1’ or ‘2’. This definition is open to user configuration.
- Plan score weighting: To help the user focus on the most important tasks, the plan scoring calculation is weighted to favour the completion of MIT over other tasks. By default, the weighting is 60% for MIT, 30% for other tasks, and 10% for habits. The weighting ratios can be configured by the user.
- Task story points: Each task may be assigned a ‘story point’ value. This numeric value can be used to set the likely effort to complete the task. How that value is interpreted is left to the user. It can be used as a literal measure of time (e.g. hours). Still, generally a story point scoring method can be abstract as it is intended to reflect the effort required to complete the task, the complexity of that effort and the level of unknowns. It is recommended that the user settle in their own mind a number of values that can be used to reflect the range of task sizes they will usually encounter.
- Burn-down chart: A burn-down chart shows the number of story points of tasks open at a given date during a plan. If the tasks are sensibly allocated over the plan duration, the burn-down should show a line that descends consistently over the plan duration. On that basis, the burn-down chart is a simple vehicle to show the user whether they are on track for completing all plan tasks.
Configuring planning options #
The user may define how planning is managed and exposed within Good Day. This is configured via the ‘Planning’ tab in the User Settings form.
The user may define:
- What planning cycles are active
- For the daily cycle, what days of the week are active for daily planning
- The priority ratings that are to be taken as MIT
- The plan score weightings across MIT, other tasks and habits
- Plan results chart colours.
Planning process – main steps #
The recommended approach for creating a plan covers the following main steps:
- Select the plan content – this is about identifying the most important tasks that are to be completed during the plan timeframe.
- Review the plan content story point estimates
- Progress goals – Use the plan planning view to verify that the task effort is spread across the plan duration
- Verify work over plan duration – Use the plan planning view
- Check that planned work loads against historical trends
- Save the new plan
Avoiding common planning issues #
The three common dangers of a poorly defined plan are:
- An overly optimistic view of what can be achieved –
- A front-loading of the plan content at the start of the plan
- Not working on activities that move the priority goals forward
Planning page #
The ‘Planning’ page provides access to a range of functions related to defining, tracking and reviewing time based plans.
A plan is a snapshot of tasks and habits that are scheduled to be completed within a given time duration. A plan can set to cover a day, week, month, quarter , 12-week period or half year.
The page starts on the ‘Overview tab showing a list of open active plans.
- To open a plan click anywhere within a list entry card.
- To close a plan swipe the entry to the right
- To delete a plan, swipe the entry to the left.
To create a new plan, click on the ‘New plan’ button
Choose the required plan type and period, and click on the ‘Create’ button to start a new plan.
Planning trends #
The ‘Trends’ tab shows a series of charts related to plan progress and outcomes.
At the top of the page, the ‘Planning period’ dropdown selector allows the user to change the period type being shown in the charts.
The trends tab panel shows five charts:
- Scores: This shows a trend line chart of the weighted percentage scores attributable to MIT, other tasks and habits over time.
- Sentiment: This line chart shows the user sentiment at the start of plan measured against the sentiment at the plan’s end.
- Story points: This line chart shows the target story points for a plan and the actual story points completed.
- Task outcomes: This line chart shows the trends on tasks that were not completed as part of a plan.
- Goal progress: This chart shows the trend of story points completed against the associated goals.