How do you plan?
I've been thinking about how indie hackers plan, either on a daily basis or generally planning out (the future of) their product.
- are there any approaches that you adopt?
- do you have any checklists, templates, frameworks or resources that you find useful to refer back to?
- do you write it all down? If so where/how?
Trello (when working with clients), //TODOs in the code, and my paper notebook which has the meticulously-copied product/project/problem post-its I've been jotting for years.
100% of my plans fail.
At first, I thought I'm just terrible at planning and it's my problem.
But then I realized that the world is changing super fast. I am changing. So it is OK to have plans to keep failing. You just move forward and it will be fine.
Yes, often I get frustrated that I can't find consistency with things. Then I remind myself to be kind to me and that things are still making progress and that is ok.
I use trello.
I have a list for each type of backlog. For example - marketing backlog, paid features backlog, and of course a general backlog.
I try to keep the top ~3 items of each list prioritized, after that it doesn't matter.
And every time I start working on something it goes to 'doing' list. This list has no more than 2-3 items.
All my planning starts with writing notes / drawing diagrams in my notebook.
I then try and put this into a longer-term strategic plan for the start of a new year using trello. I only put 4-5 things I want to achieve for the year. I.e. implementing a new financial model (Profit First) for the business, or develop a different way to onboard staff, external partners, clients etc.
From there we break it down into mini plans that is more like a to-do task list. Allocating who is responsible for what by when.
And finally I have a plan b. I call it a pivot plan. Mainly looking at an alternate business model for future implementation.
We use a combination of Slite.com and Trello to handle planning. Slite is pretty good for sharing information and processes for us to use, it saves us time from coming up with a say new sales templates, allows us to easily look up things like customer personas and notes on general strategy.
Notion.so is where I plan my projects, keep track of people to reach out to, manage things for freelancing clients, etc. It's so flexible, I use it for basically everything now.
I have a notebook that I write down ideas and work problems out. I'll create a list of all the things for a particular project. Boil it down to the smallest things and then adding those to a daily to-do list.
Today on my to-do list, I'm finishing up a printable for a new project and then putting it up on gumroad. I could have added "integrate into site", which is the next logical step after those.
That works for me:
How about yourself? How are you keeping the "Ministry" on the right path?
Personal Planning:
I use a simple note-taking app (Bear). I have a folder (hashtag) for notes related to my “docal”. I have a single note for each week that outlines the tasks I will do that week.
I have an 18 month vision for myself and I set quarterly objectives, following OKRs
(This might be too long of a time scale. I might change this to 6 weeks starting in January).
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Every week I do a retrospective / planning for the next week:
what have I done this week
what's my rating for myself this week
what would have improved my rating, and why didn't those things get done?
what are the outcomes i want for next week
what are some of the steps I can take to get to those outcomes (i.e. brainstorming different tasks)
every day I choose 1-3 'highlights' for the next day, things that I must get done that day before working on anything else (depending on the amount of client work / errands / other plans I have)
Once I finish the highlights for that day, I add more based on my start of week brainstorm/anything else that i've added to my task list.
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I generally use Trello for stuff like planing a new project or improving existing. Most often I have a list with ideas, and from there cards go to todo or research list.