Part 2: Feed The Animals (FTA)
The second part of my daily action plan is something I call "Feed The Animals," or "FTA" for short.
What the hell is FTA?
Before we moved to Texas, we owned a five-acre Christmas tree farm in British Columbia.
After a bear ate 11 of our 15 chickens in one night, the remaining 4 were too traumatized to lay eggs. So we fed and watered and cleaned-up after those free-loading chickens for months, waiting in vain for the laying to resume.
(Our "chicken tractor" before the bear came)
My point is this: animal feeding is a peculiar type of work. It isn't hard, or complicated. It isn't "game-changing," either. But if you DON'T do it… the animals die.
One day, when I was trying to explain to my wife why I had to duck up to my office for a few minutes to check on an advertising campaign, even thought it was a holiday, I told her it was like "feeding the animals." She laughed at the analogy… but it clicked for her.
It's been our humorous shorthand for tedious-yet-necessary forms of work ever since.
So, FTA is "Feed The Animals."
Part II: FTA
Here's how it looks on my one page action plan:
For me, I treat as FTA…
* All meetings
* Most phone calls
* Checking email
* Creating and reading reports
The key here is that I push all my Feed the Animals work to the afternoon, AFTER my Core work.
I limit myself to no more than 5 or 7 items… doing the mental math to make sure I'm not adding more than I can get done in my allotted FTA work window.
Why?
This is huge… the biggest secret to my system BY FAR:
I don't finish the work day until and unless my list is done.
EVER.
It's 100% execution, every day.
If something comes up… if one of the kids is sick and my workday gets thrown…
That means I go back up to my office after dinner, pick up the thread, and get the list done.
No matter what.
I used to treat each day's action plan as negotiable… working to "get as much done as possible."
But what I learned was this: that thinking will destroy you. It's a slippery slope… a cancer that slowly coopts the entire organism, causing it to rot from the inside out.
I KNOW THIS because that was my life in my twenties and much of my thirties.
Now don't lose heart: don't think for a minute that means this system depends on Herculean effort.
The secret to 100% execution isn't working crazy hours: it's shortening your to-do list.
It's in exercising extreme prejudice on what you will and won't put on your list… in not putting something on there unless you know you can and WILL get it done.
See the difference?
This daily action plan process is one of THE most powerful things you can do… so if you take NOTHING else from this series, do yourself a favor and TRY IT.
Now, a word of warning:
As powerful as this action plan is, it's just one part of my productivity system… the tip of the iceberg:
What you DON'T see is the page I write BEFORE this page…
Or the reason I never set deadlines on goals but EXTREME deadlines on something else…
Or why "Dark Goals" are so important…
Or the one master habit the entire system depends on.
If what you've read so far has struck a nerve, then read on: the best is yet to come.
I'll tell you everything: show you the guts of the entire system… tell you the whole crazy story.
It all began on a clearcut mountainside near Pentiction, British Columbia, back in 1996.
