Coaching practices for Generative Work Planning
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Generative Work Planning, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I open my inbox first thing "just to clear it," and by the time I get to my real creative work my head is already full of everyone else’s requests and I can’t find the blank-page headspace anymore.
- I keep dragging the big-picture dreamers into the tedious finishing work and asking my finishers to brainstorm wild ideas, and everyone’s miserable and the handoffs are a mess
- My whole week is just a pile of work tasks, and the parts of me that matter
- I dream up the ideal plan first and only afterward bump it against my real budget and time, and then I’m stuck hacking away at something that was never going to fit
- I tend to figure out my plan the same morning I’m supposed to start, in a rush to just get going
Practices that may help
- Sequence creative tasks before reactive tasks each day
Do generative (creating) work before reactive (responding) work — never the other way around.
Task Batching: Grouping Similar Work to Cut Switching Costs - Assign project phases to genius-matched people
Route early ideation to Wonder/Invention geniuses and execution phases to Tenacity geniuses.
The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni) - Plan from roles and goals, not from tasks
Before listing tasks, list your key roles this week and name one meaningful goal for each.
Big Rocks First - Start from the constraint, not the goal
Define the hardest boundary first, then generate within it — rather than generating freely and pruning to the constraint.
Deliberate Constraints, Made Practical - Separate the planning session from the execution day
Do your planning in a dedicated session, never on the day you intend to start.
The Planning Fallacy — Why Your Estimates Are Always Wrong - Map your current edge: what is one step away from where you are?
List everything that is genuinely accessible from your current skills, relationships, and resources — your adjacent possible is defined by what you already have.
The Adjacent Possible, Made Practical - Protect time for work that matches your genius
Deliberately schedule blocks of genius-type work before filling the rest of the week.
The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni) - Create an ideal week template
Design a blank-canvas week that shows where each type of activity should live, before any specific week's demands arrive.
Ideal Week Design - Prototype to think, not to finish
Build or sketch something rough specifically to learn what you actually want.
Quantity Over Quality: How More Drafts Produce Better Work - Use a planning and strategy day
Reserve a recurring window for thinking about direction, reviewing systems, and planning the coming week.
Theme Days, Made Practical
Related concerns
- Weekly Planning
Before listing tasks, list your key roles this week and name one meaningful goal for each.
Plan from roles and goals, not from tasks
- Weekly Planning Roles
Before listing tasks, list your key roles this week and name one meaningful goal for each.
- Weekly Planning Window
On Monday morning (or Sunday evening), name three "big rocks" and block calendar time for each before anything else.
Identify and schedule big rocks at the start of each week
- Action Planning At Work
Action planning — specifying when, where, and how you will execute a goal-directed behavior — is one of the best-supported techniques for closing the intention-behavior gap. Orbell and Sheeran’s research, along with Peter Gollwitzer’s work on implementation intentions, shows that forming specific plans reliably increases behavior over vague intentions alone, with meta-analytic effect sizes in the small-to-medium range.
- Daily Planning Routine
The method only works consistently when the evening planning step is a fixed daily habit, not an occasional practice.
Make the evening list a non-negotiable daily ritual
- How To Organize Your Week By Type Of Work
Decide in advance which type of work each weekday is for and protect those assignments.
Assign a theme to each day of the week
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.