How specific should a daily outcome be?

Specific enough to evaluate by end of day with a yes/no. 'Do meaningful work' fails this test. 'Finish the first draft of the technical specification' passes it. The evaluability criterion is the most reliable quality filter for outcome statements.

What if my daily outcome is dependent on other people?

Set outcomes you control. 'Send the proposal to the client' is controllable. 'Get client approval on the proposal' isn't — their decision is out of your control. For interdependent outcomes, frame around your input, not the external output.

Can outcome-based planning work for maintenance-heavy roles?

Yes, though the outcomes look different. For a customer support manager, an outcome might be 'complete all high-priority ticket reviews before 2pm' or 'complete the team performance documentation.' The key is naming a result, not a to-do.

How does outcome-based planning integrate with weekly goals?

Daily outcomes should trace back to weekly or quarterly goals. Each day's outcome is effectively a contribution to a larger goal. If you can't explain how today's outcome connects to a bigger aim, that's a signal to reconsider whether it's the right outcome.

Outcome-based planning: design your day around what you want to achieve, not what you want to do

Outcome-based planning starts with the result you want and works backward to the actions that produce it. Learn how it changes your daily planning process.

What is outcome-based planning?

Outcome-based planning is an approach to daily and weekly planning that starts with defining the desired result — the outcome — and works backward to identify the specific actions that will produce it. Traditional task-based planning starts with a list of things to do ('write report, send emails, review proposal') and hopes they add up to meaningful progress. Outcome-based planning asks first: 'what needs to be true by the end of this day or week that would make it successful?' That question generates a more focused set of actions because they're explicitly tied to a result rather than selected from a general task backlog.

How outcome-based planning changes prioritization

The difference between task-based and outcome-based prioritization shows up most clearly in how they handle a full workday with competing demands. Task-based prioritization tends toward urgency: do the things with deadlines first, then fill with whatever's next on the list. Outcome-based prioritization asks: 'which of these tasks contributes to my outcome today?' Tasks that don't contribute become explicitly secondary, not because they're unimportant in the long run, but because they're not what today is for. This creates a natural sequence: outcome-connected work first, in your best cognitive windows; maintenance and administrative work in the gaps.

The one-outcome constraint and why it works

today implements outcome-based planning with a single-outcome model: one most important result per day. The single-outcome constraint is a forcing function — you can't list three outcomes and claim all of them are equally important. The act of choosing one forces genuine prioritization. Gary Keller's 'The ONE Thing' argues that the most successful outcomes in any domain trace back to a single most important activity, not a distributed portfolio of actions. At the daily level, this translates to: what is the single most important thing today? Answering that question with specificity, at the start of each day, is one of the highest-leverage planning decisions available to a knowledge worker.

Measuring outcome-based planning with completion rates

The feedback mechanism for outcome-based planning is straightforward: did the outcome happen? Unlike task completion (which can be gamed by doing easy tasks), outcome completion is harder to fake — either the result is there or it isn't. Over a week, your outcome completion rate tells you something real about your planning accuracy and execution quality. A consistent 70–80% rate is healthy: ambitious enough to create directional pull, achievable enough to maintain motivation. A 40% rate might indicate outcomes that are too ambitious or days that are too reactive. A 100% rate might indicate outcomes that are too safe. today tracks this rate across your weekly rollup.

Frequently asked questions