The Triple E Game Plan – Peaker Tactics To Reliably Follow Through On Commitments

On Playing the Engagement Layer, Reacting to Discoveries on the Battlefield And Keeping Fractal Awareness In Sight

This post is part of the vertical life sculpting series. The first post covered aspirations, and the second on commitments. They lay the foundation for this piece. So, make sure to read them before this one.

If you are reading this, you likely have some form of productivity system in place. Maybe you use a version of Getting Things Done, a more “nichey” solution such as Do It Tomorrow, a solution like PARA that combines project & knowledge management, or maybe you have even created your system from scratch.

If you follow one of the systems out there, you might have realized that these systems don’t usually deal as much with commitments and aspirations as we did in the previous two parts of this series. Instead, they are fully focused on execution. They operate on a “task and action management” level instead of concerning themselves with goals and plans.¹ They are about follow-through, implementing plans, and taking actual steps. This is what I call the layer of engagement.

Let’s quickly recap and connect this to the ACE framework of accomplishment we’ve been building up to. At the very top of ACE, we have an abstract layer of aspirations, which lets us dream big, tap into our source, and deduce our value-driven “north stars.” Then, we have a middle layer that deals with commitments — here, we generate the concrete and heartfelt missions and plans we want to take toward our lofty aspirational ideals. In ACE, these two layers set the stage for what happens at the lowest level, where we engage and execute.

The engagement layer is where we confront the ugliest and messiest level of productivity and accomplishment. Systems like GTD recognize this and claim that if you are overwhelmed on the day-to-day level so that you execute poorly, nothing upstream matters. And there certainly is some truth to that. However, systems that are too detached from the upper two layers will, after a while, feel empty. They will favor efficiency over effectiveness and yield sterile productivity, not true Productiveness. They also disregard The Size That Works and are based on several false assumptions. In other words, by neglecting the higher layers, conventional productivity systems often disregard the necessary calibration and pathfinding that make effective execution even possible. Once we have things set up, everything but execution is preliminary skirmishing, but before that, it’s the other way around!

So, the challenge is to tackle any potential overwhelm on the battlefield and, at the same time, be able to steer in the right direction with a clear head. ACE proposes the Triple E Game Plan (TEG) for this. It recognizes that on the lowest layer of productivity, we don’t just want to “push through” and “get things done.” Instead, we want to be a bit smarter about it. We do this by seeing day-to-day productivity as three separate and very different processes: we need to engage with the vast option space that presents itself to us, we need to execute what we decided to do, and we need to escalate upon unexpected discovery. These three Es form the game plan that will allow us to drive success.