Revisiting: Yes, all the time. The yearly plan would be framed at the start of the year, but new opportunities and personal ideas arise quite often and unexpectedly. If something can help me achieve my life goals better, the entire planning cascade gets reprioritized from that point on. I have done things like defer personal projects, drop ideas that turned out to be impractical after prototyping (an example of a wrong track), and renegotiate scope of client projects. It's a dynamic thing - the idea of the system is to force life goals to convert into concrete daily activities, but the goals themselves can and have changed.
Leisure time: Leisure time is very much part of the daily plan. I put tasks like jogging, workout, reading, going out in all my plans. Even have things like fitness annual goals and explicitly write them in my weekly schedule and daily plans. Anything that I should allocate time for goes into these files.
Missed goals: Yes, that happens. I'm quite bad at time estimation, and some ideas involve a lot of exploratory prototyping that may take much more time than anticipated. I mark incomplete tasks as [PARTIAL] or [SKIPPED], analyze at the end of the D/W/M what made me skip them, adjust scope if required, and modify my plans to correct the problem by next D/W/M.
You can be as meticulous or as high-level as you want, depending on your disposition.
Because my default state is one of procrastination and laziness, I have to explicitly plan such things. If I don't, the other work or distractions will just expand to fill my time, and I'll just keep perpetually delaying them only to find at the EOM that I didn't indulge in my favorite hobby for even 1 hour the entire month, and that feels really bad. My system has evolved to overcome my own mental handicaps.
But I personally know 5x times more productive people - with spouses and multiple kids and time sinks like house constructions - who don't do anything like what I do and still manage to fulfil all their professional and personal plans much better than I do.
I have only one daily, one weekly, one monthly and one yearly file. Each file covers all categories of life goals. Organizing categories into multiple files seems natural at first and I had tried it in the past with mind mapping tools, but quickly realized that tracking and updating them is inconvenient and didn't really help me with planning my day.
Here's an excerpt[1] from my daily todo to show what 2 days daily plan looked like - maybe it gives a better idea of what I'm describing.
I feel, with a certain definitiveness, that I need a schedule. Rather than working on a strict task-to-task basis, I feel like what I need is an obligation: "Do project X at 10, for at least an hour, then take your time until project Y at 2" etc.
I can't speak for OP, but I've been addressing "leisure planning" primarily with logging and reminders instead of planners: I received a Fitbit over the holidays which has done a great job of encouraging me to block out 10 minute activity breaks and to stick to a certain wake-up time. I just used break time to do some cleaning and often start chores like laundry and dishes on breaks too. When the "activity day" ends, it's functionally like "work is over, real leisure can begin," although since I am working independently I tend to spread everything across the day, just now I bias towards household chores and physical work early in the day, and mental work later. It works for me since I no longer have to feel disciplined about physical activity - it's simply built into the schedule that I will get up and do something, so something will get done at random, and when the break is over I can just put it down and come back to it.
For gym time I use the FitNotes Android app to track progress and set session goals. I have done this for about two years successfully. Since this has gotten me on a roll, most recently I installed ActivityWatch to correlate the sleep/activity/health metrics against my screen time. What I find most important for myself is closing the loop of goals/plans/feedback: if some part of it is missing then progress stops. Usually it's lack of feedback that causes the biggest problems.
I've been thinking about specified breaks. My idea was: a 5- or 10-minute break every hour, away from the laptop, doing anything at all. I've noticed that, once AFK, I have my mind back: it springs back, outputs ideas, regains its perspective...
I've also been thinking about implementing pre- and post-workday breaks, for 1 and 2 hours, respectively.
The former is about starting the day right: instead of diving into whatever web the Internet has for me (a web of my own making, don't get me wrong), I could take a walk, or do a little cleaning, or cook, or read, or...
The latter, preceded by an hour of review, is to wind down, in order to maintain a proper sleep pattern (which I have serious problems with at the moment: waking up at 1 PM is not good for me).
Let's see how it works for me.
Best wishes to you and your own scheduling. I hope it works out to an excellent result for you.
Leisure time: Leisure time is very much part of the daily plan. I put tasks like jogging, workout, reading, going out in all my plans. Even have things like fitness annual goals and explicitly write them in my weekly schedule and daily plans. Anything that I should allocate time for goes into these files.
Missed goals: Yes, that happens. I'm quite bad at time estimation, and some ideas involve a lot of exploratory prototyping that may take much more time than anticipated. I mark incomplete tasks as [PARTIAL] or [SKIPPED], analyze at the end of the D/W/M what made me skip them, adjust scope if required, and modify my plans to correct the problem by next D/W/M.