Not a better plan. A shorter one. The reason most pre-market work fails is not that it lacks depth, it is that it is too long to survive a Tuesday, so it gets skipped on exactly the days it was written for.
Five steps. One minute each. At the end you have a written plan that says what you are waiting for, what makes it invalid, what you are risking and when you stop. That is the standard, and almost nobody's plan currently covers the last two.
You already put ten to fifteen hours a week into this around a job. The constraint is not effort, it is that the effort is spread across charts, videos and rooms rather than concentrated into the one part that governs the session. A thirty minute preparation ritual survives about three days.
There is a second failure, and it is more common. Most plans stop at what you are going to trade. They do not say the size, they do not say the daily loss limit, and they do not say the time you stop. So there is nothing in the document that can tell you no, which means by 11am there is nothing to deviate from and every trade you take is technically on plan.
A plan with no stopping conditions is not a plan. It is a wish list with levels on it.
The third one is quieter still: by the middle of a session you could not repeat what your plan said. That is not a memory problem. It means it was never specific enough to hold, and a plan you cannot recall was never governing anything.
Each step has a finish line, so you know when the minute is done rather than drifting into analysis. If a step takes three minutes you are doing a different job than the one described.
Where has it traded while you were asleep or at work. The overnight range, and whether price is sitting inside yesterday's range, above it or below it. This is orientation, not analysis. You are not forming a view, you are finding out where you are standing.
You can say in one sentence where price is relative to yesterday. If you are still reading, the minute is over.
The levels you would actually do something at. Two or three, not eight. Marking every line on the chart feels like preparation and achieves the opposite, because when everything is a level nothing is, and you end up with a reason to act almost anywhere.
They are written down as numbers, not as a shape you would recognise later.
One. Written clearly enough that somebody else could tell you whether it had happened, plus what would make it invalid. The invalidation is not optional — a setup with no invalidation cannot be wrong, and a trade that cannot be wrong is one you will hold.
If you cannot write it in a sentence, you do not have it yet. And "I will see what it gives me" is how you end up taking the trades that were nearly the plan.
One setup and one invalidation condition, both in writing.
Decided now, while nothing is moving and nothing is at stake. This version of you is better informed about 11am than the version who will be sitting there at 11am. Add a maximum number of trades and the time you stop, because a loss limit on its own still allows a long slow session of small mistakes.
Three numbers exist: the most you will lose, the most trades you will take, and the time you stop.
The previous four minutes only count if they leave your head. What is held in your head is negotiable and what is written down is not, and the entire value of the routine is that at 11am there is something outside you that can say no.
It also has to be visible during the session. A plan in a notebook in a drawer is a plan you wrote, not a plan you are running.
It is on a screen or a page you can see without going to find it.
A routine you follow 80% of the time beats a perfect plan you follow 40% of the time.
Which is the whole argument for keeping it to five minutes. The version of this that includes a full market structure review and a session breakdown is better on paper and worse in practice, because it will not be there on the morning you slept badly and have a call at nine. Consistency is the variable, and it is the only one you control on a Tuesday.
The honest limit: reading a routine and running it for thirty consecutive sessions are different problems, and only the second one changes anything. Below is the routine as something you can actually run, which produces the written plan at the end rather than asking you to remember to make one.
Educational mentorship only, not personal financial advice. Trading carries risk, including the loss of capital.
Roughly. Your stopping conditions are worked out from it, so you never type an amount again.
Stays on this device. Change it whenever your size does.
This stays on your device. Keep this page open beside your platform for the session — a plan you have to go and find is one you will not check at 11am.