Building on the prior post about past misses and pivoting towards a two week glide path of daily wins – how do you go about building your plans for the future?
I mentioned previously that all to dos and promises to myself are eventually assigned dates to get them done. If it isn’t worth putting a date on it, then you should keep them filed away in your backlog to revisit for a future revisit.
Starting simply – if you are getting one promise to yourself done a day, and you can hit that repeatedly over the course of a month – then you are likely ready to consider building upon this daily habit/ritual. To ease into this future oriented version of yourself – consider the following as a simple approach to get started.
Calendar and Weekly Goals — Get a calendar – it can be a paper based one, it can be an online calendar, it can be an app/service the follows you across all of your devices – at this point – the form factor is immaterial. Now that you have a calendar – could you set a single goal for the next week to be completed by end of day on the next Thursday? The reason I am suggesting Thursday for your weekly goals to be completed is that you are building in a little slack in case you miss your commitment – you have Friday to knock it out and it opens you up to cleanly enter the weekend focused on the next Thursday goal. The goals you set are based upon ‘hard’ due dates that you give yourself to get something meaningful accomplished – typically a series of to do’s strung together will make up your weekly goal. Start on the smaller side of things – maybe you want to read 5 chapters in a book in the next week, believing that you can really get a little under a chapter read each day or maybe you want to get a set of shelves installed in the garage – with this week’s goal being to just purchase the materials for installation in a future week. The point is to set your sights on a single goal with a Thursday, end of day / before you go to bed, and write it down on your calendar.
Calendar and Weekly Plans – Now that you have a goal set for next Thursday that you are committed to, consider some additional plans that are targets – not necessarily ‘hard commitments’ aimed at completion. This idea of ‘secondary plans’ is something I’ve been playing with, and these are the things I know I need to knock out but I cannot commit to setting a due date that will be met. These are the sorts of to do’s that you will spend time on as you can free up space and time to advance them, even on a partial basis. To start with, identify a second weekly plan/soft goal for next Thursday. This secondary plan should not interfere with your weekly goal that you set, and watch out for the secondary ‘soft goal’ becoming a source of procrastination. This is a real risk. What you will find as you begin to hit your sole weekly goal is that you will gravitate towards wanting to get more done, and having something as a secondary deliverable for yourself will keep you focused. Write down this secondary planned deliverable under your primary goal on the calendar for next Thursday.
I’d expect you to be able to hit your weekly goals each week as you have seven days to get this one thing done. Let’s see how you do over the course of a month starting from the next Thursday. You will have at least 4 meaningful goals accomplished in a month – ideally spread across an area/domain or two of your life during the time. Hell, you may even have a couple of planned ‘soft goals’ knocked out during this time. If you start with the simple approach of getting 1 thing, 1 single thing that you’ve promised yourself you’d do – along with hitting your weekly goal for 4 weeks, and a secondary plan or two — you will have knocked out 30 actions, 4 meaningful goals, and another goal or two in 30 days.
More importantly, you will have started to own your shit – taking back your commitments and living out your word to yourself. Imagine how that will feel knowing that you’ve started to ramp your ability to get more time back, more focus on the things you need to get focused on, and your self reliance will be increased. We will talk about how to take this basic plan for the next thirty days into a much more repeatable and scalable ritual for the rest of your life. Imagine if you grind out one thing a day for the next 356 days? You could look back and see each of the 365 steps forward you took, what if you could get that up to 1000 things you got done across your entire life in a year? Priority things you chose to get done. Amazing results man, amazing. Those closest to you will witness the change and hell the attraction of a man getting his business handled each day will increasingly be apparent to you. All sorts of benefits will emerge, I promise you.
For now, let’s keep it simple and do your job for the next 30 days – 1 thing per day, 1 goal per week. Write it down somewhere, and keep track of how well you did in getting your stuff done.
We’ll be checking in about a month from now to see how you are doing.
