When to Plan and Track

All the time.

Thanks for reading.

Ok, fine. I’ll elaborate. You
couldn’t just let me have a super short blog post, could you?

I’m going to try my “Ten Weeks”
planning method again, and see if it works better when I have more available
time. The basic idea is the following. Buy a 70 page notebook. Assign one day
to every page. Use that as your calendar for ten weeks. Set some goals that you
think are reasonable to do in ten weeks. Review your situation once a week.
Learn from the process and do it again the next ten weeks.

I always start the first Ten
Weeks of the year on the Monday of the week that January 1 falls. This year it
was December 30, 2019. Today is my New Year’s Day. And March 9, 2020 will be
like a New Year’s Day, because I’ll do a massive reset on that day for the new
Ten Weeks. In order to even out the year, I always take time off from big goals
for a couple of weeks during the end of year holidays.

Dan Fogelberg – Same Old Lang
Syne

(This has nothing to do with
planning.

It’s just a good song to listen
to at the end of the year.)

Daily – You should probably plan
daily. “Lord” Brian Tracy suggests writing your goals every day without
referring to your previous goal lists. He suggests that you choose the three
most important goals, and do the next step of each as your Most Important
Activities for the day. I just can’t seem to do goals daily, even though I see
the value in his method so strongly that I wish I could. I do have a list of
daily activities though that I reset to each day and do as much as I can.

Weekly – Once a week, it’s likely
a good idea to take a deep breath and say, “Whatever has gotten out of control
this week, I can now reset and make a new relevant plan for.” Dave Allen
suggests that this is a good time to review notes from the week and plan future
dates to follow up on ideas that you don’t have the time or inclination for
now.

Monthly – This is a review that
I’ve not gotten the hang of. It feels like it’s just an extra weekly review. If
you study Dave Allen, you’ll see that he has some 80/20 questions and other
things that make this a different review. I just haven’t learned it well
enough.

Every Ten Weeks – This is just me
talking. This is because of my Ten Weeks method. The flaw that I’ve found in
the past is that if I’ve set a bigger goal and haven’t made any progress in the
first seven weeks, I have a bad tendency to not make what progress I can. This
is something that I’m going to try to pay attention to when I review at the end
of the week. It’s better to make some progress and reset at the end of the Ten
Weeks than to not make any progress. The biggest reason I want this method to
work is because I’m the type of person who needs to refocus frequently. This
gives me a reasonably long period of time to create good goals, but it allows
me flexibility with mistakes in goal setting.

The truth is that most of us have
an optimal way to operate. The reason we keep reading about what other people
do is just because we haven’t found our optimal way. These are just a few
things to try to see if they work for you.

Chris McGinty is a blogger who
once again didn’t run into an old lover in the grocery store on Christmas Eve.
I’m starting to think that “Same Old…” may be a bit overstated, Dan.