When to Plan and Track

by Chris McGinty of AccordingToWhim.com

I thought I’d write a quick blog post about when to plan and track your activities.

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.