PDFSP Study Group Day 3: Quarterly Planning Time

[Zukin]

[This post is part of the Personal Development for Smart People Study Group, which is going through Steve's blog posts from the very beginning and discussing them.]

Major Points:
1. It's helpful to type up a detailed plan for your life every 90 days.
2. Write down a list of assumptions that you are taking into account while you put together your plan.
3. While you are writing your 90 day plan, think ahead two years in advance to determine how your goals fit into a longer-term plan.
4. Planning can give you a sense of peace since you've examined your life and goals consciously.

[Kaspian]

I assume we're discussing this post:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/200...planning-time/

[Freelancer]

So how do you guys build up your 90 day plans?

Goal
Reasons
Action?

No idea where to start with one.

[Laranja]

One of the topics with which SP helped me a lot.

Like SP I maintain a PAS (Personal Accountability System) which is based on GTD (Getting Things Done by David Allen) but ads a layer of purpose to it. Since I am self-employed (Yup, no real job.) I do as well need a layer of accountability to it, to make it complete.

This works very well for me and gives me an awesome sense of purpose, a feeling that I do the right thing, security. And than offcourse, the original reason to do planning: clarity.

Like SP did I recommend GTD, and I mean the book. Read it and apply it. Don't read websites about GTD and think you somehow got it. Buy the book itself.

For the purpose-part, the weak thing in GTD, I recommend the 7 habbits like SP does so in his article. I also found the RPM (rapid planning method) of Tony Robbins a good process to plan the higher levels.

Regarding the schedule, or like SP calls it, the accountability, I would suggest the best way to be accountable is doing GTD and finding your purpose and being, dammit, honest to yourself and others. Like SP wrote in a blog entry, nothing is better motivation than finding your true purpose and setting goals acording to it. I found that to be true.

If you lack particular skills like for example being on time or estimating how long a type of work takes, train these. Or maybe you have got a boss and a spouse how manage your accountability for you, in that case I would suggest you thank them for it once in a while.


So, in conclusion, purpose, GTD and accountability together make for an awesome planning and achieving solution.

[Laranja]

Originally Posted by Freelancer

So how do you guys build up your 90 day plans?

Goal
Reasons
Action?

No idea where to start with one.

I would start with finding out your life purpose. If you already have that one, I would think about an array of life areas you want to focus on. What is the structure you think of your life? And: is this the best structure, or the one you should use according to your life purpose?

For example you can have the life area "career". But you also could write "work - financial", "work - creative", "work - contribution/charity". There are many ways to weave your web. And probably it will change over time.

The important thing is IMHO to archieve a sense of a) completeness and b) the right balance - have a lot of career-based areas if your work is super-important to you or more family life areas if that is more aligned to your life purpose.

Think of this areas as the horizontal. And don't neglect anything important.

Now, once you have got that, check out the vertical. This would be goals and projects and actions and so on.

The thing is, like SP wrote in his blog, planning takes time. I would suggest to plan each day one area. But this depends a little on how big you wrote your areas.

Just set some big longterm-goals for each area. Then identify what you have to do to reach those goals. This is basically the sum of your work.

Now you have to schedule all this somehow. I cannot tell you how you want to do this. But this is were the true planning comes in. You now know what you want to do (goals, projects ect) and you know why you want to do it (purpose). Now schedule the time to do it.

Let me add one more thing: in practice each project needs it's own particular way to plan it. Some need repetitive action like working out, others need one big chunk of time like building a new garden-house. There is no way around this: you have to think.