Planning for Growth

I’ve always considered myself to be a pretty good planner, but as I’ve learned more I’ve realized how poor a job I often do. Over the past year, I’ve refined my processes quite a bit and I feel I have things in a much better place (though always looking to improve).

For me, planning really consists of two pieces:

• Planning for the day/week/quarter/year ahead.
• Keeping a rough log of what happens so I can use that knowledge going forward.

Planning Ahead

There are a lot of tools out there on goal setting, so we won’t be digging too deeply into that. A good place to start would be books such as “ Your Best Year Ever “ by Michael Hyatt for help in that area. In terms of goals, I see it essentially like this.

You should have roughly 100 lifetime goals, worked into 10–12 goals each year, perhaps 3 goals each quarter, and then a “big three” each week and each day that point toward those goals. Those daily and weekly big three don’t always point toward your quarterly goals, but should be set with those in mind.

My yearly planning and quarterly planning are similar, where I look at my overall goals and try to plot things out. The weekly and daily planning are where things get tactically useful for you.

Be SMART

This article isn’t about goal setting, but it’s worth touching on how goals should be developed. Ideally your goals should be “SMART”, using the framework that…