So I said a lot of things in the What to Expect post. How am I going to make sure I deliver on them? Planning.
In all of the self help podcasts, books and memes I’ve consumed over the years, I’ve learnt most good things come from making a plan and writing things down. Now I love, writing things down, as you well know blog readers. To-do lists, schedules – that’s my bag. Where I fall down, is sticking to them!
A new approach I heard on the Design Life podcast is to split the year into quarters. Splitting out goals and side projects over the year would result in greater focus as opposed to trying to focus on everything at once. ‘Cool, I can handle that.’ I thought.
At a similar time my business minded beaut of a friend Annika introduced me to reverse engineering. It was actually whilst asking her thoughts about this very blog that the suggestion came about. She said “think of what you want it to be and work backwards from there.”
Deconstruct your goals
So pick your end goal and deconstruct it into small digestible chunks from which you can make a step by step plan.
For example, if I want to buy a house – daunting in this here London but stick with me – an approach to this would be to explore the kind of property I want. Research the price range, and figure out what my rough mortgage payments would be like and deposit would be. Then make a savings plan to reach my needed to deposit amount in the desired time. If I need a £20,000 deposit in 3 years, I’d need to save £555.55 a month. Whether or not that’s feasible in my current role is by the by, but the point is, it was easy to reverse engineer what I needed to do.
The same goes for goals that don’t require thousand and thousands of pounds. And if anything, they could be argued to be simpler, as often they don’t require any large financial investment at all. Just determination and staying power – in my case, these can sometimes be a lot harder to come by.
This year’s approach
This year instead of just writing my goals down at the top of the year and forgetting about them, like I very much did last year, I’ll be trying out this very targeted approach combining both these methods and seeing what comes of it. I’ve got milestones for the blog, my work, and my personal development all in there so it’ll be interesting to see if I can adhere to what’s set out once it’s been written down and plotted so thoughtfully.
If you’re interested in planning out your year in a similar way, please find a downloadable template here.
And before you say it, I know it’s perhaps a bit later than expected to be planning the year now, (this post was supposed to go live aaaaaages ago) but what can I say? I operate on my own schedule – see you next time!
Here’s another article you might enjoy about future planning.
Thanks for spending some time Up and Away with me!
I’m writing here to keep track of not only my travels to new places, but also my daily journeys through learning, loving and life.
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