Lee Semel

It’s New Year’s Day, a time for fresh starts. Each year, millions of people make resolutions for improving their lives: losing weight, becoming happier, starting a business, making more money. And every year, millions of people follow their plans for a month or two, but ultimately forget about them.

If there are important changes you want to make in your life, thinking about them once a year isn’t enough. Instead, do a three-month plan. Three months is long enough to see changes and improvements in your life, but not so long that you can put things off easily or lose sight of your goals. Just as public companies issue quarterly results to Wall Street, you should issue quarterly reports to yourself.

Here’s the process I use for the quarterly plan. This needs to be done in writing because it will become something you refer to often, as well as a document of where you started and what you’ve achieved:

• Identify the major areas of your life. My list includes Business & Career, Financial, Family, Relationships, Social Life, Learning & Knowledge, Fun & Recreation, and Health & Fitness. You may have others.
• Make an assessment of each area, and plan your goals. Write down an honest assessment of where you are in each of these areas. If some areas are suffering, it’s important to acknowledge this, because unless you admit there’s a problem, there’s no way to improve. For each area, determine what you want to change and write down your goals. Look ahead in the long term to see where you want to be in a few years, and choose appropriate short term goals for the next 90 days to help you get there. This can take several hours, but it’s worth it to see where you are and keep you on track toward accomplishing your goals.
• Turn the goals into concrete actions. To accomplish a goal, you need to identify a list of concrete actions you can take toward achieving it. Write down a list of the things you can actually do, right now, to get the ball rolling. Be as specific as possible. For instance, “lose weight” isn’t specific, but “go to the gym from 8-9 AM on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays” or “buy diet soda instead of regular soda” are. If any seem daunting, break them down into smaller tasks.
• Take action. Immediately, start implementing the actions steps on the list. After completing them, highlight them or cross them off (using the strikeout feature of your word processor). Don’t delete them, because you’ll want to keep a record of what you accomplished. Surprisingly, the act of writing down and crossing off completed actions helps increase your motivation and sense of accomplishment. It’s very satisfying to open up the document and see a list of 30 days you’ve been to the gym, each marked as accomplished.
• Review the list weekly to stay on track. It’s important that you use the document as an essential planning tool, reviewing it regularly. This ensures you never lose sight of your goals. Otherwise it’s easy to get caught up in day to day work, and focus on what’s urgent and immediate while forgetting about your long-term goals. The first thing Monday morning, go through your actions list to check your progress, and to plan time for them in your week’s schedule. No matter how ambitious, all of life’s goals have to take place on ordinary days between the time you get up and the time you go to sleep. If you’re writing down goals and actions but don’t plan actual time to execute them, nothing will happen. If you have free time during the week, you can check the document to find an action you can take toward one of your goals.
• Every three months, re-assess your plan. At the end of every quarter, go back to the assessment, take a look at what you planned to do, and note what you actually done. When you haven’t followed your plan, this will be easy to see, and you can make a course correction in your behavior and time management. Then, go through each major area of life. Write a summary of your accomplishments for the quarter, and note any areas you haven’t made progress in. Revise your goals, and come up with new actions to take during the next quarter.

Writing a quarterly plan will help keep your goals and resolutions constantly in mind, and will give you a sense of control, because you’ve systematically thought out and planned all the major areas of your life. The critical step is reviewing the plan regularly, as part of your regular work process. This will ensure you continue to work toward your long term goals, and never get sidetracked by day-to-day concerns.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 1st, 2007 at 1:29 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.