How to plan your life and achieve each goal?

Imagine who you want to be at the end of your life - and try to achieve it.

If everything suits you, everything is done, all plans are fulfilled, books are read, classwork is received, and you are in perfect sports form and everything is wonderful with you, it means that you are well planning and this material is not for you. For those who want to know how I plan my year, month, day - I will tell you in detail.

If you ask if there is one universal way to keep things going, I will answer: yes, there really is this way, and it is called “not to plan at all”. If you have not planned anything - you always have time for everything. There are no plans - no need to reach them. But planning - is the basis of any of your progress.

I came to planning about 15 years ago when I started my business. The number of tasks accumulated in the calendar exceeded the ability to store them in my head. At that moment, for the first time, I thought that without a detailed study of my long-term and quarterly plans, it is simply impossible to manage my time. I then read many books in Russian and English, and all of them contained general planning principles - but they did not add up to a complete picture in my head. Then I came across a book by Ryan Ellis with a very good approach, which I have been using for the last 5-6 years.

You are what you do most often.

What is the essence of this method? You have to see which final point in your life, career or sport you are going to. The author proposes to divide your goals into very large ones, the planning horizon of which is approximately 20-30 years; then below - 10 years, 1 year and 1 month. From the very beginning of the book offers some useful conclusions.

1. You will gain an advantage immediately, since you will be surprised how many people do not use planning. It does not depend on the activities you do. You got a new job - most of the employees do not think about where they will come tomorrow and what will happen to them. According to statistics, in America, about 50% of people do not even have savings. What does this mean? Financial planning is missing. Start planning right today - and you already win.
2. Write down your goals. I recommend you to make it even more interesting: when you formulate your goals, go through your relatives, relatives, and maybe partners - and ask them to subscribe to them. So they will be some kind of auditors. What for? If you don’t, they’ll tell you. If you start to lag far behind, it will remind you. It is proved that any public contract has a positive effect on the outcome. Unfortunately, without a kick we are hard to move forward.
3. You should see yourself by the end of your life. To which the destination you want to come? Maybe you want to be a president or go surfing in Hawaii, create a charitable foundation or win the Olympics? It doesn't matter, but you should see the end point. Useful exercise from the author of the book: write in one sentence, as you see yourself at the end of life. Dream big and it will allow you to find ways to achieve your goals.

One interesting point that surprised me recently. The last 10 years of my company's life, I have constantly used the SMART planning method: the goal should be measurable, realistic, clear, clear, and so on. However, research from Harvard Business School says that not everything is so simple with SMART planning. It very often dries your goals, allows you to plan it in a format in which it is uniquely doable. Therefore, SMART planning is good only when you understand the direction, big goals. It works effectively for short periods of time, but is not suitable for medium-term and long-term planning.

I plan using this approach? I have a clear one page sheet with my vision for the next 30-40 years. For example, I say to myself: I want to build a company that would work in the global market and solve the serious problem of humanity. After that, I can divide the goal into components in the intervals of 10-20-30 years. Every year in early January, I again return to large goals. I see how my annual goal is combined with the general plan for life. It helps you to be constantly in focus. Planning for the year should bring you closer to what you have drawn yourself for several years to come.

An important point that works well for annual planning is to divide all your tasks into four large pieces: work, family, personal, and developmental. As a result, we have a balanced picture between work and family goals, health and hobbies, development and education. This allows not to become a closed person, an asocial person.

What technical tools do I use for planning for the month? I just want to say that for planning for a year or ten years you do not need notebooks or special programs - everything is much easier to write in a plain text document and save. But for monthly and weekly planning, of course, you need to use various tools to help you keep track of your goals. I use Outlook, someone prefers Google Calendar - the essence does not change. Every week I clearly set goals that go beyond menstruation. Then, already in the week, I highlight the tasks that should be closed.

The smallest block of my planning is planning for the day. My day, as a rule, is painted into components in a half-hour-hour format. Since I have a big company and a lot of employees, the tasks may be different. But if you do not have overloads in the diversity of tasks, you should just divide your tasks into blocks in half an hour and an hour and put them in the calendar. It is advisable to articulate what you want at the end of this task.

There must be buffer time between task blocks. No need to sculpt them without any gap. We are not robots, we have to drink tea, breathe air or get up and warm up. Buffer time allows us to more calmly perform tasks and foresee the possibility that something may take longer than we think necessary. According to Harvard Studies, people plan less time for tasks than they actually take.

I also mark tasks as they are completed. This allows you to see what has been done and not done during the working day. At the end of the week, I highly recommend to set aside half an hour and calculate the amount of time you spent on a particular task. This is done so that you can check with yourself - are you really who you call yourself. For example, you say, "I train people." See the plans, but in fact you are not teaching them, but you go to the office. There is a good expression: "You are what you do most often."