As I write this post today is 3rd July 2019. The first half of 2019 is over and it’s a great time to reflect and plan ahead. I hope you had a successful first 6 months of 2019! Perhaps you set some goals at the beginning of 2019 or made some new year’s resolutions. How has that worked out for you?
Time does fly! In my part of the world we have turned the corner of the year – the Summer Solstice (longest day of the year) was on June the 21st and now each day gets slightly shorter. This process will continue until we are at December 22nd and the shortest day of the year. It’s a good time now to pause and reflect, review goals and set new ones. In this article I want to describe how I go about planning the next 6 months and hopefully you will also pick up some useful pointers on how to improve your own planning.
Action research
The first thing I want to say is that planning is a cyclical process of Planning – Action and Reflection. This cyclical process is know as action research. We learn by doing but in a systematic way. I first came across action research when I was a PhD student and it is a simple but powerful process. When I say simple I mean simple to understand but not necessarily to put into practice! We have a tendency to want to rush to planning and action before taking the time to reflect properly. It’s natural. Many people have action bias: a predisposition to do in an effort to have control over a situation.
After reflection we then make new plans based on what we have learned from our reflection. This approach leads to cycles of continuous improvement. Using this model of planning we have to go back to our existing plans and see what worked and what did not work and make adjustments. Therefore planning the next 6 months starts with Reflection and a review of the last 6 months and extracting the lessons from there.
Reflection
Time now to re-visit your goals at the start of 2019. Perhaps you have been adjusting your goals since then? In fact if you have been adjusting and refining your goals as you went along then that is great – well done. A weekly reflection and planning session is ideal.
Reflect on your current active goals and ask yourself the following questions:
- What did you set out to achieve over the past 6 months?
- What actually happened – what were your results?
- Why did it happen?
- What are you going to do differently next time?
In doing the above process we are not interested in judgement of success or failure or beating ourselves up. We are interested only in lessons learned.
I am assuming that you did have some goals! I think it is very beneficial to have goals as they provide you with future direction and motivation. However the trap with goals is being too rigid. Be ready to adjust goals as you go along. Be ready to throw out goals that are not serving you and be ready to adopt new goals as new horizons and opportunities open up before you.
Planning
I keep all my tasks and projects/goals in a Microsoft Outlook file. A task is different from a project because a project has multiple steps or tasks which are required to achieve it. I keep a category in Outlook called ‘Projects’ and also another category called ‘This Quarters Key Goals’. As I write I have 15 projects listed and only 3 goals in this ‘This Quarters Key Goals’. At any one time I have no more than three goals maximum that I am working on. This quarter is July/August/September and referring to my larger list of projects I will set 3 goals to work on for this quarter. When formulating my goals I will of course take into account the results of my reflection. Therefore I expect my goals and results this quarter to be better than last quarter! At the end of September I will reflect again and set 3 new goals for the remaining quarter of 2019. We have six months left in 2019 and lets commit now together to making these 6 months life-changing!
Need New Ideas?
If you are looking for new ideas or information to take your life in a new and exciting direction over the next 6 months then have a look at my course ‘Reinvent yourself: 30 Experiments in Personal Change‘. The course deals with planning and goal setting in much more detail. Learn how to visualise your ideal future and set great goals. Click the link below to get the course for the discounted price of €12.99. You can take the free course preview. The course comes with a 100% money back guarantee if you are not satisfied. Please click the link below for further details:
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Best wishes,
Tom