Select important goals for each role.
For each role that you’ve identified, stop, and ask:
“What is the most important thing I can do this week to make progress in this specific role?”
If you try and answer that question using both your mind and your heart, the answers should represent what is most important rather than what is most urgent.
At your weekly planning session (preferably every Sunday afternoon), you should write down one or two goals for each of the roles you’ve specified.
Goals should be based around doing the right thing for the right reason in the right way. The characteristics of effective weekly goals are:
- They are in harmony with your conscience.
- They are important but not necessarily urgent.
- They reflect basic needs and capacities.
- They fall within the scope of things we control.
When setting a weekly goal for one of your roles, take the time to consider the What-Why-How framework:
- Specify what your goal is precisely.
- Note all reasons why achieving that goal is desirable.
- Specify exactly how the goal is to be achieved.
There are numerous refinements that can be added. For example, you can develop q wish list of goals that you may want to adapt in the future. You can also develop goals that require absolute obedience to be successfully achieved and others that require just a best effort. The important principle is not the precise goal system you use, but that you take the time each week to set one or two goals for each role which you fill. Set aside time firstly for important goals, and then fits other urgent activities around those times.
From the perspective of the entire week, create time zones for specific important activities.
The idea is not to fill the entire week with time zones, but to set aside a few specific periods during which you can concentrate on non-urgent and important activities related to your goals.
The advantage of planning one week at a time is you have context and perspective as you consider workdays, evenings, and the weekend. You can strive for balance between your various roles from the weekly viewpoint.
The weekly perspective helps us schedule renewal time during which we can engage in recreational activities that charge our batteries and provide balance. It also allows us to balance the details with the vision, and to look for ways to create synergy by combining activities which fall under more than one role. It also puts content – the activities of life – into the correct context of what is most important in life.
The ideal planning will schedule time for each goal to be accomplished without filling every possible minute with activity. There must be some flexibility left for the unexpected which always comes along.
Inspired by
Stephen R. Covey