Quarterly Planning

I spent the morning working on my plan for the first quarter of 2007. This is the first time that I have tried to make a formal plan like this, and I am impressed with the results. As per my 30 day trial, I dragged myself out of bed at 5am (actually closer to 5:30 by the time I worked up the will to drag myself out from under the covers…it is cold) and hopped onto the laptop. I created a blank page on started with:

By April 1st, 2007? What can I do? What should I do? What do I want to do? What must I do?

And then I started typing. Assuming I have my purpose figured correctly (I have not, at this point, backposted that here yet, I need to get that done) my main focus is on getting my business up and running. A close second is continuing this personal growth push I’ve been on. Everything else is supporting those two efforts. In all, I ended up with these subheadings:

• the business
• self and spirit
• home and family
• work
• money

Looking over my notes again, I see that I could probably break out one more topic — career — which is currently scattered under the other headings. I will be continuing to work on this plan for the rest of the month, I’ll make that change next session.

I mostly put things down in a stream-of-consciousness fashion initially, thinking about what I could feasibly do in three months, keeping in mind my tendency to be grossly over-optimistic about such things. When my brain took a pause I pulled out goals into bullet lists under each topic, trying to phrase them in such a way that they were small, and well-defined. That tended to trigger more stream-of-consciousness ideas, and back and forth. After about two hours I felt like I had a pretty good sense of things. As a bonus, an overarching theme emerged: I am building a platform from which to expand.

I am toying with the idea of actually signing the plan, as if it were a contract, as motivation to stick with it (I am easily distracted).

I should mention that my 30 day goal of getting up at 5am made all of this possible by providing me with two solid hours of uninterrupted thinking time, with enough left over to write this post. But now M and The Youngest are up and about, and it is time to get back to life.