Stay with me. If you follow along for the whole year, your look back next year will be amazing.
In my last blog post, I mentioned the Plan-Execute-Measure (P5-E55-M5) Process to making plans.
Let me give you a little look into the planning process. This is how it starts:
During the last five weekdays of the year, we plan (P5) and dream, and visualize a big future. This week I spend most of my time hitting the big reset button and getting ready for the running start of next year.
Execute(E55) – represents the next 11 weeks of executing the plan for a total of 55 days
The last Five Measure (M5) in the Five-55-Five method is the 5-day week of measuring what happened in the prior 11 weeks.
If you follow my plan, you always wind up with 5 days of plan in the last 5 days of the year and the next cycle of plan usually starts at the end of March, the end of June, and the end of September.
If you’re going to play along with me this year, here are the key dates for the first plan iteration:
12/27/2021 – 12/31/2021 Plan for 2022 created
1/3/2022 – 3/18/2022 Execute the plan
3/21/2022 – 3/25/2022 Measure how the first run went
3/28/2022 – 4/1/2022 Plan for the second round
Today we start with continuing to plan the vision in the first five days.
Yesterday I asked you to come up with a theme word for the year and to email me that theme word to memorialize your commitment. It’s a good idea to write this all down in a notebook that you use exclusively for planning your year. If you’re like me, you’ll use a multi-tabbed version. It’s up to you digital or paper works. I’m not going to tell you what your organizing system should be. I use a hybrid paper and digital system that works for me. You do you. The first truth about accountability systems is that they only work if you use the kind of system that resonates with you. Sometime down the road, I’ll outline my system. For now, start with the kind of system that traditionally works for you.
Today we look back on the past year. In your notebook write answers to the following questions:
- What was my biggest challenge in this past year?
- What happened in this past year that I would not want to happen again?
- What was the best decision I made this last year?
- What lessons did I learn? [Lessons learned can be a separate tab or even a separate notebook that you use to collect all of your lessons learned over the years.]
You can’t use COVID in any of the answers because that’s a challenge we all had and would not like to repeat so think about the other aspects when answering. Write it down in your notebook. Tomorrow we’re going to dream into the future. Start to imagine what you’re like to be to do or have.