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Holy Moly! It’s June 30th here in Australia and aside from being the last day of our financial year, it’s the last day of the first half of 2019.
I know it’s cliche, but where did this year go?
I remember my grandmother telling me when I was quite small that as you get older, time seems to move faster and she was right.
Oddly enough, back when she was telling me that in the early 80’s, the phenomenon hadn’t really been studied but now there are entire university papers on it - here’s a good article if you’re interested.
The bottom line is, when we’re young, we make lots of new memories and that has the effect of making time seem longer because things are more memorable.
As we get older, life becomes more mundane, we make fewer impactful memories, and so time seems shorter, so in this post, I’m going to share with you a framework I use to help myself focus on getting more work done!
The Paradox of the Uneventful, Eventful Half Year
Oddly enough, my year seems so far to have flown by in a way that’s almost paradoxical to the theory I mentioned above.
In late December, my mom passed away, so I spent the first two weeks of January back in Canada, packing up her place (my childhood home) where she lived for 41 years.
Time flew by because I had so much to do and so little time to do it - which is it’s own form of time dilation, but I digress.
Then when I got back to Australia, I got a pretty bad flu which knocked me around for a solid week in January.
Fast forward to March and I ended up in hospital for a week and laid up in bed for another two - that’s a pretty “impactful” memory because I have never had to stay in hospital before for and length of time, let alone for four days!
So paradoxically, I’ve had an “eventful year” so far, but it seems like it’s flown by.
I think I know why…
I intentionally have tried to do nothing for the past few months.
LOL - crazy, right?
After everything that was going on, in the first three months of the year, for the last three, I’ve kept my head down and tried to get life back to some degree of normalcy.
Of course, recency bias has kicked in because the last three months have been reasonably laid back, so time feels like it’s just evaporated.
Time To Get Back On The Horse
Leading an “uneventful” life is fine in short bursts, but if you’re like me, you have things you want to achieve, so there’s only so much of the quiet life one can accept.
For me, step one was getting social media under control and last week my overall phone usage was down 40% and Twitter use has fallen by 60%.
I’m going to try and lower that again this week.
Then there’s been the process of writing these posts - that’s got me back in the flow of writing which has been helpful.
Over this weekend, aside from this post, I’ve written over 3500 words on another project which felt great - editing that work today, it was really rewarding to see myself having produced something of that quality in that period of time over the course of a weekend.
That’s exactly what I was shooting for.
On Friday, I lined up my next video training course that I’m going to be creating with my friend, Scott - our plan is to smash that out before the end of July which would be good.
The key to this surge in productivity is about having a strategy and then putting in place a plan and processes to support that strategy.
I’m going to share with you how I think about these things and my framework for doing this.
Breaking Success Down Into Tiny Pieces
One of my favourite books is by Dilbert creator, Scott Adams, it’s called, “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.”
It’s a great book about the idea of just chipping away, doing the work, and things will happen for you as long as you do the right activities and you keep improving.
In the book, Adams has a line, “Goals are for losers and systems are for winners.”
When I read that a few years ago, it totally resonated with me - I understood what he meant entirely.
Then I read a book that same year called, “Simple Rules: How To Thrive in a Complex World” by Donald Sull and Kathleen Eisenhardt, and again, it was like an epiphany.
Sull and Eisenhardt explain that to achieve something, you should break it down into a bunch of smaller activities that if you do each of them successfully and repeatedly over a period of time, your outcome is assured.
If you want to walk 100km over the course of a calendar month, you just need to go out and walk 4km per day and you’ll get there with days to spare.
For those of you who used to read my daily emails and get my paid physical newsletter, you’ll know that this was how I used to run everything - I wanted to publish 250,000 words publicly in 2016, so I wrote daily emails for the year and published over 400,000 words.
To be successful, you have to deconstruct the constituent pieces of success and figure out how you can proceduralize activities to achieve those individual pieces so that success is basically assured.
It sounds simple, because it is just that simple - do the right things repeatedly and get the results you want.
Having Tactical Sign Posts and Strategic Objectives
Over the past few years, I’ve sort of walked back some of my rhetoric and feelings about the use of the word “goals”.
At one point through 2016 and 2017, I had completely eliminated that word from my vocabulary as much as possible - I never spoke about “setting a goal.”
My focus was on what I call: Strategic Objectives and Tactical Sign Posts.
A “strategic objective” is something big that I want to achieve - normal humans might call them “goals”.
To get to the desired strategic objective, I create “tactical sign posts”, that are a set of major milestones along the way.
The good thing about these sign posts is that I am able to tie them back to both “time” and “activities”.
Go back to the example above about walking 100km in a month.
I could set a tactical sign post that says, at the end of week one, I need to have walked at least 30km - the tactical part of this milestone is that it gets me part of the way to the objective and it is also what some people call a “stretch target”.
These sign posts allow me to evaluate where I am against my strategic objective and at the same time, build in contingency and reassess progress at regular intervals.
This is an important motivator for keeping momentum going and holding yourself accountable - more frequently establishing where you’re at versus your targets means if you’re behind, you’re not hopeless behind and if you’re ahead, you have motivation to keep pushing OR you can change the next milestone to be further out to drive yourself faster.
Here’s an important part about reassessing your goals or targets, whatever you choose to call them - try to never lower or reduce your targets just because you’re a bit behind where you want to be at that point in time.
Super Sizing Your Objectives
As I said, my views on “goals” has changed over the years - I now think of goals as big, hairy ambitious things that I want to achieve for myself.
So I would like to be in a position to retire in about ten years if I feel like it - I think that would require me to have ~$5m of liquidity kicking around.
I mean, sounds easy, who doesn’t have a lazy $5m floating around, am I right?
Seriously though, that’s a “goal”.
To get to that goal, I have setup a bunch of strategic objectives that involve building out my website properties, diversifying my assets, increasing my savings, etc.
Then for each of those strategic objectives, I have a set of annual and quarterly tactical sign posts that I should be measuring myself against.
The goal is a ten year plan, the strategic objectives are 1 to 3 year plans, and the tactical sign posts are rolling quarterly plans that are mapped out for the year ahead.
Think of it like a feeder system - I work on achieving the milestones of the tactical sign posts over the course of year, they roll up into a strategic objective which I achieve just by successfully hitting my milestones of the tactical sign posts.
The “goals” are a little more loose in terms of roll ups, but ultimately, it’s the same thing, but with a slightly further horizon.
Don’t Sweat The Big Stuff
I am a big fan of the saying, “don’t sweat the small stuff” - life is hard enough without punishing yourself over inconsequential things.
For example, I have made a concerted effort to reduce the amount of sugar I use in coffee.
If I inadvertently place my old order at a cafe in the morning and get a bit more sugar, in my latte, I could send it back or beat myself up about it, or I could just drink it and remind myself to be more thoughtful about what I order next time.
Punishing yourself all the time over little things just leads to a stressful and unhappy life for you and everyone around you.
I’ve also taken the approach of not worrying too much about where I’m at right at this moment against my big audacious goal.
This past six months, and arguably the last year entirely, have been subpar by the standards I set for myself.
But when you think about it really, what’s the impact to my long term future for having a tough year and not getting everything done that I wanted to?
It’s fairly low impact, so why freak out and make myself unhappy.
You shouldn’t either.
Life is short, it’s important to have goals, but punishing yourself mentally and emotionally isn’t going to make it more enjoyable - by all means, hold yourself accountable, but just don’t be too extreme with it.
Finishing The Year Strong
Having said all that about not beating yourself, I do think the half year is a perfect time to reset ourselves and get back on track.
Just because the first six months maybe didn’t go the way you wanted, there’s no reason you can’t crush the next six months.
And if the first half of the year was great, then set the bar a bit higher for the rest of the year and have your best year ever!
I think the system that I outlined above provides a pretty good framework for helping people not only set a plan, but to structure it in a way that makes achieving your targets easier.
I’ve already revised my strategic objectives for the next year or so and I’ve reset my tactical sign posts for the next twelve months with a considerable amount of detail over the next six months.
If you think this plan will help you, I encourage you to give it a try and if there’s someone else who might be able to take advantage, feel free to share this post with them - I’d love to hear about your results!
Now, go out there and finish 2019 strong!
Some Housekeeping…
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