From the course: Time Management Tips

Using quarterly planning for maximum benefit

From the course: Time Management Tips

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Using quarterly planning for maximum benefit

- Occasionally, people are surprised when they find that I don't recommend that you do planning on a daily or weekly basis. Part of the reason for that, is that I recommend that you're processing consistently weekly. That means that you're taking all the items that you have to deal with and deciding what, when, where. If you're doing that, if you're processing on a consistent basis, your schedule is probably already full. At least a couple of weeks out, if not a month or two. So does that mean that planning has no value at all? Well, I believe that it has value if we do it in the bigger picture, for instance, quarterly. That means that every three months, we want to sit down and establish new things that we're going to accomplish, make commitments to them and then schedule some time to work on it in our calendar. So, step one of the this quarterly planning session is to review our targets for the quarter. A target is something that you want to accomplish that's reasonable but that will push you a little bit. For instance, let's say that last quarter I said I wanted to exercise five times per week. I want to assess, did I hit this or did I miss it? And if I missed it, what got in the way? So if I only exercised four times a week, I'm going to ask what got in the way and figure out a plan to do better next quarter. Then the next step in the planning session is to set new targets. What do I want to accomplish over the next three months? I recommend that you establish a target both for yourself personally and for yourself in terms of your career. So, for instance, I may say I want to get better at using Photoshop this quarter. This leads us to step three which is to ask ourself, what is the next step? So in our example of me getting better at Photoshop, the next step might be to watch a course here on the library, which leads me to step four, which is gathering that step. We need to take that one thing, watching a course here on the library and put it into an approved gathering point, such as sending myself an email or writing it into a notepad to be processed later. In this way, we'll take things that we want to accomplish and break them down into bite-sized pieces and that will help us move forward as we plan quarter by quarter.

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