Self-discipline is the ability to make yourself do something you don’t necessarily want to do, to get a result you would really like to have.
—Andy Andrews
A plan is worthless unless you review it on a regular basis. Once you have completed your Life Plan, it’s important to establish a pattern of regular review.
Years ago I (Michael) was part of a rapidly growing organization. Finally we got to the place where the CEO determined we needed a strategic plan. At a staff meeting he announced, “The days of ‘winging it’ are over. We need a formal plan, and we need it now.” He then hired a very expensive strategic planning consultant and scheduled a three-day retreat.
About fifty members of the company leadership, representing different departments and interest, gathered at a gorgeous resort facility outside Austin, Texas. The consultant led the assembled team through the process. It was extremely thorough and systematic. He had custom, leather-bound three-ring binders created with the name of our company stamped on the cover and multicolored tabs inside. The team had incredible discussions, made important decisions, and achieved alignment on key issues that had dogged them for years. They created detailed action plans with milestones, due dates, and accountabilities. The plan was a work of art.
The only problem was they never looked at the plan again—ever. Every executive at the retreat had the plan on a shelf in his or her office, but it was never reviewed, tweaked, or revised. This is nothing new in corporate life. A company that creates and then implements a plan is the exception rather than the rule.
We don’t want this to happen when it comes to your Life Plan. We want to ensure you implement it. The only way this is possible is if you have a process in place for making it visible. You need to review, tweak, and revise it regularly if it is to actually shape your life.
Dr. Henry Cloud explains the importance of this process in Boundaries for Leaders. Achieving our goals depends on giving them attention. When we do that, important things are addressed, while unimportant things are not. In the process we generate vivid awareness of what’s required to achieve our goals—what Dr. Cloud calls “working memory.” Reviewing your Life Plan will help expand your working memory and thereby increase the chances you’ll achieve your goals. We’d like to suggest three ways you can do this.
Start by Reading Your Plan Daily
At Building Champions, we coach our clients to read their Life Plan daily in the morning for the first ninety days. You should also read it out loud. The idea is to lock each aspect of your plan into your heart and mind and to avoid this exercise from becoming rote.
Review Your Plan Weekly
After the first ninety days, the next way to keep your plan alive is to practice what some have called “The Weekly Review.” This is an opportunity to get your head above the daily blizzard of activities and see where you’ve been and where you’re going. It’s also an opportunity to see how you are progressing against what matters most—those items you have identified in your Life Plan.
In our practice the Weekly Review is the key to staying atop our projects and assignments. The result is that we stay in control of our workload and keep moving forward in the direction of our most important priorities.
No one has written more compellingly about the importance of the Weekly Review than productivity expert David Allen. In his book Getting Things Done, he writes:
Many of us seem to have it in our natures consistently to entangle ourselves in more than we have the ability to handle. We book ourselves in back to back meetings all day, go to after-hours events and generate ideas and commitments we need to deal with, and get embroiled in engagements and projects that have the potential to spin our creative intelligence into cosmic orbits.
The whirlwind of activity is precisely what makes the Weekly Review so valuable. It builds in some capturing, reevaluation, and reprocessing time to keep you in balance. There is simply no way to do this necessary regrouping while you’re trying to get everyday work done.1
I (Michael) usually do my weekly review on Friday when I have clarity about what got done and what’s still pending. I used to do it on Sunday night so I was clear going into the new week, but I’ve since come to see the value of being completely off Saturday and Sunday. By doing it Friday, I’m clear about what’s coming on Monday and I’m free to fully engage in rest over the weekend.
I (Daniel) prefer to do my weekly review at home as well but early Monday mornings. It helps me to focus on what matters most before I head to the office and jump into the demands of my week.
But the truth is that any day can work. Some people we coach like to do a weekly review on Friday afternoon, at the end of their workweek. Others prefer first thing Monday morning. The important thing is that you are intentional about it and actually put an appointment on your calendar to do it.
We generally recommend fifteen to thirty minutes for your Weekly Review—but it could go longer if necessary. It will rarely require the full time you set aside, but it’s helpful to have the window blocked off on your schedule. If you don’t schedule it, it’s easy to avoid this activity or schedule something else in this slot.
What should you do during this time? It’s not essential, but here’s the “agenda” we recommend and use. It considers more than your Life Plan, but it is all interrelated. It is modified from David Allen’s list. Feel free to customize as you like:2
1. Review your Life Plan. Read through your Life Plan, word for word. Keep in mind, it’s a brief document so it really doesn’t take long to go through it. The value is that it gives you a high-level view, so you don’t lose touch with what matters most. It also infuses your daily actions with purpose.
2. Gather all loose papers and process. Empty everything out of your briefcase or computer case, your physical inbox, and your wallet or purse. Then go through each piece of paper and decide what to do with it. Following David Allen’s model, first ask if it is something that requires action. If not, you have three options. You can
If the item requires action, you can
3. Process your notes. Note taking is a critical productivity skill.3 You can use a low-tech solution, like a Moleskine notebook, or a high-tech one, like Evernote, on your desktop, tablet, or smartphone. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is to read back through your notes, looking for action items that you agreed to do. You want to transfer these to a task list.
4. Review previous calendar data. We suggest you review the previous week’s meetings in your calendar program and see if there is anything you missed. For example, you may not take notes in lunch meetings, but you might want to follow up with a thank-you note or a gift. Reviewing the prior week’s appointments provides an opportunity to stimulate your memory and catch things you might otherwise miss.
5. Review upcoming calendar. This is one of the most important parts of the Weekly Review. This is an opportunity for you to note any upcoming meetings with an eye to the preparation you might need to do. This keeps you ahead of the curve and your assignments on track. (We are still amazed at how many professionals show up at a meeting without reviewing their previous assignments. This makes them look sloppy and incompetent. Reality is that they don’t have a process in place for systematic review of previous meetings and assignments.)
6. Review your Action lists. Although we recommend and do this on a daily basis, the focus is broader during the Weekly Review. We ask ourselves, “What do we really need to accomplish this week?” If it’s a really important task, we drag it onto our calendar and schedule it.
7. Review your Pending (e.g., “Waiting For”) list. This is a list of items you have delegated to others and are important enough to track. If something is overdue, or if it needs a progress update, you can send an email or make a phone call and nudge the person responsible. We also recommend you make a note in the task itself that you have sent a reminder.
8. Review Project lists. When an action consists of many subactions, it qualifies as a project. For example, planning the annual staff retreat may require multiple actions, like reserving a venue, booking a caterer, sending invitations, and so on. Whatever project management system you use, the important thing is to review your major projects and consider the next action required to keep the ball rolling.
9. Review Someday/Maybe lists. These are items that don’t require immediate action but would be nice to do someday. This is a great place to park ideas you don’t want to forget but are not quite ready to commit to. Once you are ready, you can transfer the item to the appropriate action list.
Our readers, clients, and seminar attendees tell us that the Weekly Review is the most important tool they have in their quest to implement their Life Plan. We agree, but it’s important to remember that this is one possible review strategy. It’s effective for us, but others use different methods. The point is to find a system that works for you. Our hope is that you’ll find some useful handles here so you can stay accountable to your Life Plan.
Tweak Your Plan Quarterly
The secret to staying atop your priorities is to schedule regular times for review and reflection. But there also needs to be a time to revise your plan or “true it up” to reality. Dr. Cloud says this kind of purposeful engagement is what enables people to soar.
While you can do this tactically in your Weekly Review, you should do this regularly in a more in-depth, strategic fashion as well. We recommend you do a formal, scheduled Quarterly Review.
This appointment-with-yourself is basically an extended version of the Weekly Review. In the Weekly Review you climb to the tops of the trees and peer at the forest. In the Quarterly Review you take a hot air balloon to a thousand feet or so to see how the forest fits into the overall landscape.
A Quarterly Review is a great way to ensure you stay on track. You can make incremental adjustments rather than lose an entire year before realizing you’re off course. How you do it depends on your personality. The artist and scientist will do it differently. But the point remains the same no matter how you approach it—to invest time in being more intentional.
If possible, we recommend that you try to leave the office or your workday environment for your Quarterly Review. You want to get away from phones, drop-in visitors, and the hustle and bustle of office life. Of course, you could also do this on a Saturday morning. You may want to be in the same place you worked on your Life Plan day. It doesn’t have to be fancy, just relatively private and quiet.
Think through the agenda before you begin. Based on our practice, following are two items you might want to consider:
Review your Life Plan. We encourage you to read through your plan one time without editing. Then begin the revision process. You might tweak the language in your Purpose Statement or Envisioned Future. You might add a Bible verse or inspirational quote. Most importantly, completely reassess your Current Realities and draft Specific Commitments. Try to do this part of the exercise as though it were your first time through the Life Planning exercise.
Write goals for the upcoming quarter. Then we recommend you take the review of your Life Plan and translate it into specific, ninety-day goals or objectives. We are not asking you to create a long list of to-do items. That’s too tactical for this exercise. Instead, we recommend a short list of the five to seven most important goals you can accomplish in the next quarter to move the needle on your Plan.
If you are committed to a Quarterly Review, we strongly suggest you schedule these far, far in advance—about two years out. If you wait until you have a break in your schedule, you’ll never get to it. Making appointments with yourself and scheduling other things around them is the key to proactive self-management.
Revise Your Plan Yearly
The Weekly Review is essential. The Quarterly Review is helpful. But if you really want to keep your Life Plan alive, an Annual Review is critical. This is a time to take an extended look at your plan, evaluate what you have accomplished over the past year, and determine where you want to go in the next.
Writing your Life Plan for the first time is the biggest challenge for nearly everyone. But once you have it, it is much easier to revise. You have already done the heavy lifting!
We recommend a day in the last quarter of the year to do a “deep dive” on your Life Plan. (In the previous chapter, we also recommended updating your Annual Time Block.) Doing this can replace your final Quarterly Review. The only difference between the Quarterly Review and the Annual Review is the amount of time you have to reflect and revise.
During this time, it is worth questioning your previous assumptions:
Outcomes
Priorities
Action Plans
One of my (Daniel) favorite weeks of the year is the week between Christmas and New Years. I have the privilege of closing the office and taking the week off to celebrate, reflect, and recharge prior to the chapter change into the year ahead. And one of my favorite days during this special week is spent in a little cabin on the Oregon Coast. It is usually crazy stormy and the perfect setting to light a fire, make a hot pot of tea and to focus on what matters most. This is where I take a full day to review my Life Plan and the lessons of the previous year. I then make the changes to my Life Plan for the year ahead.
Whether you change your Life Plan a little or a lot doesn’t matter, provided it reflects your life as you want it to be. Some years, you might change it more. Some years, less. Much of it depends on what has transpired in the previous year and where you hope to go in the next.
Conclusion
“Work feels like I’m in a rat race,” Stan told us. But when we asked him about family and the rest of his life, he said those accounts were at an excellent 9.5. Considering how hectic things are, it would be easy and understandable for Stan to turn more focus to his job. But he’s holding the line. When asked, he said that the Life Plan shows him how much to invest in each area of his life. It helps him keep balance—particularly since he reviews it regularly. That’s the difference maker. In fact, he told us, he has not “seen another way for people to follow through.”
Stan’s results have been so beneficial, he’s got his whole family doing it now, including his parents and siblings.
A few years ago, I (Michael) changed my Life Plan more than in any of the previous ten years. But that was largely due to my life circumstances changing so significantly. The last of our five daughters moved out. I transitioned out of my role as the chairman and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers. I launched my new career as an online training provider. I had a whole new set of business associates.
Thankfully many of my Life Accounts didn’t change—my spiritual, physical, intellectual, and avocation accounts stayed largely the same. I only tweaked them slightly. But given my new life circumstances, I needed to make adjustments to my family and professional accounts. I wanted—and needed—a Life Plan that was compelling. The Weekly, Quarterly, and Annual Reviews we have suggested here ensured that I was constantly moving toward a future I wanted to embrace.