I share weekly actionable advice for people who use paper-based planning systems looking to live a more productive and creative life.
You Don’t Need to Do Everything
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Hey Reader Happy Reset Week! 🥳 The 13th week of every quarter is my time to get cool, calm, and collected for the period ahead. Part of this involves resetting my physical space, scheduling appointments for the upcoming 13 weeks, and taking care of myself. Most excitingly though, Reset Week is my time plan the goals I’ll work on next quarter. While I always try to be mindful of not committing myself to too many goals at once, this time around I’m also more carefully considering the action steps involved with each goal. Pretty much any goal will have a lot of different ways we can work on it. Want to grow your savings? You can:
Breaking it down even further though, there are even more options!
While it might seem nice to have so many options for action, the first risk here is analysis paralysis; we make no progress because we couldn't pick a path. The other often selected option is trying to work on all paths simultaneously...and burning out... Not really a win either 😅 Whether it's a savings goal or something different though, there’s a way around this. Let’s have a look! The idea - Scrap 80% of your goal action listOkay, it doesn't have to be 80% exactly, but this idea comes from the Pareto Principle. Also called the 80/20 rule, this one states that approximately 80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes. Put another way, 80% of the progress we make towards our goals comes from 20% of the things we do to work on them. If only one-fifth of our goal actions are getting us most of the way there though, what about all the other action steps on our goal plan? 👀 At best, they're distractions. Things that we do for the illusion of goal productivity. Things that make us busy rather than productive. At worst, they're vampires. Things that suck away the resources we could be applying to the really impactful stuff. Things that steal time, effort, energy, and sometimes money from us!
An extensive brainstorm of actions steps we could take can feel satisfying, especially if you're the kind of person who likes to feel that you have choice in how you approach a goal. The risk though is that we end up giving away our resources to tasks that don't actually push us forward, or only do so at a much slower rate compared to the genuinely impactful stuff. To combat this, I'm aiming to cut down my goal action lists for Quarter 2 using the guiding question of: Which action steps are going to have the biggest impact for my goal? While I do appreciate the mathematical approach of culling 80% of an initial brainstorm, this guiding question just helps me focus on the outcome I'm hoping for. Sure, there are a lot of ways I could work on my goals, but I want to use my resources on the smaller set of actions that will have the biggest impact. I want to focus on the 20% of possible actions that will get me 80% of the way there. Change Your Life in Quarter 2If you were hoping to make big progress on your goals in Quarter 2, we'd love to have you as part of the Change Your Life Challenge! 🥳 This is our free quarterly goal-getting challenge where we take action on the things that will move our lives in a positive direction. The challenge comes with our accountability community and planning workbook, so hit the video link below to check out the details! Let's take actionAfter brainstorming the possible action steps for your Quarter 2 goals, use the question below to help prune back your list: Which action steps are going to have the biggest impact for my goal? You don't need to do everything to make the progress you're hoping for. You just need to do the stuff that's actually going to push Until next time! - Jess Sick of setting goals that don't get achieved? Learn the system everyday goal-getters are using to make EPIC things happen. |
JashiiCorrin
I share weekly actionable advice for people who use paper-based planning systems looking to live a more productive and creative life.
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