The 12-Week Year Challenge: Week 1 – Reality Sets In

Week 1 is history, and here’s how it went down, folks.

The goal: to create a schedule of daily “mini goals” to complete (based on the three SUPER GOALS outlined in the previous blog post) for each day of the week and to stick to that schedule.

The outcome: Let’s just say that the schedule has been tweaked since week 1. So, you can imagine that maybe, just maybe, everything didn’t go as planned for week 1. And, you would be correct.

The Plan to Follow

So, the plan was to simply follow the weekly schedule that was created to focus my active attention on the to-do items necessary to help me move toward my SUPER GOALS destinations.

Here are the steps I followed to create my schedule:

1. First, I did a huge brain dump of everything I could think of that I would need to do on a routine basis in order to help me reach my SUPER GOALS. Because, it’s going to take consistent, repetitive action to accomplish these goals. You’re talking about writing winning grant proposals, losing weight, and growing a youth membership. And, those kinds of goals don’t happen overnight, and they don’t happen without some mini goal achievements paving their way.
2. Second, I looked at the action items from the brain dump and kicked the “non-essential busywork” to the curb. I’m only dealing with action items that have a high probability to result in some progress being made in movement toward my SUPER GOALS.
3. Third, I looked at how I would arrange those items from Sunday through Saturday. Some action items would need to be done every day or almost every day. Other action items would only appear on certain days of the week. So, I figured out how my day-to-day for the week would look and assigned tasks accordingly.
4. Next, I repurposed a store-bought journal for use as a tracker, and wrote down daily to-do checklists, or schedules of mini goals to complete by day of the week. I wrote out all the action items that would need to be accomplished for each day in order to get me closer to my overall goals, or SUPER GOALS. Next to the action items, I included a little box. (This box is what will be checked off once the action item has been completed.) You can also call those “action items” . . . “mini goals.” I use the terms interchangeably. NOTE: no times of the day were assigned to the mini goals. The only time requirement was that action items were to be done during whatever timeslots/blocks would best suit them for that day (early-to-late afternoon or throughout the day), depending on the task.
5. Then, each mini goal would be checked off for the day once completed.
6. Finally, I would review the outcome for the day to see how I did with the completion of my mini goals for that day’s schedule. I would also review my overall weekly schedule to see what was done over the entire week, identifying areas of strength and areas of weakness. This review would allow me to see what things were working with the schedule and what things I may need to adjust to make the schedule a realistic one to follow.

Reflection Time

I have a habit of being somewhat unrealistic about the management of time at times. In other words, I tend to think that I can get waaaaaaaayyy more done in a certain amount of time than is realistically or humanly possible for myself. I don’t know why I’m like that, but I am. And, I happened to let my optimistic view of time management get the better of me when sitting down to map out my weekly schedule.

Lessons Learned

• No productive creative work or work requiring deep and focused thought will be done after 5p. So, 5p to 5a is pretty much a no-go for any mental acuity-driven work being done by yours truly. With that math, I’m left with only 12 hours to get some 12-Week Year Challenge action going. I quickly found out that I can’t schedule any grant and/or youth membership work to be done after 5p. At 5p, I’m starting to wind down for the day. However, the mini goals, leading to the losing weight goal, are still a go after 5p. Why? Because, I don’t have to use high-level brain power for that one.
• Distractions do damage to planned-out schedules. Well actually, I didn’t schedule in downtime, entertainment, or “distraction” time for week 1, so those unplanned activities ended up showing up without a designated time to do their best work, and they ate up some of my “mini goals” time. Balance is important, folks! There’s nothing wrong with having some playtime or relaxation periods from work during the day. All work and no play equals no balance, and I definitely won’t thrive in that kind of life environment. I will NEED some of my day (maybe that 5p and after timeframe) to be devoted to downtime, entertainment, or “distraction” time. Nothing wrong with this at all; the non-work action just needs to be officially scheduled into my day so it doesn’t take away from my work time.
• Some of my planned mini goals consistently didn’t fit into my daily schedule at all, namely ones that I previously (before this challenge) never established a consistent routine of incorporating within my day-to-day. What I mean here is that they didn’t get done at all. And, here’s one thing they all had in common: I allotted one hour to each of them on their respective days in the weekly schedule. And here’s what happened: because I couldn’t dedicate a full hour to do those goals, I just chucked them altogether. But, here’s the lesson that I learned with this: it’s better to do some thing, than to do nothing at all. So, my goal for week 2 is to leave these action items on the schedule but not assign a length of time to work on them. Right now, one hour just isn’t doable for these activities. But, I can give some portion of that hour to these tasks. And, every bit of consistent action (no matter how small) will help move me closer to my end goal.

So, there’s the recap of week 1. Week 2 has just ended; and later this week, I’ll let you know if I was able to get a better handle on managing my time for goal achievement.

The 12-Week Year journey continues . . .