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Wayfinding for Personal Planning and Productivity
Introduction
There are 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week for a total of 168 hours. That is all that any of us have to work with. The seven-day week was a tradition started by the Babylonians in the 6th century BC and it spread from there to other ancient civilizations. The Romans had an eight-day calendar until 45 BC when they gave into peer pressure and switched to seven-days. This is too bad, because most of us could use another day in the week.
Personal productivity is about how we the time we have more effectively and efficiently. Effective use of time means getting the most important things done. Efficient use of time means getting more done in less time.
Wayfinding uses an agile planning process to structure decisions and take action that follows the POMDAD sequence.
- Purpose: What are you trying to achieve?
- Observation: What do you know?
- Model: How do you organize what you know?
- Decide: What to do?
- Act: Do it.
- Destination: What next?
Purpose
If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.
Lewis Carroll
Purpose begins with your goals. Start with your 12-month goals. What do you want to achieve in the next year?
Break this goal into sub goals. What are 12 milestones between here and your destination? Roughly one milestone for each month. The challenge with one-year (or longer) goals is that it is easy to put them off because they are so far away or to feel frustrated because we are not there yet. Monthly milestones provide a way to measure progress and maintain focus.
Next create a 60-day plan. Review the two milestones for the next two months. What tasks need to be completed to achieve these milestones?
Now create a monthly plan. What is the priority for those tasks to be completed in the next two months? Which need to be completed first?
Once you have done this, in future months you will build on what you have already done. You can review your annual goals to ensure they are the same. You can…
