Today is my planning day.
I just started reading a book called The 12 week year. It is an interesting premise. It suggests that rather than setting annual and quarterly plans we should work on 12 week plans. And you should divide a year up into four 12 week years. I haven’t got that far enough into the book yet to tell you what the remaining 4 weeks are for. I suspect though that they are for planning the next 12 weeks and to recharge your batteries.
Despite the fact I have just started reading the book, I thought I would make my plan for the next 12 weeks. And see where I get to. I will even set myself a reminder to write again about how it went 12 weeks from today.
For me there are really three areas of my life I want to plan for. My Business life, My Health Life and My Social Life.
For my business over the next 12 weeks I want to get 3 new clients and release 3 new products. I am working on a bit of a rebranding and repositioning for me Web Development and Social Media agency. So for the first three weeks I will be devoting quite a bit of time to that. My main priority though is to build a system for getting new business. Until now I have been fortunate enough to get new clients through referrals. Because I live in Peru the cost of living here is low, so I haven’t been nearly as ambitious as I should have been. The time for that to change is now. So when I come back to revisit this post 12 weeks from now, I am expecting a nice increase in revenue.
For my health, my main priority is to work on my upper body strength. I am getting close to being the fittest I have ever been. I am certainly the lightest I have been since I was in my early 20’s. That was when a brief stint at the British Army’s Officer training school led me to get quite fit. In honesty It wouldn’t surprise me if I was actually fitter now than then. Either way it is a close run thing. However, like then my upper body strength remains weak. I am unable to do many pull ups. Actually I can just about do 1, so many is an understatement.
My brother in his wisdom has decided that we should enter a Tough Mudder as a family team, which looks quite fun. It is a 10 mile run over various obstacles, including some walls. My nephew sent me a photo of a wall at Pompeii, damaged by the recent rains, suggesting that it was the last wall I tried to run over. Since I can’t use it because of copyright I have included this wall. It also looks rather like the last wall I tried to run over!
Anyway rather impressively my brother seems to have got myself and most of my nephews to join in. My nieces seem less keen! Anyway it is in May of next year, so I have plenty of time. Still I really need to get that upper body strength up to ensure I can get over all the wretched walls. And if I leave it a long time then it won’t happen.
Photograph © Copyright Jim Barton and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence
So for my fitness I will be keeping up with my running. I am currently running 23 miles a week and over the next 12 weeks I will be pushing that up to the 35 miles a week. That is the same mileage I was doing before my Marathon in May. I will also be working on a new gym routine. I haven’t been as strict about going to the gym as I was earlier this year. Whilst I have been going 2 or three times a week, I haven’t had a formal plan. So I will be working on developing that and am looking to go 3 times a week. And depending on how the training is going I might change that to 4 times a week.
And then for my Social Life I want to make more of an effort to be in touch with my family. The other thing I want to do is devote more time to mastering Spanish. Despite having been here for almost 7 years my Spanish remains at a fairly basic level. That is frankly unacceptable to me, so I will be devoting more time to working on that.
Recently I wrote a post about how I used Trello for Productivity. I mentioned there that there were five areas that I thought it was important to concentrate on. For the sake of this 12 week plan I have combined Family and Friends into Social. Spirit life for me is my daily meditation. I am happy with that currently although I am aware it has room to improve.
How about you? How do you plan your life? And do you plan yearly or break it down into smaller chunks? Love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Time Spent Writing 20 minutes
Time from time to finish 21 minutes
Time editing: 10
Happy with result 7
