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Life planning

The weekly planning⚑

I follows these steps:

  • Empty your inbox channels
  • Check and adjust the tickler and the calendar of the next two weeks
  • If you have it check the month plan guidelines
  • Do the project refinement.

It's difficult to do the weekly review until you get the correct process that suits you right now. I'm still struggling with it.

Month plan⚑

The objectives of the month plan are:

  • Define the month objectives according to the trimester plan and the insights gathered in the past month review.
  • Make your backlog and todo list match the month objectives
  • Define the topics to learn
  • Define the habits to incorporate
  • Define the checks you want to do at the end of the month.

It's interesting to do the plannings on meaningful days such as the first one of the month. Usually we don't have enough flexibility in our life to do it exactly that day, so schedule it the closest you can to that date. It's a good idea to do both the review and the planning on the same day.

We'll divide the planning process in these phases:

  • Prepare
  • Clarify your state
  • Decide the month objectives

Prepare⚑

It's important that you prepare your environment for the planning. You need to be present and fully focused on the process itself. To do so you can:

  • Make sure you don't get interrupted:
    • Check your action manager tools to make sure that you don't have anything urgent to address in the next hour.
    • Disable all notifications
  • Set your analysis environment:
    • Put on the music that helps you get in the zone.
    • Get all the things you may need for the review:
      • The checklist that defines the process of your planning (this document in my case).
      • Somewhere to write down the insights.
      • Your action manager system
      • Your habit manager system
      • Your Objective list.
      • Your Thinking list.
      • Your Reading list.
    • Remove from your environment everything else that may distract you

Clarify your state⚑

To be able to make a good decision on your month's path you need to sort out which is your current state. To do so:

  • Clean your inbox: If it's feasible in a short period of time refile each item until it's empty otherwise quickly overview it to see if there is any thing that needs to be addressed this month.
  • Clean your todo: Review each todo element by deciding if they should still be in the todo. If they do and they belong to a month objective, add it. If they don't need to be in the todo, refile it.
  • Clean your agenda and get an feeling of the busyness of the month:
  • Open the orgmode month view agenda and clean it
  • Read the rest of your calendars

Decide the month objectives⚑

Create the month objectives in your roadmap file after addressing each element of:

  • Your last month review document.
  • The trimester objectives of your roadmap.
  • You can add notes on the trimester objectives

Then reorder the objectives in order of priority. Try to have at least one objective that improves your life.

Decide the next steps⚑

  • For each of your month and trimester objectives:
  • Decide whether it makes sense to address it this month. If not, mark it as inactive

  • Create a clear plan of action for this month on that objective.

    • Reorder the projects as needed
    • Mark as INACTIVE the ones that you don't feel need to be focused on this month.

  • Tweak your week distribution

  • Check your calendar to see how many free days you have.
  • Taking into account the month objectives select what do you want to focus on in each week day.

  • Document the week distribution in your roadmap document and make it visible in your weekly planning process.

  • Refine the roadmap of each of the selected areas (change this to the trimestral planning)

  • Define the todo of each device (mobile, tablet, laptop)
  • Select at least one coding project in case you enter in programming mode
  • Clean your mobile browser tabs
  • Tweak your things to think about list.
  • Tweak your investigations list.
  • Tweak your reading list.
  • Tweak your learning list.
  • Tweak your habit manager system.