THE VERDICT IS IN

PERSONAL STRATEGIC PLANNING WORKS

Maslow’s Iceberg, my interpretation of Maslow’s Pyramid.

It’s been 2 months since I developed my personal strategic plan. In that time, I’ve thought about the plan often. I think I’ve been following it, but it’s definitely time to check in– both to verify that I even remember what I am supposed to be focused on and to form an opinion on how I am managing my time across the various actions I committed to. Success in this planning process meant more focus and intentionality about how to spend my time.

If I was tracking my time, I would have checked in many times since the end of May. But I’m not. I tried to make myself do that, but I just could not motivate myself. It seemed like more work than it was worth.

So after 2 months, I am opening up my map and my spreadsheet of actions expecting to be more or less on track. I expected to be a little off when predicting how much time I would spend on a given action. But I wasn’t expecting to have missed an action all together. 

To my surprise, there is one thing that I haven’t done at all (advocating/sharing information on solutions to social media, which I said I would do 1 time per month) and there are a couple of others that had faded into my memory about a month back.

Having been involved in hundreds of project plans over the years, I can confidently say that the parts of a plan that get easily forgotten always get lost for a good reason. And when they do get lost, that means you need to seriously consider revising your plan.

So, why did I forget about these actions? My gut tells me that these activities felt a little more removed from my overall goal. 

I tested myself, thinking about each action I had forgotten and hiding the map for a moment. 

For the 1st, I couldn’t even think of how it was helping me to achieve my overall goal. I remembered where the bubble was placed on the map, but I couldn’t think of why it was there. A definite disconnect. So I dove into why that ended up on the map to begin with before determining whether it needed to be placed somewhere else. Something struck me as I was contemplating its place. 

There was not a lot about meeting my own needs on my map. I clearly had a hard time being direct about the parts of the map that were “self-serving”. And that doesn’t really surprise me. I’ve always shied away from the idea that I am a human with needs, as many of us do.

So here is what I learned: Everyone’s personal map needs to include actions that are intended to serve themselves. 

After all, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs tells me that there are a lot of things I need before I can even think about achieving my goals. Just like everyone else, I need a foundation. With that in mind, I did some adjusting.

For the 2nd action, reading, I lost my commitment to that because the activity alone was not working to get to my goal. My goal was to learn about how to improve community health and quality of life. But that wasn’t happening. I need to translate what I read into practical lessons. To do that, I need to either write out my thoughts or talk to someone or sometimes both. That would make learning a reality. So I made another adjustment on my map, adding the opportunity to process what I read.

For the 3rd action, advocating/sharing information on solutions to social media, it was clear to me that I dropped the ball on planning out the methods I was going to use. Sharing information on solutions requires first researching solutions and then crafting a communication. Luckily, this check-in gave me the opportunity to refine my plan and explore the connections between various actions on my map. I’m now planning to use what I learn while reading to share information about effective solutions (more to come in my new blog series The Fix).

These three items were not the only things that turned out differently from what I had planned. There is also a whole area of my strategic map that needs a little more attention. But thanks to this check-in, I have some new strategies in mind for how to push things along. 

Overall I feel like this whole personal strategic planning process has been helpful for me. I would recommend it to anyone. 

Keep in mind that I embarked on my strategic planning process for a very particular reason– to figure out how to spend my time. So if you are interested in starting your own journey, always keep your end goal in mind– not your end goal meaning your personal mission (which of course is important), but your end goal for the planning process. 

If your end goal is different than mine, then your process may need to look different. Make sure to start by asking yourself “Why do I want a plan? What will it help me decide?”. If you keep that end goal in mind throughout the process, you cannot go wrong. 

This brings me to the end of my four part blog series on personal strategic planning.

Starting in August, I’ll be launching my new blog series, The Fix - Stories about Improving the World. Stay tuned for a change in pace! Now I’m really ready to make my personal strategic plan a reality!