Welcome to our last entry in the mini-series, From Concept to Completion (C2C)! It’s here that we get to the nuts and bolts of the whole process! We’re about to come full circle and connect your daily activities with your “Big Picture.”
If you’re new to the mini-series, here’s a snapshot of where we’ve been. Click on the titles below to get caught up and follow along. The process started with defining your “Big Picture” and now ends with your daily actions that support your goals and make them a reality.
Concept to Completion (C2C) steps are:
- Step 1: The Big Picture – that big thing you want and why you want it
- Step 2: The Big Rocks – breaking those things down and making them S.M.A.R.T.
- Step 3: The Resources – the other stuff you might need to make your goals a reality
- Step 4: Your Strategy – choosing those dates and putting everything on the calendar
- Step 5: Your Daily Implementation Plan (Here we are!)
Let’s get started. This is where I grab my favorite daily planner. I love Michael Hyatt’s Full Focus Planner because it contains everything I need and it’s well organized. And it allows me to break my year down into quarters, then into weeks. If you already have a planner, keep using it until it’s full and then try out the Full Focus Planner for your next planning session.
“Most people spend more time planning a one-week vacation than they spend planning their life.” – Michael Hyatt
Now’s the time to plan your life. Your planner is a place to keep track of your goals, set deadlines, and is an important resource for you to plan out each day. In the Full Focus Planner, there are special sections for you to keep track of the details of your annual goals. There are month-at-a-glance blank calendars so that you can set deadlines. There is even a section for your daily rituals.
Now that you have your overall yearly calendar set, and you’ve identified what you can get done in a quarter, let’s look at the “action” stage. Did I mention my favorite planner is set up in quarters? Coincidence? I think not!
All that up-front work is going to pay off BIG right now! Since you already know what you want to accomplish this quarter, all you have to do is lay it in and start taking action!
Daily Planning
The best way to begin is to start planning your days “Michael Hyatt” style. By that I mean, pick “your daily big three.” These are your three most important tasks for the day. And guess what? These three tasks aren’t really big at all.
Have you ever created a mile-long “to do” list? And does your daily list usually include dozens of things? The problem is, most of the time, you don’t get everything done. You check some things off the list, but you’re still left with a ton of things that didn’t get accomplished.
More importantly, have you ever done things on your list just to mark something off only to realize later that they weren’t really the most important things? And now, you feel stressed because you need to rush to get something really important done in a short period of time?
Instead, pick just three important tasks for the day that will impact your big goal, and list those. You’ll probably get MORE done, but if you list those three as the most important, they WILL get done!
Now this is important so if you’re multi-tasking, come back to me! It may take some practice to write down “tasks” instead of entire multi-step projects. Let’s use an example from my life.
Earlier in my career, I needed a website so building one was a major goal. That’s a big, multi-step project so I didn’t write: “build my website” as one of my daily big three. I broke the whole website thing down into quarterly goals the first of which was to “research and select a website hosting platform.” So, a few of my first daily tasks were “register my domain name” or “sign up for Go Daddy and WordPress” or “watch one training video on content necessary for a website on WordPress” as key tasks. Like I said, your daily big three aren’t BIG at all! But they accomplish big things when strung together! The task needs to be limited, something you can check off by the end of the day and are always aimed at your goal.
Weekly Planning
One of the other things I like about this planner is the Weekly Preview section. It allows me to look back at the prior week and set my goals for the next. There are 13 weeks in each quarter so it’s easy to take small, manageable steps toward your quarterly goals. The idea is to recognize your biggest wins and build on the momentum from week to week.
It also has a section on self-care where you can write down additional mini-goals that you might have regarding your personal routines, like sleep, food, movement, connection, and relaxation. You can decide what you’d like to do in this section and how you want to use it.
Taking the time to plan out your week in advance helps tremendously in your overall success. For me, this section reminds me every week of my wins, my goals, and the specific things that I’m doing to accomplish them. One small thing at a time. Small wins + Time = BIG accomplishments.
Your turn! Sit down in front of your wall calendar and review all the Big Rocks and strategic plans you placed there last week. Grab your planner and start the process of naming your weekly and daily big three. Regardless of what planner you are using, or even if you simply use a journal or notebook, at the very least, start identifying your daily big three for each day, and start doing them! Don’t wait for a Monday! Start now and keep me posted on your progress.
I hope you found this mini-series helpful. I love planning and love seeing my goals come together. This process gives me the confidence that I can meet my goals. And I like the flexibility to move things around until I feel I have the right mix. I like the daily satisfaction of crossing tasks off my list, especially when I’m confident that they are moving me closer and closer to my goals. I hope this helps you too!
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