Executing long-term goals with my trusty planning habit
I’ve always been into planners and journals, but come 2024 I’m going to employ a new tactic and practice time blocking, akin to Cal Newport’s quarterly, monthly, and weekly planning strategy.
I’ve always been into planners and journals, but come 2024 I’m going to employ a new tactic and practice time blocking, akin to Cal Newport’s quarterly, monthly, and weekly planning strategy.
Cal Newport is an author, podcaster, and computer science professor at Georgetown University. He also advocates what he calls “The Deep Life,” or the joys of a focused life in an incredibly distracted world. He says that, the more you focus on the things that matter by eliminating unnecessary distractions, the happier your life will be.
One fact I find awesome about him is that he does not have any social media accounts. In this era of TikTok, can you even exist without a social media presence? He and a few others make me realize that, apparently and refreshingly so, you can. But back to planning…
Mr. Newport says that to get your life goals achieved, you have to first know what your values are, because it’s from your values that everything you choose to do stems from.
One characteristic that underlies life goals, however, is the fact that all of them require long-term execution. To ensure that “the sheer volume of cognitive effort required to accomplish something hard actually occurs,” Mr. Newport suggests breaking down life goals into manageable chunks.
For instance, if the goal is to align one’s company’s CSR (corporate social responsibility) efforts in helping reduce the incidence of child hunger in South Africa, that goal might be broken down as thus into the following quarterly, weekly, and daily chunks:
- Description of the project in my Quarterly Plan: “One of my goals this summer is to align our company’s CSR efforts in helping reduce the incidence of child hunger in South Africa, and getting at least 50% of our department to volunteer in the initiative.”
- Sample Weekly Plan note about this project: “Schedule 30 minutes for lunch each day this week for meetings with the Vice President of Human Resources. Strategize the 5 W’s and 2 H’s of the initiative. Also figure out how to drum up interest about it among the workforce.”
- Sample time block schedule: Every day of the week, include a 30-minute time block labeled “lunch + CSR/SA.”
The blog Async agile also has useful suggestions for multi-scale planning. Quoting some of them verbatim below:
- “I use a dummy event to log my weekly goals each Monday and I conduct a weekly review each Friday to hold myself accountable to those goals.
- Based on the weekly goals, I block focus time each day, so I can complete the tasks that help me achieve my goals.
- I support this multi-scale planning approach through a few behaviours.
- I capture all my work in relevant systems to reduce my anxiety and stress.
- I avoid unnecessary meetings to reduce context switches.
- I reclaim empty slots in my calendar and time-block them.
- Instead of back-to-back meetings, I plan time between them so I can reflect on the previous meeting and prepare for the next one.”
This method isn’t supposed to be rigid. It allows for flexibility in case something unexpected comes up.
In essence, this is also about being intentional about your schedule, so you don’t end up spending all your extra time doomscrolling.
I’ve already gotten myself a planner with a weekly page template that allows for time blocking, and I can’t wait to incorporate this strategy.
Another tactic
If you’re more into journaling than planning, I’d like to share this science-supported journaling protocol that Andrew Huberman, a podcaster and associate professor of neurobiology at Stanford University, discussed in a November 20, 2023 podcast of his.
The exercise may be emotionally excruciating, but it’s supposed to affect neuroplasticity (or the rewiring of the brain), improve brain function in the short- and long-term, and bring about healing from trauma.
Here’s how the exercise goes:
- Think about the most difficult experience you have had.
- Write about this experience— non-stop — anywhere between 15 to 30 minutes.
- Do not pay mind to grammar, spelling, and the like. You are not showing what you’ve written to anyone. The point is the exercise and the benefits derived from it, and not winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.
- Repeat the exercise over the next three days, for a total of four days.
- Do not visit what you’ve written until at least a week after the fourth day. Count all the words you’ve written on the first day that show positive emotions (“ecstatic,” “glad,” “hopeful”), and then compare that number against the number of words depicting negative ones (“sad,” “crestfallen,” “upset”). Now compare these numbers across all four days.
Detailed much? Wait, there’s also three considerations:
- Write about the facts of the difficult experience.
2. Include emotions that you felt at that time, versus any emotions about the experience that you feel now.
3. Also write about any links that come to mind about that prior hard experience with whatever else has happened in the past, is happening in the present, and/or might happen in the future.
According to Mr. Huberman, one remarkable result from this exercise is that the number of positive words increase from the first to fourth days — even if all four entries talk about the same exact difficult experience.
Other results include improved health metrics in chronic anxiety and insomnia sufferers, plus “significantly improved symptoms” among those with arthritis, lupus, fibromyalgia, and/or undergoing cancer treatments.
Mr. Huberman adds that it’s not a cure, although it has been shown to offer improvement in the physical and mental conditions of those who do it.
Some of the articles related to the said journaling protocol can be found in this link.
Do you like journaling? How do you fill up the pages of your journal?
