Goals to projects to next actions

In my last post, I outlined how I had set up my monthly plans to weekly plans (and at times, daily tasks) in my binder but said that the next actions area was still a big blank as I hadn’t had a chance to think about things. Well, I managed to find some time this weekend to think about things, and to some extent, simplify my ‘life areas’.

In the past I have had between 3-8 life areas, but this year I have just 4 (in no particular order):

• Writing
• Chimwemwe
• Health and fitness (for which, read ‘running’ essentially!)
• Relaxation

Now, the title of this post of “Goals to projects to next actions” is a bit misleading as most of these areas seem to have ended up with either goals and no projects or projects in an area (but no overall goal)! For example, ‘Health and Fitness’ has three goals:

• Run 15-20 miles per week
• Keep weight between 9 stones and 9 stones 4lb
• Maintain core strength and shoulder stability

If I achieve the first, I will almost certainly achieve the second goal! The core strength and shoulder stability (my shoulders dislocate all too easily!) will be achieved by doing my exercises and these have already been written into every single day in 2014 (as described in the last post).

Likewise, ‘Writing’ has three projects, though I suppose they all come under the overall goal of ‘getting published’ – finish and edit book 5; Kindle-publish ‘Faultlines’; script-write ‘3a’ (which makes sense to me).

Anyway, I have now set up the navy Portland in a way that makes sense to me. Here goes!

Walk-through:
Plastic protective sheet
Quote from ‘Inception’

Divider 1
Annual Plans sheet
4x Quarterly plans sheets (grey paper)
Life area 1: Writing – project outline
Life area 1: Writing – projects to next action sheets
Life area 2: Chimwemwe – goals/projects outlines
Life area 2: Chimwemwe – projects to next action sheets
Life are 3: Health and Fitness (aka ‘running’) – goals sheet
Life area 3: Health and Fitness (aka ‘running’) – milestones sheet
Life area 4: Relaxation – projects/goals sheet
Life area 4: Relaxation – ‘finishing the Morris Quilt plans’
Lined cotton cream paper for reviews/extra notes space
Grey lined paper for quarterly review notes

Divider 2
Monthly sheets for 2014 (see previous post for details)

Divider 3
Weekly sheets for 2014 (see previous post for details)

Divider 4
Currently nothing, though review sheets (weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual) will probably go in here

In more detail
Behind divider 1:
All of the pages are cotton cream except for the quarterly plans ones (which are on grey so I can find them more easily). I was going to use different coloured paper for each life area and indeed pulled out all the coloured paper I have, then decided it would all clash horribly, so changed to cotton cream with washi tape to code the life area.

The first page is a summary page and lists the (current) goals for the year in each area. There is washi tape at the side to indicate the code for that life area.

Annual plans

Then there are the quarterly plans pages. I have only completed Q1 because three months is a long time and if I plan them all out now, it may all be out of date by the time I get there. I would rather plan a quarter in advance (with a weather-eye on the annual plans). The plans for each life-area are written in colour-coded ink.

Quarterly goals (Q1)

Quarterly goals (Q2) still to be completed

After these sheets come the projects in more detail. The tops of all of the following sheets have washi tape to indicate the life-area and there is a small square of washi tape on the reverse too to help locate pages when I am flicking through the section.

Writing goals/project summary

For each life-area, there is a summary page of things to have achieved in 2014, followed by project to next action sheets for them. For example, ‘finish and edit book 5’ has a page which has the next scenes to be completed and their hoped-for completion date as the next actions, with space to tick them off. The only real exception to the sheet per project system is ‘Relaxation’ as the next actions would be all the same for ‘read 40+ books in 2014’ (‘read a book’ then ‘read a book’ then ‘read a book’...) and similarly for most of the other goals. The only ‘relaxation’ detail sheet is a plan on what needs to be done to finish the William Morris patchwork quilt I am halfway through.

One of the project sheets for 'writing'

Summary sheet for 'Chimwemwe'

Health and Fitness

Milestones rather than next actions

In Health and Fitness, I have milestones rather than projects, so my running milestone for January is ‘long run = 6 miles; 1-2 other runs/week’. Incidentally, the reason that ‘Health and Fitness’ boils down to little more than running is because that when I am running, everything else just drops into place – I eat well, I sleep well, I stay hydrated, my weight drops, my mood improves... as long as I am running, I don’t need to focus on any of that.

List of things to do to complete the quilt

Behind divider 2:
You’ve seen this in the last post, but on these monthly sheets I note any birthdays for the month, any ‘to do’ for the month (things I have to do that month that are unrelated to any of the life-areas/projects e.g. renew car insurance; send card and present to x etc.) and now I have written in, for the first quarter at least, the next actions/milestones for the projects, colour-coded to the life-area.

Behind divider 3:
The weekly sheets. Again, you have seen these in the last post and these are lists of ‘things to do this week’ broken down into ‘to do’ and ‘next actions’ and the next actions are colour-coded to life-area.


This post will get huge if I try to explain my ‘system’ for how all this works on a day to day basis – I’ll cover that in the next post!

Getting ready for 2014

Ooh... I feel all prepared and organised. Well, somewhat! After some interesting, inspiring and fun discussions with Shadow Wolf over email, I became enthused about getting set up for 2014 so have spent a couple of days preparing things.

Despite still not being 100% sure about my goals and next actions (yep... still working on them), I did know that I needed monthly sheets and weekly sheets and that my weekly sheets needed dividing into ‘next actions’ space and ‘to do’ space (in my head, ‘to do’ are things that need doing like buying stamps, writing to a friend, getting the dry-cleaning, doing the housework, whereas ‘next actions’ are the things I have to do to progress my projects and hence approach achieving my goals). This year I have struggled a bit with ‘to do’ beginning to swamp me and ‘next actions’ getting forgotten and I am determined that this won’t be the case in 2014!

Whereas my homemade week + notes is designed around me and would have been a perfect set-up for 2014, I am also getting annoyed with myself for buying perfectly good diary pages and then printing up my own anyway, so I have decided to stick with the Paperchase week to view (which I reviewed here) and amend it slightly.

My set-up (and I am really hoping that despite all the siren-songs from Red shiny people, I may stay in it!) therefore runs like this:

• Goals to Projects to Next Actions (held in the navy Portland)
• Monthly sheets (all bar the current month held in the navy Portland; current month’s sheet is in the day-to-day binder)
• Weekly sheets (all bar the current month’s weekly sheets held in the navy Portland; current month’s weekly sheets are in the day-to-day binder behind the current monthly sheet)
• Week to view (whole year in the day-to-day binder)

In detail
1. Goals to Projects to Next-Actions
Still a work-in-progress at the moment but I am hoping to map them out over the next few days!

2. Monthly sheets
Still also somewhat a work-in-progress as the next-actions are nowhere to be seen yet. However, the rest has been set up.

sample monthly sheet

I have used lavender-coloured paper and a separate sheet for each month. The month is written across the top then there is a space for writing in all the next-actions and any month-specific to do (like renew the car insurance, etc.). At the bottom is a reminder of all the birthdays that month (covered up in the photograph). You can see November in the picture (fewest birthdays to hide!) and a few things in on the monthly list (but not many! It is for November 2014 after all).
The reverse of these sheets just has ‘Review’ written across the top and will be where the monthly review gets written up.

3. Weekly sheets
These used to work so well for me and I don’t understand why I let them slip. They are effectively the ‘+ notes’ part of the week + notes format, only with space for the weekly review on the reverse.

sample weekly sheet

I have split each week into ‘to do’ and ‘next actions’ as explained earlier. And yes, I have drawn up all the weekly sheets needed for 2014 and in every single one I have written ‘weekly review’ (as well as ‘monthly review’ and ‘quarterly review’ where appropriate). Shown in the photograph is a sample week (with not a lot to do in it yet!). I was going to write all of these out on nice cotton-cream paper but then found a heap of quadrille paper and thought I would use it up (yes, it was Time Manager paper and I trimmed it and re-punched it to fit). In the monthly review, these sheets will get filled up with ‘next actions’. I have put in all the ‘buy card and present for x’ reminders over the whole year too, as well as ‘post card and present to x’ (yes – that level of reminder is needed!)

4. Paperchase Week to View Diary
These pages live in the turquoise Baroque (current day-to-day binder). Since the week to view has to cover both appointments and tick-lists and since my Virgoan/OCD-squeakiness makes me not want to mix these up on the page, I have split every day into two, with appointments to go on the left and tick-lists to go one the right. (This might have taken less time if the lines weren’t all precisely a Today-ruler’s width from the edge of the lines...)

sample week to view

I also realised that I need to make a bit more effort over some habit-tracking. If things aren’t actually written down on a day, I won’t necessarily do them. However, my Virgoan/completer-finisher/OCD-squeakiness makes me determined to tick something off if it appears on a day! Hence, on each day, I have either got ‘core’ or ‘rowing’ (by which I mean rowing like rowing a boat, not rowing like having an argument!) and on Sunday I have to do both, so have both written in, with a small square to tick. No, I’m not joking. All 365 days of 2014 have one or both of these written in.

I became sloppy about doing my weekly reviews last year – probably a major reason why my goals slipped and non-goals-busyness took over. To try and avoid that this year, on every Sunday I have ‘review’ written and there are also indications of when I have more than one to do (monthly and/or quarterly), so I get to tick them off on the day and on the weekly sheets!

Since I am incapable of turning a page to look at the weekly sheets, I will also have their lists on Post-It notes on the weekly pages too. I know – why have the weekly sheets at all if I’m not going to look at them? I don’t know. I need them when I plan the month and I like to have them for the weekly review, but I’m just hopeless at looking at them in the week itself and if I allocate tasks to specific days I tend to overload myself and get frustrated by a lack of flexibility, so I have tasks on the Post-Its and throw them away at the end of the week.

The only other thing I have done to the diary, is the minuscule amount of washi tape you can see. Although I love the idea of washi tape and have a fine collection myself, I can never cope with it on the days of my diary, any more than I really can cope with stickers. Whereas I love seeing what others are doing when they decorate their pages, I think I am too much of a ‘clean-line, no clutter’ person in my diary. So, my concession to washi tape in the diary is to put a little bar of it along the top corner, coded to indicate the month. It makes the page (a little) more interesting but doesn’t swamp the point of the WO2P of showing me what and when I am doing things.

Anyway, that’s my set-up. What about everyone else? Are other people as bonkers as this or am I the only one who finds sitting down and prepping the year like this soothing and reassuring?

Mulberry Goes to Work

After I abandoned the set-up with a satellite diary, I was back to my original work diary which was designed to fit in the A5 filofax, not an A5 Mulberry. There were also a whole load of other pages for work, punched to go in the A5 filofax. All of this needed either adapting to go into the Mulberry, or recreating.

Of course, I could have waited until the new year and only moved into the Mulberry when I had a new diary for it, making there one less thing to be adapted/recreated.

Yeah, right.

Recreating would be a total faff and since the Mulberry ring spacing is the same as the personal filofax, and since a personal filofax sheet fits in an A5 filofax if you snip the bottom corner off, I only needed to punch one more hole in the pages to make them fit in the Mulberry. So that’s what I did.

Granted, the pages all now sit low in the binder, but they don’t stick out at the bottom (which would have been more than my OCD-like brain could have coped with).

So, here goes:

Front (slightly battered) cover

Inside

The dividers you see are just cheap A5 binders, re-punched. I may make some nicer ones! The sections are:

• To do
• Notes
• Diary
• Module notes
• Other (largely meeting notes, plus other bits and pieces)

I may separate out ‘other’ into more divisions, as it was in the filofax, but it can wait for the moment.

Although there is an A5 pad tucked in the front (and I have punched an extra hole in all the pages that are left in it) I will probably use the Oxford International paper for notes at work once I have used this up as it is much better paper.

To Do

I do actually have some ‘to do’! Just none from work that I can show you. These are home-made pages, done originally for the filofax, but you can see that I have just punched one extra hole in them to make them fit the Mulberry.

Notes

Again, home-made. I like this style. The Oxford paper will be what ends up in here, ultimately.

Diary

The filofax vertical WO2P, with an extra hole punched. There are currently about 18 months of diary pages in here – all of last academic year and up to December this year. In a few weeks I will be able to cull last academic year’s pages to make some space.

The back

I can’t show you any of the module notes or the information pages as they are largely private or confidential. I have my business cards in the zipped pocked at the back.

So, there it is, all ready for work.

New set-up (rapidly abandoned!)

I have been fiddling about, trying to work out if I can move to a different set-up next year for my filofax. I currently have two main planners – my work one (which used to be an A5 filofax but is now an A5 Mulberry) and a personal one (current squeeze is a pink Baroque). Hence I have two diaries – one at work and one for outside of work. In my personal, I have a year (or so) of week on two pages and a week at a time of day to a page. This year I switched to a week on one page plus notes (see here - which shows the set-up in pocket but I did the same for personal). This is working so well for me I don’t really want to change. I even have next year’s diary all figured out (see here).

However, a whole heap of people have said that running two diaries is daft. In all honesty though, there hasn’t really been a major issue with the two diaries for me – all work stuff goes in at work; all home stuff goes in the personal (which I carry to work and keep in my handbag. The work diary stays on my desk unless I’m blogging about it ☺). My work and home lives do not mix. Quite deliberately.

So what’s the problem?

I do like to have some inkling of what’s coming up before I get into work, especially as I generally work only Tuesday through Thursday. However, any memory of having looked at my work diary before leaving on a Thursday has become a dim and distant smudge of knowledge by Monday night!

Anyway, for all of about three days, I had considered a satellite A5 diary (bought for £2 at a cheap stationers) that could slot into my binder at work and come home with me when I left.

This concept lasted all of about three days because

1. I like the week to a page plus notes more than anything else
2. I like having my diary in my personal filofax
3. The cheap diary has horizontal days and I prefer vertical
4. The cheap diary has paper about as good as filofax paper which made me not want to use it

Consequently, I have returned to the original set-up and have a post-it in my work planner (so it can move from week to week) saying, “diary” to remind me to note what’s coming up in the following week in my personal diary.

Lesson learned:

If it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it!

Moving into the Holborn

Warning - picture heavy post!!

Well, after buying a personal Holborn ages ago, and then drooling over him for what seems like months, I have finally made the switch from pocket Miss Aston into Mr Holborn.

In many ways, I am sad to move out of Miss Aston as she is a lovely filofax and very neat in a handbag. But, my summers always have fewer appointments and more to-do and space to write in was beginning to be an issue.

Mr Holborn’s attractions were his pocketses (oodles of them) and the layout. I also like the very dark brown colour (especially as I made all the contrast stitching match the leather with some Brasher boot cream – the cream stitching bugged me!).

My layout has settled down over the last year, but is still different in this personal size in comparison with the set-up I had in either the Baroques or the Cavendish, but the tweaks are quite small.

Here’s a walk-through of the whole binder.

Front cover, with blended stitching…

Inside cover:

There are 6 card slots  and a larger pocket with a curved edge underneath. I am using 5 of the slots, but I removed my credit/bank cards so as not to have to faff about redacting the details on them!

Behind the card slots there are two full-height pockets – one facing outwards and one facing inwards. I have paper money slipped into the outward facing one and nothing (at the moment) in the inward facing one.

Outward facing pocket (before Brasher treatment

 

Inward facing (also before Brasher treatment)

Sections:

Throughout the filofax I use home-made dividers with the same image printed on the reverse as on the front. I blogged about making them here.

1. Notes

Behind this divider is some blank paper. I have sifted through to find some unwritten on paper for the same reason I took my cards out! You’ll see old diary sheets being used as scrap paper (but turned upside down so I’m not confused!).

2. Projects

The start of the ‘meat’ of the filofax, this has:

a) a mind-map diagram (colour-coded) of the main areas of my life with their associated goals.

b) a sheet with written on it:

            Is it my DREAM?

            Is it essential?

            Time is finite

These statements are there to remind myself to focus on the important. [see this post for more details]

c) a to-do list that contains all to-do items that are NOT associated with a goal/project (like: post birthday card etc.)

d) the goals to projects to next action pages. I’ve blogged about these before (see here) but in essence the goal might be to raise £500 for a charity; this could break down into two projects – to produce and sell calendars, and to have a book sale. These projects would then have next actions such as choose the pictures for the calendars, and book the hall for the book sale etc. The goal and the project go on the front of the sheet; the next actions for that project are listed on the reverse. I use a separate sheet for every project and all of them are colour-coded according to which area of my life it belongs to.

3. Diary

Diary section (the elephant is for both 'never forget' and for 'eating an elephant' reasons!)

June monthly list; same pictures on the reverse of a divider as the front

At the start are monthly goal sheets. These have things that I know are going to have to be done this month (e.g. car tax) and these are often written in a long time in advance. There are also things added in during the monthly review/planning session I have, when things get moved from the next actions sheets to the monthly list.

After these, I used to have sheets for each week (with the sheets for June tucked behind June’s monthly list, then July’s monthly list followed by July’s weekly lists etc). I used to transfer things from the monthly list and the general to-do list onto the weekly list. Currently I have a week of DPP sheets for planning the day tucked immediately behind the monthly list (marked with one of two Today markers). Behind these sit a whole year of week to view. These used to be the filofax lined week to view but recently I have changed to using the Philofaxy week-on-one-page-plus-tasks diary format:

Instead of putting things on a separate weekly list page, I now transfer them straight to the weekly list opposite the week on one page. In busier times, the four lines for the day’s appointments will be woefully inadequate, but at the moment, they are okay. I may get these next year (or work out how to make my own version).

Right at the back of the diary, I have a Forward Planning page where things get jotted down for next year (or beyond). Slightly randomly, after that I have my training schedule… no, I don’t know why either.

4. Lists

Lists section

Here are gathered lists of sites I want to look out for, lists of things I’m waiting on, what I’ve bought/sent for birthday presents, things I receive as presents (and if I have sent a thank you), an equivalent list for Christmas 2011 (so I don’t send the same present twice!), lists of things I have written to friends about (as I am an inveterate letter-writer, but don’t easily remember what I have said to whom or when I last wrote), some packing lists, books to look out for, things to get for house/garden…

5. Info

Info section

Does what it says in its title… ‘in case of emergency’ contact details, general bits of info, travel insurance telephone numbers and policy number, ditto for car, coded passwords, those info pages from the diary, tube map, map of GB, world map etc.

Right at the back of the information section are addresses and phone numbers. These used to be sorted behind A-Z dividers but they seemed bulky so I chopped up some Post-It index flags and wrote the letters on them.

Right at the back are three plastic things: a zip-lock bag that I have punched holes in and put coupons and vouchers in then a zipped pocket with coins in, then a card-holder with the other store cards, car insurance card, donor card etc. I will blog about making the zip-lock bag in a separate post.

Removed from the filofax because anonymising their surroundings was too tedious

Inside Back Cover:

I like the design of the back cover much less than I like the front cover. There are two full-height pockets again, one outward-facing and one inward-facing. Inside the outward-facing pocket, there is a zipped pocket, but the placement of the pen-holder makes it almost impossible to access this pocket with the pen in there. I had the same issue with the Aston and hence moved my money out to a zipped purse hack (which was originally made for the mini-Baroque! Maybe filofax need to think about making the pockets in their products better?).

Outward facing pocket with zipped pocket inside (right next to the pen-holder)

Inward facing pocket

I have stamps in the outward-facing pocket and nothing in the zipped pocket. The inward-facing full height pocket is also currently empty and my Zebra Sharbo pencil/biro combo in the VERY small pen-slot. I tried to get a slim Frixion in there but it’s too tight. The Zebra Sharbo is a tight fit! I don’t know if that’s just my Holborn or if all of them have such small pen-holders, but my Zebra Sharbo is a very narrow writing implement!

So, that’s the set-up. It feels a bit like a brick in comparison to the Aston, but I need the real-estate over the summer. My Baroques are clamouring to be used, since I’ve moved up into the personal size again, but they will have to wait their turn!