One of the changes in this year is that Petra and I decided to take a bit more control over our lifes. As part of this, we’re reviewing our goals and tasks from time to time. To be exact, we have a daily ‘meeting’ (usually right before bed time) looking at what tasks we completed and need to complete the next day.
And every month, we take a slightly higher level view. I won’t bore you with all the details - I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than to follow Petra and my goals in meticulous detail. However, I’d like to share the basic ideas behind it with the web at large. I’ve been googling for ‘monthly review’ before, and never found something that really made a lot of sense to me. Consider this indexing my brain via Google…
There are three sections to this review, at least in our version.
What happened last month
It’s a great way to reward yourself for the things you achieved, and it reminds you of the things that went wrong. For example, my wife finished her recent lab assignment with a 97% grade (Yay!), and I finally started a decent workout routine. Also, by looking at the things that didn’t happen, I realized that my blogging has been non-existant. (It’s gonna change, promise!)
What did we learn
There’s really no point in looking at what you did if you don’t decide to learn from it. Our first monthly review yielded quite a few interesting insights, at least for me:
- Without taking notes, the daily task-setting is useless. You’ll forget by next morning
- Trader Joe’s is great shopping - cheaper AND better food.
- Buying big ice cream large tubs prevents pigging out - you need to scoop some into a bowl and can’t just eat the whole thing.
- I’m reading less than I thought
And of course, quite a few more.
After we’re through that section, we come to the final step
Goals for next month
Turns out it’s surprisingly hard to set goals when you don’t have a larger framework to operate in - and we haven’t yet bothered to set yearly goals. (And, frankly, we want to take a bit of time before actually committing to goals more than a few months out.)
So we used a little trick to get our brains working - instead of just thinking of goals, we’d think of goals for specific aspects of our lives. I.e., “what are my goals as a professional?”, “as far as my health goes”, “as a financial entity”, etc. For some reason, that makes it way easier to come up with goals.
Just as an inspiration, here are a few of the ones we set for ourselves this month:
- Finish at least 6 assignments
- More workout - at least 5 times a week
- Investigate working from home
- Draw 2 designs
- Read 4 non-fiction books
As you can see, it’s a wide variety of goals - but they all have the advantage that you can say yes or no to the question if they are completed. There’s nothing more annoying than having vague goals and not knowing if you achieved them.
Over the next month, we’ll see how well we’ll stick to them, and how things work out. Expect another update end of February.
Hey! Maybe you’re on to something- Agile Relationship Development. Heck, you’re even doing Pair Programming. ;o) Glad you’re blogging
Funny as it may seem, this review thing actually is inspired by agile development. Daily Review is more or less the Standup meeting, and monthly review is planning for a new iteration.
Now if I can figure out how to do burndown charts for personal growth…
Nice. I’m surprised how easy it is to forget that working out what you want is a pre-requisite to being happy.
As far as note-taking for tasks goes, there’s a whole mini-industry devoted to it. David Allen’s book ‘Getting Things Done’ is pretty popular.
Yes, I’ve read GTD. I crave productivity ideas
This is probably my fourth attempt to actually implement GTD, and it turns out the reviews are a major part that I was missing before. They tend to answer the whole question of what action you actually should take next. (I’ve still got issues with the mechanistic view of GTD, but I’m slowly figuring it out)