Fail to Plan = Plan to Fail

If you fail to plan then you plan to fail.

My friend Alex mentors a group of people starting up their own businesses. This week he told them, “You either Plan or you Gamble”.

This is an important message. I meet people all the time who have Big Dreams, and no plan, so nothing ever happens.

What is it that you’ve talked about doing? You’ve talked about it a lot, maybe even for years. (I’m sure your friends and family still listen raptly to you when you do. Yes indeed.)

For me, it’s been writing. For awhile I knew I could write a bestselling novel. I started one or two of them. Then I told everyone about how I was going to write important non-fiction books that took incomprehensible material and ‘translated’ it into language that everyone could understand. It would change people’s lives; I was committed to a life of service. I took writing courses, read writing books, joined groups where we supported each other to write better, even became a lifetime member of an online writing university. Years of talking about it and making halfhearted attempts. In recent years (maybe 3) I’ve been talking about blogging. I bought every book, tried it 2 or three times and each time it lapsed.

NO plan = NO success.

Someone challenged me to fish or cut bait; he said that I needed to either DO it, or shut up about it.

So, here I am blogging 5 days of of the week, working from a plan, and DOING it!  I feel good about it, AND optimistic that the next thing I decide I want, I can have.

All I need is a plan. (And then of course, to follow the plan.)

Let me know how your plans are going….

Rocks, gravel, sand

Think of all the things you have to do in a day, and metaphorically divide them into rocks, gravel and sand.

Rocks: the most important things, where the outcome matters to you. They might be big things, or not-so-big, but they are important and you want to be sure they are done today. There probably are only a few rocks in any given day.

Gravel: less important things, but they still matter to you. They probably require some time to get done. These need to be done, although not necessarily today. If you take care of some of the gravel bits each day, it doesn’t pile up so as to become an insurmountable mountain.

Sand: either not that important, or don’t take more than a few minutes. Possibly not important at all.  There may an almost limitless amount of sand. The grains of sand are low priority; they may be fun, or interesting, or shiny and new.

Imagine that your day is a good-sized glass jar. There’s room for a lot of rocks, gravel and sand in it. But, since you can’t fit it all in, it matters the order in which you put them in.

Your unproductive day: first sand, then gravel, finally rocks. You can’t easily judge how much sand you can get away with before you fill the jar too full to hold much gravel or any rocks at all.

A pretty normal day: some gravel, some sand, some more gravel, and then if there’s any room left, maybe one rock.

Your effective day: The biggest rock, then possibly other rocks, then a scoopful of gravel to fill in some nooks and crannies, and finally, pour in some sand to fill in all the smallest spaces.

In your effective day, you got the most important things done, quite a few of the next most important things, and still had some time left over for fun and games.

If you regularly have important things that you don’t get done, try a different approach.

Rocks, gravel, sand.

Four Territories of Experience

There are four areas where you can place your attention when you think about your experience. They differ slightly depending on whether your experience is only with yourself, or with one other, or as part of a larger group (and we’ll look more closely at those differences in another post). But in general, they cover four perspectives or arenas of experience.

First Territory: Outside events. Results, outcomes, assessments, observed consequences, environmental effects, market performance. In business, or in life, these are the external, measurable, observable, results we get.

Second Territory: One’s performance. Behaviors, skills, patterns of activity, actions. In business, and in life, these are the activities we perform, the things we do.

Third Territory: Strategies, or action-logics. Strategies, game plans, ploys. In business and life, this is the larger plan about how we plan to achieve a vision, how the overall intention is to be realized.

Fourth Territory: Intentional attention. The vision, the intention, what it is you are trying to create. In business, the long term vision and mission of the organization. In life, your purpose in living, what you want to create in life.

Awareness of each of these territories is the first skill to master in Action Inquiry, an approach to learning from your experience by comparing your results to what you intended.

By learning to identify which territory of experience has the focus of attention, you’re well on your way to being more effective, through Action Inquiry.