“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here” said Alice.
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to”, said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where”, said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go”, said the Cat.
This is one of my all-time favorite quotes. It applies equally to business and life.
If you don’t know where you are going, any road can take you there.
One thing that drives me is how can I be better – and for me to do that, I need to figure out how to hack into improving where I focus my energy.
I have tried various things in the past to plan my annual goals – from plain old books, Bullet journals, gilded diaries to digital tools like ToDoIst or Evernote.
Through trial and error, I figured out what keeps me away from getting to them.
These past few days I looked at all my goals that I had failed on accomplishing this year and listed out reasons why.
They mostly fall under these 5 buckets –
- I don’t want it badly enough or there is no strong ‘why’ behind my goals.
- I am overwhelmed by the day-to-day – I don’t plan for failure
- It seems like there is more for me to do than what I can handle – I don’t have a mental model to prioritize my decisions
- I have a goal post but the path is fuzzy – I don’t have a system to get to the end of the journey
- I, like other humans, have limited will power – I am not leveraging routines and building habits.
So I did the next best thing I could instead of repeating the same mistakes in 2021.
I built a planner to help address these with pin-pointed solutions.
I have been quite inspired by the design thinking and hands-on prototyping philosophy from my IDEO workshops, so I have added
- 5 activities that you can do in under 1 hour that will help you uncover your goals, motives and a process to get things done.
- 5 templates that you can print out to help you with designing your
best year yet!
The question that I have seen people struggle with the most is ‘How do you manage to find time’. We underestimate how persistence and grit always beats talent. Or how the tiniest of changes can result in completely different paths.
Grab a pen and a hot beverage. Find some solitude and I hope this helps you as much as I hope it did I.
So go ahead and download this free “Find your Dawnwall planner”. You don’t need to sign-up, provide your email, it is completely free and will always be.
Ensure to pay it forward and share it with someone else you think might benefit from this!
P.S – please share your feedback so that I can maybe do a better job in the next version 🙂
