Day 25:       Take The Short Term Goal and Work Backwards.

    Okay.  Strategic planning involves having a goal and working backwards from that goal to where you are now, your starting point. 

    For example, I want to clean out the boxes in my garage.  Currently, there are over thirty boxes in there that need to be gone through.  My goal is to throw out at least one-third of the stuff that is cluttering up my life.  And I have one month to do this.

    Now you could say, thirty boxes, thirty days, do one box a day.  But the truth is there are going to be days when I don’t have time to go through a box.  I also know that it is easier to do several boxes at a time because once you get into a project, you kind of get on a roll. 

    I am a procrastinator.  I like to say I work better under pressure, but the truth is I put off doing things I don’t want to do until I ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO.  (Does this sound familiar?)  So knowing this about myself, I don’t want to end up having to go through fifteen or twenty boxes the last week of the month because I have been procrastinating.

    Working backwards, I want to have no more than five boxes to go through that last week of the month.  Those five might be odds and ends boxes, or that leftover few that I missed in the box count.  But no more than five.

    I can divide up the thirty boxes evenly over the three weeks of the month but I also know that my enthusiasm for a project tends to wane a bit as time goes on.  So the first week I may do fifteen boxes, the second week ten and the third week five.  I am going to need to set aside a large chunk of time the first week to go through all fifteen boxes.  So I can choose a weekend day (or non-work day) to tackle the largest part of the job.  Maybe I get through eight boxes.  I can then spend the rest of the week doing two or three boxes or set aside some time during two days and get through five boxes and two boxes.  I can break it up whatever way I want, but at the end of the week, I need to have gone through fifteen boxes.  I can measure that. 

    If I have only gone through twelve boxes, I need to do thirteen boxes the next week to get back on schedule.  Is that likely?  Probably not.  I didn’t get through thirteen boxes when I had fifteen as my goal.  So maybe I reset my goal to do ten boxes during week two and eight boxes during week three.