Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy

Welcome to Day 240 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.

This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom

Your Life Plan Blueprint – Planning Goals #3

Thank you for joining us for our 7 days a week, 7 minutes of wisdom podcast. This is Day 240 of our Trek, and we are continuing on our current Trek Your Life Plan Blueprint. Yesterday we remained on our trail covering the 4^th step or phase of our WESPER framework which is planning. We examined fitting your daily and weekly tasks into your schedule using a daily calendar, identifying the best times each day to work on your tasks, and learning to invest your time wisely.

Today we will focus our exploration on how best to schedule your tasks to ensure they are consistent with your strategy. Since our life planning series does cover many days, if you miss any of our Wisdom-Trek episodes, please go to Wisdom-Trek.com to listen to them and read the daily journal.

I am incorporating all of these daily concepts along with worksheets into an easy to use workbook, and I will let you know when it is complete so that you can download it. If you have any questions or would like additional information as we go through our daily trek, please leave a comment on Wisdom-Trek.com or email me at guthrie@venturecg.com.

We are recording our podcast from our studio at The Big House in Marietta, Ohio. Our renovation contractors were back on Monday, and they started to drywall the ceiling and skim coat the walls. It will add to the dust and clean up but will be well worth it when finished. I am also making slow but steady progress on the woodwork in the library. On the outside, temperatures are moderating a bit this week, but it will take some time for the current snowfall to melt completely.

Let’s head out on the trail for day twenty of our Wisdom-Trek Life Plan process which we refer to as…

Your Life Plan Blueprint^©

We started developing a plan for your long-term objective goals and short-term activity goals two days ago. These goals need to be based on your pre-planned strategy for proper execution and completion of those goals. You must allocate the time required to ensure success, which leads us to the trail that we will continue to explore today.

2. Fit Your Plan Into Your Schedule

c. Schedule your weekly and daily activity goals/tasks.

After you have identified the best available times to work on your goals, schedule your goal tasks:

1. Schedule your key activities of success. Start filling your available time slots with your key activities of success first. These are the most important tasks in your goal setting and need to be placed first. As part of your long-term life plan, it is important to complete all activities, if possible, but focus on the tasks that will have the most impact first.
2. Schedule your remaining tasks. After giving priority to your key activities of success, fill in the other tasks. These are the remaining tasks that need to be done in the course of your goal pursuit. They are not necessarily all that critical in the bigger picture of your goals but need to be done anyway as part of the activity goals and your life plan.
3. Ensure you spend disproportionate time and energy on your key activities of success. Ideally, the majority of your time is allocated to your key activities of success. Your other tasks should be disproportionately skewed toward the former. The ratio will be dependent on the context of the activity goal to your overall life plan, but the general principle is to spend as much time and focus on your key activities of success as possible.

As you work on your schedule, here are some tips that can help you build a more robust schedule.

1. Batch/Schedule similar-tasks together. See if you can be more effective by batching tasks or scheduling similar tasks together (e.g. doing all your exercise routines in one block of time while listening to audio books or podcasts to improve your mind or other areas of life; doing all your grocery shopping once per week; batch prepare meals for the entire week with specific portion size).
2. Allocate sufficient time for each task. Many of us often run into the situation where we underestimate the time needed for an activity. Develop a good understanding of the timing needs for each task and allocate it accordingly.
3. Schedule extra “buffer” time. This is for contingency purposes. It will come in handy at times when there are unexpected events that occur that need your attention or when you underestimate the time taken for a particular task.

If you find you don’t have enough time to schedule all your tasks, you will either need to reprioritize time across all the activities in your life plan or choose only those most important activities that will allow you to move closer to fulfilling your life purpose. You may have to delay some activities to another season of life. Continue to massage your schedule until you are able to fit everything into your time schedule. Remember, you cannot manage time, only your activities. Check the journal for Day 239 to study the Activity Management Matrix.

3. Ensure Congruency With Your Strategy

As a checkpoint, your goal plans that you develop should be congruent/consistent with your strategy. Your strategies are a subset of Your Life Plan Blueprint, so your goal activity plans should be based on that blueprint and not deviate from it. In any scenario when you find inconsistencies in your goal plans vs. your strategy, you need to:

• Revisit your strategy to examine if you missed something during that step
• Revise your goal plans to fit your strategy

For example, let’s say you want to reduce your body fat by 10%.  Your main strategy is to do high-intensity interval training (HIIT). HIIT involves doing bursts of intense exercise that is followed by lower intensity exercises. This method has been proven to be effective in reducing fat compared to other methods. However, when you are doing your planning, you fill up your exercise schedule with aerobic lessons and resistance training, which are not HIIT exercises. This will cause you to miss your benchmark. To stay true to your strategy, you should identify exercises that allow you to perform HIIT, such as treadmill, running, or elliptical trainer workouts.

Let’s look at another example. One of your objectives is to improve your overall health and one of the measurable activities is to lose 25 lbs. As part of your activity goal plans, you decide to reduce your overall intake of food, and you have done that successfully. But, if you find you still find yourself eating out several times per week or you continue to purchase highly processed foods or boxed meals instead of preparing your own meals using whole foods, your plans are not consistent with your strategy.

As you are setting your activity goal plans, remember to solicit the advice of trusted and wise mentors to assist you. Proverbs 15:22 tells us, “Plans go wrong for lack of advice; many advisers bring success.”

With the right planning that is consistent with your strategies, your execution of those activities will become an easier task. The next step within our WESPER framework is execution.

On our trek today, we focused on how best to schedule your tasks and to ensure they are consistent with your strategy. Tomorrow we will move onto our 5th step or phase in our WESPER framework, which is the execution of the plans that we have created.

We are hiking our life plan trail with perseverance as we lay the foundation and build Your Life Plan Blueprint. This framework integrates into our concept of Wisdom-Trek as we look at life as a trek, taking one step at a time. So encourage your friends and family to join us, and then come along tomorrow for another day of our Wisdom-Trek, Creating a Legacy.

That will finish our podcast for today. As you enjoy your daily dose of wisdom, I encourage you to help us promote Wisdom-Trek in the following four ways:

1. Leave us feedback about the podcast on Wisdom-Trek.com, so we can continually improve.
2. On your smartphone, subscribe on iTunes, GooglePlay, Spreaker, Soundcloud or Stitcher, so the podcast will be downloaded to you automatically each day.
3. On your computer or if you have an iPhone or iPad, leave us a rating and review on iTunes.
4. Please share Wisdom-Trek with your family and friends through email, Facebook, Twitter or in person so they can come along with us each day.

Thank you for allowing me to be your guide, mentor and most of all your friend as I serve you through the Wisdom-Trek podcast and journal each day.

As we take this trek together, let us always:

1. Live Abundantly (Fully)
2. Love Unconditionally
3. Listen Intentionally
4. Learn Continuously
5. Lend to others Generously
6. Lead with Integrity
7. Leave a Living Legacy Each Day

This is Guthrie Chamberlain reminding you to Keep Moving Forward, Enjoy Your Journey, and Create a Great Day Every Day! See you tomorrow!