I saw a tweet the other day that made me laugh. It was so close to home!

You see, I had mega-plans for December. I was going to organize all of 2019 and hit the ground running. This year was going to be different than prior years where I stumbled through the first week of the year trying to figure out what to do. I wasn’t going to be pondering what I wanted to accomplish. I was going to be ready to rock-and-roll.

But life has a funny way of conspiring to ruin the best plans.

November and December ended up entirely differently than expected. I didn’t take into account how disruptive to my normal routine Thanksgiving-Christmas-NYE was going to be. I discounted the impact that all the kids being home was going to have.

Essentially, I learned nothing from my prior forays into planning at the end of the year. I took insufficient steps to ensure that I was setup for success.

By the time New Year’s Eve rolled around, I realized I totally dropped the ball. It was a Monday to boot…so the Monday blues was something of a factor.

I decided over the next two days I was going to make a plan for January. Just one month of planning, not trying to figure out the entire year in 48 hours. I was going to get a handle on enough aspects of life that I could be productive for the next 30 days.

So I dug in.

I started thinking about the things that I could work on for the month. I made task lists. I cleaned up my project list and started adding to that. And the lists got longer and longer. I sorted tasks into projects. I allocated projects to my areas of focus. I worked and I worked.

My eyes were bleary as I stopped working.

In a fitting culmination to the way the year had gone, we couldn’t even find a replay of the New York City ball drop, and my daughter and I rang in the New Year with a really lame broadcast from New Orleans.

Within 30 minutes of the dawn of the New Year, the lights were off and I was fast asleep.

When I awoke on New Year’s Day my mind immediately started spinning. There was so much to do! I wanted to get everything done, but I realized that it couldn’t all happen in January.

Then I had the revelation that I needed to get my act together. All aspects of my act. So I decided I was going to use January for Review and Planning. I struggled with the idea all day, vacillating between thinking it was the greatest idea ever to thinking I couldn’t afford the time to just Review and Plan. There’s too much to do. I have to get it all done now.

I finally decided I was going to engage in a two week sprint of Review and Planning. I was going to make the time to set myself up for success. I even made a mental agreement with myself that I could extend the Review and Planning to the end of the month if that time was warranted. But I wasn’t going to decide that now.

The idea of the sprint comes from the book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. No synopsis does it justice…you should read the book. But the short version is you decide on an area you’re going to work on for a short length of time and you focus on that area, to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. You consciously set aside the other stuff and make a deep dive into whatever the subject matter is for the sprint.

So I kept working through my review of 2018. What things had gone well. What was still the same as 2018, but needed to get better. And what had deteriorated throughout the year. Then I started to consider how I wanted things to look this time next year. When 2020 dawns, what did I want my life to look like?

I break everything in my life into five Areas of Focus:

• Business
• Family
• Financial
• Household
• Personal

I always list them in alphabetical order so I don’t have to decide what’s more important to me. They are all important, but their relative importance changes depending on the season of life I’m in. Sometimes I need focus on business tasks because there’s a big thing happening. With three weddings last year, I had several windows of time where family was definitely the AOF at the fore. Throughout the year, the relative importance shifts between the areas of focus, sometimes dramatically.

As I moved through the Review and Planning Sprint I collected my thoughts in an Evernote document for each area. I started with a prose discussion of the area. I included thoughts about where I wanted to be in the future. I added thoughts about where I’d been last year, both progress and failure. Finally I included general thoughts that crossed all those boundary lines.

I collected tasks and dropped them into their area of focus, without respect to what project I was going to attach them to. I added to my list of projects in each area when the number of tasks got large enough under any one heading that it was obvious that it was a project. Some of the projects even broke into separate sub-projects.

I toggled between capturing the thoughts, tasks, and projects, clarifying what was trying to say about them, and organizing them into cogent categories that I could do something with.

After two weeks I’d covered a lot of ground. On the last day of that window I was nowhere near close to done. But I could finally see a logical break in the tunnel. I started another two week sprint with the end result being a specific plan for each area of focus for all of 2019.

Frankly, it was a pretty tall order, but I it was doable. The toughest part was realizing no matter how well I plan, things will change down the road. Life will happen. But by doing a comprehensive plan up front, I think I’ll be able to roll with the changes, knowing I can put any aspect of the plan on hold until I can get back to it.

While I didn’t really intend to take an entire month to do this planning, it’s something I’ve needed to do for a long time.

The whole point is that I want to make it a great year, and the only way I can do that is to actually plan to make it great!