Your Development Plan: Planning and Execution

This is the second part of the series on putting together a development plan. The first part was on assessing your current state. This article covers goal setting and execution.

Dec 04, 2023

What’s next?

You’ve spent a few hours, maybe more in introspection. You’ve identified your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. You’ve got a good idea of who you are and what you want to achieve.

The next steps are to plan and execute the plan.

#1 What do you want to achieve?

After your introspection, you would have identified some opportunities and threats that stand out for you. Is AI looming as a threat in your career? Is the exit of competitors in the market an opportunity you need to leverage?

Pick out the ones that stand out and create them into SMART goals. Remember, these are goals that are:

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Time-bound

There are many resources that you can find about setting SMART goals.

The next thing is to prioritise them. What is your number one goal? Papasan and Keller came up with a question to help you prioritise.

“What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

This may be a goal for your career or business but you may have goals for other aspects of your life, for example, finance, relationships etc.

You may only have one goal for each part of your life. You can still end up having more than five goals. The challenge here is to pick 2 -3 goals at the most that will drive you towards your ideal life.

#2 What do you need to achieve your goal?

It’s fair to say that you need new skills and habits to reach your goal. Otherwise, you most likely would’ve achieved your goal by now.

Identify the skills and habits you need to achieve your goal based on your goals and assessments.

Don’t pick too many. Choose the number of skills and habits that you can work on daily. That’s right daily.

One challenge I struggle with is having too many goals. I want to develop new skills and habits and don’t want to lose existing ones so I have goals for new and existing skills.

This leads to minimal progress in anything.

To develop a new skill and habit, you need to be obsessed and focus on it.

What about existing skills? Spend time reviewing the material and practising the skill.

#3 Create 90-day plans

Having 90-day plans and challenges is great at developing for developing skills and habits and focusing your work on achieving goals by creating a sense of urgency.

I suck at this. I struggle to achieve my 90-day plans. It doesn’t mean I don’t think they’re a great idea. It doesn’t mean that I don’t keep trying.

The part where I find them challenging is where I have too many goals but more on challenges below.

If you think there is another reason why I am struggling with my 90-day plans, drop me a comment.

#4 Daily momentum

What are your daily activities to hit the goal? You need to do something every day to build momentum to achieve your goal. It doesn’t need to be all day. Brendon Burchard suggests 30 minutes a day to work on your goal. If you’re not working on your goal every day, then it’s not important to you.

The first thing to do is to schedule it. Block off some time in your calendar. The best time is first thing in the morning when all is quiet. You can wake up early and do the work.

The next thing is to use it, don’t just learn stuff and not use it. Identify what skill or habit you want to develop and scenarios that you want to practice them. Create a trigger for you to practice it.

For example, if you want to develop your listening skills, create a trigger where when you sit down in a meeting, you create an intention to practice listening and avoiding any distractions.

At the end of the day, review how the practice went. What did you do well and what you can improve on? This creates awareness and improves the practice.

It’s easy to find excuses for not doing the daily practices and it’s hard sometimes to see the momentum developing.

If you don’t do something one day, make sure you do it the next day. Make sure you don’t go through consecutive days without doing the work.

#5 Daily and Weekly review

This is a powerful practice that will keep you on track to your goals and allow you to adapt and be aware of your progress and challenges.

The key to this is being honest with yourself. At the beginning of each day, write down your goals. Tick off your goals or cross them out if you didn’t finish them.

Go through what you have achieved, how well you did and what can be improved.

For the goals that didn’t get completed, ask yourself what didn’t get done and how can you get them done the next day. Find one thing you can improve the next day, this creates a proactive mindset.

For the weekly goals, review whether you have achieved your weekly goals as you planned them. What achievements did you have and what did you fall short on? Rework the following week’s plan for what was and wasn’t achieved. This allows your plan to be adaptive.

If you can find an accountability partner, even better. Call them or message them each week and tell them what you achieved and didn’t achieve. This social pressure will get you going and build momentum.

Steve Pressfield wrote three books for creative work - Do the Work, War of Art and Turning Pro. Even if you are not doing creative work, even if you’re putting together a development plan, read these books they’re powerful for getting you to get things done.

#6 Challenges

Some common challenges with setting goals and doing the work to achieve them. I struggle with all of them and these are some actions I take to help overcome them.

Having too many goals
- You have to be brutal. pick 1 or 2 per quarter. I think this is where I fell over.
- Maintenance of the other components. What is the minimal daily dose you need to do to keep things going?
Not blocking out time to do it
- Create a focus block of time, first thing in the morning to get it done.
- Plan out what you want to achieve in the focus block of time.
- Remove all distractions. I use the Freedom App.
Procrastinating
- Plan out the work, and write out in detail the next actions.
- Do the work for 10 minutes, once you start working you feel like continuing.
- Block your phone and remove all distractions.
- Use the Pomodoro technique. 25-minute interval (or however long) and 5-minute break. After two rounds of it, have a longer break.
Struggling with doing the work and you end up procrastinating or doing something else that feels like work but doesn’t contribute to the goal.
- Pressfield talks about this in his book War of Art. I recommend it.
- Sit down and do the work.
- Surf the urge and do the work for 10 minutes before procrastinating.

The Struggle is Real

Even with taking these steps, you might still struggle and you might fail. That’s ok. Review, adapt and try again. It’s cliched but I feel it’s true - you only fail if you give up.

I’ve listed some resources below to help you through the work. I’d love to hear from you on how you plan and execute your goals. Any suggestions on how I can tweak the process? Any other resources that you may find useful?