How to kickstart your dream? Life and work planning.
Hi there my readers! I have missed you since a while ago.
Today's post is about planning and organizing your life and work, in order to achieve your short or long-term goals.
I haven't been active much in the last few months, as I had too much on my plate. I'm not gonna get into that in detail, just I wasn't experiencing very fun moments in the last 2 years except once or twice.
Not gonna lie, it was really difficult to start doing what I wanted to do and be able to put aside the extreme resistance that I felt toward working for my dreams, but one day I woke up and just simply chose to start. The feeling of my ambitiousness trying to emerge from within was making me hate myself for doing nothing, and at the same time, the same feeling was making me sad and numb and wouldn't let me start anything.
Somewhere in the middle I just said to myself, "Enough is enough" and got to work.
Now I want to share a secret with you, a secret that enabled me to start and continue. I have this uncle that used to tell me "If you can't get any job done, just write it on a piece of paper!" and I did and it worked for that time. Over the course of time, I realized that I have ADHD, and that disorder makes my focus go away and distracts me from what I deem important. So consequently, writing down my life and work planning, helped me to focus on one task at a time and I was able to finish almost all my tasks successfully.
So with that method in mind, this time again, I started using the same method of writing tasks down with an addition; creating a prize system. I'm STILL working on it but till now I think I came up with a pretty good pointing system.
Now I will attach a template of my primitive plan as an Excel file for you and I explain how you can create your own plan in this template or a similar one with your taste.
The whole plan consists of 3 main objectives, Life, Work, and Extras. In the Life category, you will write down whatever you'd like to achieve in your life; for instance, buying a house or a car or even maybe immigrating to another country. In the Work section, you'll write whatever you'd want to achieve workwise; for instance, getting a promotion or creating your own company. In the Extras section, you'll write down the tasks that have to do with having fun and your health; for example, signing up for a swimming class, going to a birthday party, or even practicing yoga at home.
Now 3 questions might arise:
1) Why did I put the fun section as a section, not as a reward?
Unlike many corporations and governments nowadays that think having fun and caring about your health is a side hustle and can be canceled, I believe that adding fun and protecting your health should be considered necessary in life. In fact in the future when I will establish my own company, I intend to add flexibility and fun hours for my employees so that they can have better performance, not only in the company but in their lives. This eventually will contribute to a happy and effective society.
2) What can be chosen as a reward?
For this part, you can add activities and/or products that you've always wanted to do or buy but felt you don't deserve because you haven't made anything done. For example, buying a PS5 or traveling to a country you always dreamt of, or even something as simple as buying a pair of shoes that you denied yourself.
3) Why there are only two rows for each section?
Well, as a person with ADHD, doing one thing is very dangerous to your plan; adding way too many tasks and becoming overwhelmed with it. So as a rule, you can only do two tasks for each section in one day, and trust me when I say, it's even more than you could do in one day. So a total of 6 tasks a day.
Let's talk points! Personally, I rather think of points as the amount of money, to be specific, euros. So in this case, every point contributes to 1 Euro worth of money. So if I have 20 points, it means that I own 20 euros as credits and now I can reward myself with something worth 20 euros like a sweater or a pair of shoes. Notice that you can choose your own scoring system and consider each point as 2 bucks or whatever is more reasonable according to the prices in the country that you're living in. As a gift for starters, I can help you create your own scoring system, so feel free to contact me through my blog.
Now let's see how the points should be added to the pointing system. As I mentioned above, we have 3 sections, Life, Work, and Extras; as tasks in the Life and Work sections contribute more to your success than Extras, each point for the first two sections will be worth 1, and for Extras 0.5. This way not only you'll get points for caring about your happiness and health, but also you will be more motivated to complete the tasks that are related to your life and work for earning extra points.
The structure of the whole plan is in the time stamp of one month, from the day that you start till 30 days later. In the last column of the plan, you'll add one more column and write down the results that you'd want to achieve after those 30 days. For example, for obvious reasons, you can't buy a house in one month, but you can apply for a credit card and start paying your small monthly payments with it, and your objective for the next 30 days after that, could be increasing your credit to a certain point; Or for work, in 30 days, you can learn the basics of coding or even learn the basics of a new language.
Remember, writing down your objectives does not necessarily mean that you should be able to do 100% of the objectives that you wrote in the objectives section. The purpose of this plan is to set objectives and TRY to do as much as you're able to, in order to get one step closer to your dreams. If one month has passed and you were just able to finish 25% of the objectives that you set, it shouldn't make you feel disappointed in yourself; see the bigger picture, if you hadn't made this plan you wouldn't probably even made it to 10%, because you and I both know that if you're here and reading my blog post about planning, your plans aren't working and you can't get anything done, means almost 0%.
Now it's time to discuss how writing tasks and their results should be handled. In this plan, each column represents one day. You'll write the tasks vertically in that column according to the related section. At the end of the day, you now have to determine which tasks you have done and which tasks you haven't. If you have completed one task entirely, then use green as a filler color for the Excel cell, basically color it green! If you have done somewhat of your task, highlight the cell as yellow, and if you didn't do one task, use red. Each green (done) task for Life and Work gets 1 point and each yellow (half done) 0.5, each green task in the Extras section gets 0.5 and each yellow 0.25, and finally each red task (undone) gets 0 points.
Here is a schematic of the pointing system for better understanding:
Now that you learned how the plan works, you will be able to use the points to reward yourself with something based on your points. The Total sum shows your final point over the course of time.
Remember, this is just a start, plans might not work with efficiency of 100% all the time, but baby steps are better than not moving at all!
Best of luck with your planning and don't hesitate to ask me questions about any part of this plan.
Your bestie, Saina.
