Fourth quarter of 2019 has just started, and although it’s a little bit late, it’s time for another quarterly planning.
I started doing a personal quarterly planning since July of this year to make some sense out of what I want to do and achieve. If you haven’t read my article about that yet, please head to Personal Planning for Lazy People.
Since this is my second planning, I looked back at what the third quarter has been like for me.
Retrospective
I’ve done a lot of retrospectives with my teams in the past 10 years. This is the first time that I’m doing it for my personal planning.
My main goal of doing a retrospective is to guide my plans for the fourth quarter. Normally, I would have done it with just going through my third quarter plan and checking what went well, what went wrong, and what I can improve upon. But to make it better, I’ve added a second part.
Rational Retrospective
This is the part where I checked my third quarter plan, and evaluate what happened. To do that, I’ve created a table listing the life categories and listing what went well, what went wrong, and what I could improve.
Below is an unfiltered snippet of how my evaluation looked like. You don’t have to be so formal about it. It’s best that you write everything that comes into your mind.
After reading Personal Planning for Lazy People, my wife, Elaine, did her third quarter planning too. We did our fourth quarter planning together.
After a lot of rational retrospective with different teams, I’ve learned that this is not enough, and looking at how I felt is important too.
Emotional Retrospective
My colleague/friend, who we’ll hide by the name of Ari (a.ka. a1i a7n), introduced Spotify’s Squad Health Check Model during one of our quarterly planning. The main goal of this is to see how the team is doing: e.g. Are the team members happy?
Instead of using the perspectives in the Spotify model, we’ve used the life categories in our plans and indicating if we’re happy, neutral or sad. Discussing your answers, is also integral in understanding what happened.
This “health check” guided my fourth quarter plans better, by providing an emotional guide on how I can be happier, and keeping my emotions in check.
Planning, Produktiivsusklubi, and OneNote
I’ve changed almost nothing with how I did my planning this time, except for a few changes.
I used to have a physical notebook as my bullet journal. I’ve also used different apps to track my to-do list and other lists, which made it really hard to track everything.
Thinking of the need to write down stuff in a lot of places made it impossible for me to consistently do journaling. I knew I had to do something about it.
Fortunately, our people team in TransferWise, recently, introduced a productivity course which I joined in the hopes of solving my problem.
The productivity course is a basic course from the Productivity Club (Produktiivsusklubi). They teach you a system of how to be more organised by using one digital medium to track your life.
This is where OneNote comes in. It has always been on my phone, but I did not consider it because I thought going analog is the best way to do journaling. I’m not saying analog is bad, however, with a lot of information being digital, and with me working with computers all day, it only made sense to go digital.
I’ve also incorporated some concepts from the course into my bullet journal.
Someday Maybe list
Inbox and Waiting For list
Productivity
Retrospectives not only allow you to do a mental dump of what happened, it also serves as a guide for your next plan. Adding an emotional retrospective allows you to check your mental health, and give you some sense of how to improve your mental state.
The whole fourth quarter planning, with Elaine, took only four hours. We did two hours of retrospective on Saturday evening and another two hours for the planning on Sunday afternoon.
The main purpose of planning is to be productive. You don’t need a lot of methodologies or formalities, just do it.