I meet regularly with a group of women who are all working on their own personal projects / side-hustles (a major part of my personal support network).
One of the most helpful things we do is personal quarterly planning! Basically it is us meeting online on a weekend morning, usually for ~3 hours to:
- Do a mini retro (what worked/didn’t work over the last 3 months)
- Revisiting our goals (mine is divided into short, medium, and long term goals)
- Making a plan and some objectives for the next 3 months
- Natter!
When we first started it felt super cheesy and dumb, and now I’m honestly not sure what I’d do without it – this is how I work out what to spend time on outside of work!
Anyway here’s a peek of my planning board from earlier today, blurred because, well, there’s health goals on there for starters … but not so blurred that you can’t see all the emojis and the theme I chose for the next few months: “Show up. Keep mooving. Repeat.” (there was a whole cow joke – you had to be there! 
)
I’d love to know what planning anyone else does?
And if you don’t – maybe you should try it?
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OMG - this feels so deliberate and everything I should do (but nothing that I do do ). I always tend to leave all of the organisational skills that I bring to my client work at the door when I get onto my personal life (or personal projects)…
Please teach me your ways and discipline!!!
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Ha ha! That’s precisely how I used to feel about personal planning. I never would have started if it wasn’t for the group – and it took a number of rounds before it became not weird!
So I guess I’m saying: Find a (obviously nerdy) buddy!
Wowww, I really admire your group for putting this together to prioritise life!
Did you use a Miro board?
I’ve been staring at it trying to figure it out 
do you start by brainstorming goals, group them into themes, then build out tasks for each theme under ‘plan’ then map the tasks to days? Or are the goals and the plan seperate?
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@Optimistic_BA Ha ha sorry the blur does make it all more mysterious!
If helpful to clarify:
- On the left are goals. The top are long term goals (think: 10 years), the middle is medium term (2-5 years), and the bottom are short term (6 months to 1 year).
- About a year ago we did a big deep-dive on our real long term goals and honestly, they’ve not changed much since then! We tend to start planning by duplicating the previous set of goals and then validating/editing them. Most of the change happens in the short term goal space (as you can imagine!)
- The only rule is that all goals must link to a longer term goal.
- The right is the plan. The black post-it notes are themes (think focus areas), with actual actions beside them.
- To the very right of the themes (the white post-it notes) are a short summary of why this theme – I have a bad habit of just coming up with a cool idea and running at it and not actually validating that it supports any of my goals (lol). So that’s a recent addition to my approach!
- And at the bottom is a weekly schedule of when I focus on stuff! Less about tasks and more “I’m going to try and write on Mondays” or Sunday is my day to focus on “projects!”
- The ‘schedule’ is also an experiment!
- And yup! We use Miro!
Thank you for breaking this down and explaining it so eloquently! It makes sense now hearing how it’s put together, hehe. You’ve inspired me to try this myself, so thank you again for sharing 
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Hi Hannah,
following yours loosely, I did this today and WOW.
I had no idea where to start so I called in my Copilot Gemini and she and I got to work.
I now have a long term plan that feels real to me and actionable steps.
Thank you so much for sharing this!
Oh that’s great to hear! And I promise it actually gets way easier the more often you do it … I seem to iterate on what I’m doing rather than start from scratch so just having your first plan will make the next one much much easier!
What timeframe did you “plan” for? And any especially exciting goals?
I did a long/medium/short term box.
Long term is the exciting one - the financial plan and being able to break that down into something thats possible is so cool!
I have my Annual Review on Thursday. So we broke that down into tiny short term tasks that I could do to make that more meaningful. That is measurable!
