How can we plan for success?

And can we do it quickly, or do we have to become "serious planner-type people" in order to plan well?

Most of the Wild + Brave humans I work with feel like they aren't exactly "great planners." They have busy lives, and constantly-changing priorities. They need a form of planning that doesn't feel wasted when the inevitable shifts come as they navigate their week.

If that's you, how about you try on something I call "Planning in 3 Dimensions."

These three dimensions are:

D1: The Big Picture Purpose for This Season of Your Life
(don't worry, this doesn't take 10,000 hours or require a spirit guide)

D2: Your Average Day
(I know, every day has different chaos, but bear with me)

D3: This Actual Week
(yep, just this week)

Planning in 3D

Here's how you can spend 20 minutes (or 5 or 90 minutes) planning your week. If you do it most weeks, the practice itself will become lighter and more effective. But even doing it once in a while when you're stressed will help.

Start with Dimension 1: This Season of Your Life

If you have extensive time to spend on this, awesome. You can review your life goals, think about the person you're trying to become, and ask what this season of your life can do to move you forward on that.

But if you're like most of us, you should spend 5 minutes checking in with this season of life. Do that by checking these two boxes:

1. Remind Yourself what this season is for.

2. Check if You're Stressing over something that doesn't matter in the big picture.

Try to identify a "big picture" for this season. What opportunity or urgency needs to be met right now if you're going to meet it at all?

Examples for #1: Is it the first quarter, and at work you really need to maximize outbound so that you close new deals in the third quarter? Is it your third trimester and you need to prepare your body and home for a new baby to arrive? Is it a tense time in a relationship where you want to see health restored?

Examples for #2: Check where the stress and pressure is. Are you hanging on to some old project, commitment, or "I should do this" from a past season of life? Maybe you need to adjust your expectations, re-negotiate your commitments, or cut your losses around something? What could you let go of, postpone to a future season, or delegate to someone else so you can be freed up to focus on this season's big goal? (Remember: it's what you say NO to that determines how much power you have to throw at your real goals.)

Dimension 2: Your Average Day

I'm betting your days vary widely. Even if we set weekends aside (we'll talk about how weekending whacks your rhythm another time), each day has its own flow. But there's something that happens when you start to reduce the variation of your days in meaningful ways. Small routines, patterns of habits that happen without eating up our will power, daily actions that make us healthier one inch at a time...they have a disproportionate impact on who you will be in the next decade.

So don't drop everything and carve a bulletproof schedule into stone. But ask yourself, how could I improve the rhythm of my days? Where could I make room for a little more consistency in the things that matter to me? (See more on Habits.)

You don't have to nail everything down, or live a boring life to have habits. It's amazing how much energy some consistency can free up. If you use 3D planning, you'll give a few minutes attention to ask "How have I been doing with my sleep, work out, business building, relationship habits lately?"

Focus only on the habits you care about. Then ask "Where should I take action to improve things?"

Dimension 3: This Actual Week

We've all got some way that we make note of appointments and projects. The sticky part seems to be where the hard landscape of our appointments and the drawn out "get this done at some point" projects intersect. How do you account time to do something that doesn't have an appointment? And what happens when a 15 minute work call actually has 3 hours of preparation that needs to be done in order for it to go smoothly?

Enter, D3 Planning. This is where you pull open the digital calendar, grab a legal pad, and think about what's actually happening this week.

Really successful 3D Planners try to answer these three questions:

1. What is scheduled, what should be scheduled, and where are there conflicts? Check for preparation, travel time, and other people who I need to get in touch with about the things on my calendar (and the things that should be on my calendar but aren't.
2. What am I doing that I shouldn't be doing? What can I say no to? How can I free up some margin for the inevitable last minute changes and additions that will come?
3. Peek into the following week or month to jog my memory of things that I need to be mindful of. Anything I can do, delegate, or prepare that will help me not drown in the weeks to come?

And that's it!

Did that sound like a lot?

The funny thing is, the best thing in the world you can do if this feels hard, is to do this badly.

Spend 5 minutes remembering what the big picture is.

Spend 5 minutes thinking about your habits, and how your daily rhythm could improve.

And spend 10 minutes mulling over the "hows" and "whats" of the week you're heading into.

Even if you don't catch everything, don't fully strategize, or get everything perfectly figured out, these planning minutes will help you roll with the punches over the next week.

Give it a try and let me know what you experience.