My future starts when I wake up every morning … Every day I find something creative to do with my life. —Miles Davis
In This Chapter
- Learn the Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, Friday Reflection pattern for weekly results.
- Learn how to use Mondays to set your vision for a great week.
- Learn how to use The Rule of 3 for carving out daily results and weekly results.
- Learn how to use Fridays to reflect on your results and make improvements to your routine.
At the heart of Agile Results is the Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, Friday Reflection pattern. It’s a simple weekly pattern in which each week is a new chance to get results. On Mondays, you figure out three outcomes you want for the week. Each day, you determine your three most important outcomes. On Fridays, you reflect on your results. This pattern helps you tune and prune your results.
One of the most important techniques I share with those I mentor is how to manage their tasks. It’s too easy to churn or find yourself in task saturation. Another common mistake is to confuse activities with outcomes. That is, you might spend a lot of time doing a lot of activities but not actually accomplish anything. In fact, I’ve seen many smart people throw a lot of hours at their weeks only to fail in one way or another. It might be that they ended up missing an important time window or losing any sort of work-life balance. In some cases, they spent all their time doing activities but not actually producing any results. In other cases, they produced results, only to find out it’s not the results they needed or wanted.
How you frame and organize your results for the week plays an important part in your success. There are always more things to do than there is time in a day. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. It’s easy to beat yourself up over what you didn’t finish. It’s easy to spend all your time on task management. It’s easy to find yourself at the end of the week, wondering where your time went. The reality is that without a system it’s easy to get off track.
The solution is a system—a simple system you can count on, not have to think too hard to implement, and turn into a lifelong habit. In this system, each week is a fresh start. If you fall off the horse, you can get back on. Each week you know you’re spending your time on the right things. Rather than feel overwhelmed by your backlog, you feel good about your accomplishments. Each week, you improve your ability to get results. That’s the idea behind the Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, Friday Reflection pattern.
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