5-3-Quarter-Week-20 Minutes

I'm going to tell you at the outset of this letter to you that I need this advice. You might as well. That is to say, I'm not yet really accomplishing what I'm going to recommend in this letter to you. But I feel like you and I would be better if we were.

5-3-Quarter-Week-20 Minutes

You probably already get the idea:

• 5 Years
• 3 Years
• Quarterly
• Weekly
• 20 minute blocks

Right? That's not all that tricky. I'm discussing plan frames. The idea is that one might set a five year plan, keep your eye on a three year outlook to balance against what you've planned, align your efforts and your results so that you can report them quarterly, reach those quarterly goals by building your intentions out a week at a time, and schedule your days in 20 minute blocks.

20 Minutes Might Be the Hardest Part

Everything after that is a matter of tuning and learning how it all works. The 20 minute planning, for instance, is an area where people make lots of mistakes. We willingly throw away lots of time by planning in strange ways. Or, we over schedule like crazy and stuff our days full.

I schedule my day to 40% capacity, no more. Some days, I work far more than 12 or more hours, but I schedule only 40% of every day for work. That leaves room for serendipitous meetings (as Chief of Staff, there are lots of little coaching adjustment meetings and check-ins). It means when something important pops, I have the capacity to pick it up and handle it.

Now, when I go to schedule my day, I look at meetings I can't control, then meetings or time blocks that drive my larger goals for the week. (20 drives the week drives the quarter against the five year plan.)

And that's just the 20 minute.

Quarterly Thinking

I'm new to this. It came from helping our Executive Leadership Team prepare their presentations for our quarterly board meetings. What did you do this quarter that you'd like to report on? What accomplishments have you made that are board-worthy? You can't report everything, so what are the highlights? What moved the needle? What will you say that reflects an alignment with your five year plan.

Quarterly plans are how I break down the five year plan, and it's how I set the week up.

Weekly Feeds the Quarterly Bite of Your Five Year Plan

The best way to look at your weekly plans are to ask what you've got to accomplish for your quarterly goals and then stuff the most important stuff into your weeks wherever you can. Look back at the 20 minute section. There WILL be meetings and work you can't avoid. No matter what you do, there are tasks that aren't part of the big goal.

The week as a unit of measurement is just your "at bat" to work on filling in your quarter. In lots of ways, it's the most tactical, but also the least important. You fill your weeks based on your quarter, not the other way around. People who plan at the week level only rarely get to report amazing quarterly changes.

Five Years is the Event Horizon

"In five years time, I will have accomplished..." That's the five year view. We underestimate all we can do in five years and we overestimate all we can do in a day or a week. If we don't look at this frame, everything is a series of running about. Nothing matters if it's not driving the plan forward. If you don't plan the larger goal, how could you ever know what your quarter will be about? How could you know that your 20 minutes was used for something of value? The world needs you to plan far enough out that you can keep the ship going towards the island you most want to reach.

Here's the other thing about five years. You have at MOST 20 of them in a lifetime. (If you get to 105, you can stop planning at 100. It's okay.) And humans live to 100. Maybe you're building a 200 year company. Or a millennium machine. Who knows? Why not? And if not, then what are you doing? Is your goal just to get by? Then only plan for what's left of your life divided by five. If you're building a business to hand down to your grandkids, you're going to have to plan out well past the time you've turned to dust.

A five year plan cares very little about what's going on in the moment. It is fueled by the adjustments you make every quarter.

Three Years? What's This Measurement

This is a weird one. Three years isn't a planning number. It's a check-forward. You've got a five year plan that involves expanding your team and that's going to require a bigger building, and that means in five years, you'll have to have figured out a second location and decide where and why.

What will change over the next three years that might impact the plan for your second location? What if there's another global lockdown? With the climate change, should you move your second location to a vastly different locale? Should you move it to another country to avoid one political system's issues?

Three years isn't a plan measurement of its own. It's a way to think about what's coming. Right now, as I write this to you, a global financial recession is inevitable. Things will be rather tough for as many as three years (they tend to last 3 years). That means that parts of the plan might cost more, take more time, etc. Maybe it will cost less. But that's the point. Use 3 years out as a way to temper your five year plan.

Plans Are Just Thinking Tools

If you don't do, your plans aren't all that important. If your plans don't change everywhere below the five-year level, you're likely to make some terrible attempts at execution. Plans are in pencil. Goals are in ink.

Plans are in pencil. Goals are in ink.

What do you think? Can you do this kind of planning? Does it make sense? Are you doing something better?

Chris...