How to hit your goal in a week?

It was already winter in Pakistan when I was feeling guilty of not achieving one of my listed goals in year 2022 : CSP?-SM. My Scrum mastery licenses were already expired and I was not at all doing anything to upgrade my Scrum Mastery license to the next level. Although I was paying attention to improve my skillset but I was clearly distracted due to my lazy routine, office work, reading books, writing articles etc.

One morning, I started reading Deep Work by Cal Newport which was in my bookshelf for the last one year. Let me tell you that I am a slow reader; however I always wanted to improve my reading habit. This book not only helped me building personal work habit of prioritising Deep Work but also reducing Shallow Work and finding the root causes of not achieving my goals in the desired timeline. I completed half of the book in four weeks and I was still not satisfied with my progress so far and then I read about 4DX framework at Page 134. I immediately, decided to experiment with this approach to set and achieve my weekly goal to finish up rest of the book (Page 138 till 263) in a week and the purpose was to develop a deep work habit to eventually achieve my yearly goal mentioned above.

The four Discipline of Execution (4DX) was built on extensive consulting case studies to describe four disciplines for helping companies successfully implement high-level strategies.

What's 4Dx Framework?

1. Discipline # 1: Focus on the wildly important
2. Discipline # 2: Act on the Lead Measures
3. Discipline # 3: Keep a compelling Scoreboard
4. Discipline # 4: Create a cadence of Accountability

To execute this experiment like a business, I followed two steps: a) Strategy b) Execution

a) The Strategy/Planning part:

D1: Finish half of the book in 1 week (Page 138 till 263)

D2: Built a deep work routine to achieve D1

D3: Draw a score board and maintain it on daily basis

D4: Review your progress so far and see where and how you can improve

Tools used in this experiment: Weekly Planner with Dates, Pencil, Eraser, Score board.

The drafted plan was to read 20 pages per day, however following 4DX framework I managed to read 35-40 pages per day.

b) The Execution part:

I realised that execution part was harder than the planning part. Initially, I decided to read twenty pages per day starting from 25th October, 2022 till 30th October, 2022 and finish Deep Work in 6 days. The goal was miraculously achieved on the same date but there was a change of plan (you can click the below image and zoom to read). I actually drafted this plan in my work log using pencil and erased/rewrote whenever needed. Here, I am using a JPEG image to exhibit the difference between the actual and drafted plan for the readers.

Set ground rules (for deep work habits #dailyregime )

1. Sleep on time so that you can wake up on time.
2. Set deep working hours (8 AM to 12 PM)
3. Focus on your daily goal and do not get distracted.
4. Allow yourself to take a break e.g. drink water, have breakfast, stretch, 10 minutes walk
5. Put your phone on DND in deep working hours and yes, turn off your wifi/mobile data
6. Take a nap after deep hours to freshen up for the rest of the day

Record your progress (gather data to analyse your lead measures)

1. Page counter: How many pages you read everyday?
2. Deep hours counter: How many hours you worked with deep focus?
3. Breaks: For how many minutes you took a break?
4. Mark them on a visual scoreboard.
5. Review your progress at the end of week and use data to see the trend in your growth.

Since I built the habit of deep work for this weekly goal, I used ditto approach to achieve my next goal to earn CSP?-SM badge in 30 days to improve my agile coaching learning score and I made it on 2nd December, 2022. Now I am trying to to help my teams at Afiniti to achieve their goals and tracking the leading measures e.g. producing quality code, improving team engagement, reducing production bugs, tracking dependencies and increasing velocity.

In a nutshell, following 4DX model can help you hitting goals in less than expected timeline; provided that you set the wildly important goal, focus more on lead measures and less on lag measures, maintain a scoreboard in a public space, stick to the ground rules, record your progress and keep reviewing your growth every week.

Happy setting and achieving new goals in year 2023!