Hey, sure.
I have a category “goals,” with one project for the main areas of my life in which I want to grow. Inside each project I have a stickied note called “[area] goals,” which is a brain dump of different things that I think are interesting or exciting, that would focus my time and energy toward that part of life.
Then I pick a goal and choose a time frame to work towards it. It could be a few weeks, months, or even years. I set the date range for the note to match the time frame. Now when I look at the “today” view, I see those high-level goals right at the top of my notes. Each one contains some information about the goal, such as why I want to do it, success criteria, or steps to take or key milestones on the way to accomplishing it (which I represent as check lists). I don’t have a strict structure for this, it’s very ad-hoc. I have different levels of clarity for different goals, based on how much I’ve thought about them and the work I’ve done so far.
Clearly I can’t accomplish a long-term goal today, so I’m left with the question – what, if anything, am I going to do today to get closer to that goal? In the simplest form, I might have an actionable item listed in the goal note itself. If that’s the case, I add the note to the agenda for the day, and work on the action item when I get a chance. If I don’t have anything immediately actionable, I need to do some more planning. This means taking one of the milestones from the goal note, and making a new note for it. I treat it the same way… braindump different things I can do to get towards this goal, work out a plan for how to get there. I assign a time frame for working towards it, so it shows up in Today view.
The result of this is that when I look at Today, I see all of the goals that I want to be my guiding focus, along with the smaller goals / milestones / objectives / whatever you want to call them, that will help get me there. Most goals have actionable notes at the second level (first sub-goal), and so far I haven’t had to go more than three levels. It gives me a high-level overview of my plan: my top goal is on top, and the next action to take is in the note itself or the note immediately below it. Then I’ve got the next goal, and so on.
If I don’t have anything actionable, that’s interesting to look at. Do I not have any ideas about how to accomplish that goal? Am I resisting the work involved? Am I note actually motivated by that goal? Maybe I’ve just been too busy to work out the next steps required.
So, that’s the basics of how I do it. I’m only about 6 weeks in to my Agenda use, so of course it’s subject to change. However, I am really enjoying it, it supports the way I think. I find it very natural, and as I get new ideas about how to think about goal setting and project planning, Agenda continues to pleasantly surprise me with how well it adapts. In fact something about its approach has helped me come up with ideas for how to plan that I’ve never had before, while solving problems I’ve had for years (“what have I done?” “what do I plan to do?” “how the !@#$ am I going to get all this done?”).
A couple more thoughts…
I treat projects, or specific objectives that I need to accomplish, the same as goals. So here are two examples:
- I’m on a committe that was tasked with drafting a document and preparing it for a meeting next month, and I volunteered to do the initial work. I created a project “committee document” and a pinned note “present document at September meeting.” I set the date range from the day we received the assignment, to the day of the meeting, so it shows up on “Today” every day between now and then. I wrote my key milestones as a checklist, and recorded pertinent information in other notes in the project. I’m done with a week to spare, and it feels good
- I am chairing another committee, a commitment that will last for around two years. I don’t know a whole lot about what it entails, it’s the first time I’m doing it. I created a project “committee chair” with a pinned note “serve as committee chair” and set the date range from the day I accepted the position, to the day it ends almost two years out. Then I wrote down some key steps that I want to take… the first of which is introducing myself to the ~60 volunteers of this organization, and verifying their contact info. That is a LOT of calls to make! (for me anyway). So, I started by making a note, transferring everyone’s contact info into it, and making each person’s line a checkbox, and linking to the phone list note from my main pinned note. I’ve just been going down the list, calling and texting people, and noting the contact date alongside their name. When I actually get ahold of someone, I check off their name. I have a few more key milestones to take that I’ve treated the same way, and there will be many more that come up.
When I look at my Today view, I see my goals, projects, milestones, objectives… all really different names for the same kinda thing. But each one has different time frames, or levels of clarity or specificity, or importance. As I go through the list and decide what I want to work on for the day, I add it to the agenda. One day I might have my main health goal and key action, and the committee document note. Another day I might have my business goal, and the list of people I need to call for the committee chair.
I considered using a #goal tag and setting a future date, so I can see what I have coming up. But, that feels too out of the way for me. I find the Today view to be very natural for my way of thinking. Rather than feeling overwhelmed with irrelevant stuff, I like seeing all of the things that are on my mind in some way. It’s kind of a high-level overview of the shape and direction of my life that day, all the way from my most inspiring goals down to administrative things like interviewing a dog sitter in the afternoon. And I get focus by putting things on the agenda.
The last thing I’ll say is, my planning process with Agenda has been very ad-hoc. I’ve paid attention to various systems over the years (GTD, momentum method, 12 week year, your best year ever), but until Agenda I haven’t really felt effective with planning. GTD has always lacked a time element for me, and not every goal fits neatly into 12 week or 12 month chunks. But the principles that underly them are extremely useful: get an overview of everything I want to accomplish, figure out where to direct energy, come up with steps to get there, set a time frame to accomplish / reevaluate it. Agenda provides just enough structure to fulfill these principles very well, while being unstructured / flexible enough that I can implement them in a way that makes sense to me – which is often pretty messy! So I need something that’s adaptable, and really puts the focus on my own thinking rather than constraining me to a highly structured system.
I realize I’m nerding out pretty hard on Agenda. That’s because for me it really is a sort of “missing link” that I’ve felt with productivity and planning for years. So if I can help someone else along with some of the same challenges I’ve experienced, or at least give them some new ideas, I’m grateful to have the chance to do so. And from all accounts, this is still the early days for Agenda, and there’s a lot of good stuff in store.
p.s. the first project I accomplished with the help of Agenda planning was getting my yard from brown to green. It involved measuring the amount of watering done twice a week, with pictures so I could track progress and have a before / after shot. So it’s not all big, life-changing stuff In fact it might be best to start with something small, objective, and meaningful.
