How to Plan for 2019

Have you set your goals for 2019? There could be several, one for your business, one for your health, one for your relationship with your family, and so on.

Once you set your goals, you can plan how to achieve them.

I first make an outline of the year, what I do in January, what I do in February, and so on. When I do that, I look at the calendar and check social events as well. For example, EPA and TPP begin in February, Brexit might occur in March, and the new emperor is born in Japan in May, which will all affect your business in one way or another. Look at your local events as well, such as seasonal festivals. Then think of actions which can be taken smoothly with these outside incidents.

After making the outline, I make a weekly time schedule where I put every action from the time I get up to the time I go to bed from Monday to Sunday.

Something like that and continues all the way to 11 pm.

The challenging thing about writing a schedule comes from the activities you usually don’t know when you want to do them because they aren’t regular. For example, writing is a big part of my work, but unlike coaching sessions, I don’t have to do it at a specific time, so it is hard to plan when to do it. What I do to solve that dilemma is to schedule the writing and then I discipline myself to write only when the time schedule requires me to write. If I feel like writing and it isn’t time for writing, I ignore the feeling and postpone the thoughts until my scheduled writing time.

After strictly following this schedule for a while, I noticed that my level of productivity had tremendously improved. I used to be a spontaneous person who didn’t get a lot done. I had many big ideas but I couldn’t implement all of them because of my poor time management.

Okay time schedule works, I understand, and yet, it still sounds like pretty much the Yang style doesn’t it? So where the Yin style comes in?

Well, that is something I will talk about tomorrow.

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