Arise2Live Podcast
Transcript for Episode #143 ‘Preventing Goal And Life Drift (Productivity)’
Host: Scott Weaver
Date October 6, 2021
Intro: Recently, my husband and I spent a week away from home on what he called a “strategic planning and productivity getaway.” Yes, it wasn’t a real vacation, but we needed clarity and perspective to adjust our goals. Today, Scott shares what we did to help you reach your dreams, too.
Scott Weaver: Hello and welcome to the Arise2Live podcast, episode 143. It is titled Preventing Goal and Life Drift. In today’s episode I will take you on my personal journey to prevent my business and my life drifting away from my dreams. This is an inside look on how I reviewed and reassessed to see if I was on track to reach my goals. It’s sort of a cross between productivity and goal setting. I hope that this inside look encourages you and inspires you to do something similar in your own life.
I am Scott Weaver, the Arise2Live business coach whose purpose is to bring clarity and perspective so that you can have time and financial freedom in both your business and life.
Before we get started, I would like to add an update on some of the business trends, things to keep an eye on if they haven’t already impacted you yet. This is kind of a loose update about the trends that I talked about in episode 139 last August. Very recently, I attended a small conference and I had the opportunity to talk with many business owners. One of the most challenging thing they were facing is a labor shortage for their businesses, particularly in the trade and service industries. Most of the business owners have been forced to increase wages just to get the people they need and this increase in wages is across the board. Everybody in the company is getting paid more.
Also, many of them have been forced to wait on their orders for supplies, we’re talking like on the order of 3 or 4 months. Particularly construction companies are just waiting and waiting for building supplies and equipment so they can actually complete their jobs. It’s been frustrating for them and frustrating for their customers. So these two problems, not enough people willing to work and the supply chain is being disrupted, they are putting inflation pressure on businesses. Many of them have had to increase prices. So it’s likely that we all may be facing higher prices in the near future.
With that, let’s get back to today’s topic: preventing goals from drifting in your life and business.
Preventing Goal and Life Drift
About three weeks ago or so, my wife and I went out on a working getaway at a resort in the Smoky Mountains, and just as our luck would have it, it rained 4 out of the 5 days. It’s a good thing that we were doing some Strategic Planning or I would have been one very grumpy vacationer.This get-away, it was like 5 days. We’ve never planned for so long of time, but we had some good reasons. Which in real life is kind of hard to explain.
As most of you longtime listeners know, my family and I moved from the state of Oregon to Tennessee about a year ago. It’s been a good move. However, over the last couple months, my schedule and the family routine, has been, say awkward. It’s not to say it’s been bad, but there’s this gut feeling that something is little off. Maybe I could say that my rhythm of life was a bit off key. Also I was not happy about missing one of my goals in the last quarter and I wanted to look back on the reason why.
So my wife and I getaway’s purpose was to be intentional about what we have been doing and comparing that with our goals that we set a year ago. Are we on track? Did we fall behind? Did we drift off the target? We just didn’t know going into this getaway. In this episode, here are the steps that I did, that we did working together on my deep dive, reviewing the past performance and schedule and comparing that with the goals that I’ve written. The outcome was a modification of my current goals and a major schedule adjustment.
So please note that I am sharing the process that I went through. Is this the perfect way? Absolutely not! Can you steal bits and pieces to help you? Absolutely yes! This podcast is for you, so adapt and modify it for your current situation. The purpose here is to get you to stay on track to your goals and dreams.
I might need to warn some of you grammar gurus out there. I use the word ‘time’ with the adjective in front and think I did it right. Maybe. I say things like prep time and goal-setting time. What I’m trying to say is it is the time to do an activity—like bed time.
So the first thing that I did was prepare.
That is Step #1 Prep Time.
Likely it will take some time to collect the needed information to see where you are in your business and life. It takes effort to find things and that’s going to be frustrating. It was frustrating for me. So I suggest maybe just get the stuff together in one place, whether it’s on a computer or on a folder, and call it a day.
The 3 areas that I collected was my 3 year goals, the financial summaries of both my business and life: that’s the revenue and expenses, assets and liabilities, net worth and cash-flow; I also did a list of income products and services.
On a side note, I picked three productivity tools to work in. Evernote is where I keep my long term goals in. I use old fashioned pen and paper to brainstorm, and I use my weekly calendar. The tool itself doesn’t matter that much, just have a tool to get your ideas out of your head and that becomes important when you’re trying to communicate with other people.
The second step is scheduling Get away Time – So I found a place with few distractions that I can spend a significant time with strategic planning and it had good internet, which was very important part of this getaway time as I was going to spend time alone just working through things and also, I was going to spend time with talking to trusted people.
The third step is Reviewing Goals and Results Time – This review was both for my business and life. Under each goal –in Evernote– I added a line for updates. Most updates were just, you know, just type in a few things, but under a few I added a word, either ‘setback’ or ‘Yay!’ and those were for the goals that I reached or completely missed.
Doing this review, I had a very pleasant surprise. For a few weeks I had been down about missing an important business goal. The review reminded me that I had set 3 goals for the last quarter and I had forgotten that I nailed 2 out of 3. That’s not bad. I just missed one but that one I missed just took over my thoughts like some ninja out of the dark. Anyway, let’s say I was in a much better mood for the next step.
The next step is Thinking Time – This is sort of hard to define. It’s one of those things where we all know what it is but really can’t say what it is. So here’s my try. I looked over the results and started asking myself questions. Is my business running? Is it running to reach my life’s goals? Is there a correlation between business and life and business and family? Given the setback in that one goal I missed, what does this now make possible? So it’s kind of a spin, not a recovery, but seeing if there’s something new that I can do, something I haven’t seen before. Can I leverage the wins that I got? Can I improve my business, even just 1%? And there’s a whole list of things. So please come up with your own questions and truthfully answer them for yourself. It goes a long ways of seeing how your business is really running.
I should say that I wrote most of this analysis and answering these questions using pen and paper because it was a brainstorming session for me and I didn’t want technology interfering with my stream of thoughts as I scribble things down. You may be different. Maybe just typing in is great for you, but for me, the old fashioned pen and paper works.
The fifth step is Talking Time – Up till now, I had been mostly working alone, and I was working at the speed I like. I was processing data exactly the way I like it. However, isolation is the enemy in this step, the talking time.
It is now time to take my thoughts and conclusions and test them on trusted people. My wife and I spent a lot of time talking about them. Some of my ideas were good, brilliant if I don’t say so myself. However, I also came up with some real duds, stuff that would never work and I’m embarrassed to think that I ever thought it would work. Fortunately, you listeners will never hear about those ones.
This is the power of having a trusted team around you. One that will tell you if your ideas are good or really bad. A good team brings in different perspectives, and find weaknesses that you need to shore up things that I needed to shore up in my business and also got encouraging along the way, too.
For me, I talked mostly with my spouse mainly because we were planning out our life goals. But she also helped on the business side in very significant ways. I also talked on the phone with my on-line presence coach and my close friends discussing the ideas that I had and the approach that I was taking.
If you don’t have a trusted team yet, start building one today. You start with one person, one person who understands you, kind of understands the business that you are in and start there and then build from there.
The next step is Baking Time – This is an important real world step, but I have noticed that many planning activities and outlines don’t have it in there, but it is very important for really executing well. The baking time reference can be thought about maybe as making a cake, or maybe I should say “baking a cake”? The cake ingredients are stirred into bowl and mixed together to make dough. However, to get a cake, it needs to be baked and it needs the right amount of time and the right temperate. So this process, in which I’m sharing with you my ideas and my results, and my future actions were all mixed together and in some ways that were just jumbled together. But I allowed for some baking time to really help solidify the ideas and get them into solid plans. There are some details. Some of them are actually left behind. They did. They evaporated in the baking time and the ones that were remaining were pretty solid.
Anyway, after we reached this baking time, my wife and I, we went out to a wonderful BBQ place and we spent, like 2 hours there. It was a great time to relax. The owners were talkative. It was a great atmosphere to be in and then I pretty much took the rest of the day off.
In that we week, going through this process so far, my wife and I discovered that we had been living in our old Oregon Life rhythm instead of a new Tennessee life rhythm. Hopefully that makes sense.
Here’s an example of the Oregon Rhythm vs. the Tennessee rhythm. So in Oregon, the summers are pretty good, actually very good, particularly in the Willamette Valley. The summers are a lot of times around 85°, low humidity, and few storms. We did lots of outdoor activities in the mountains and oceans and family. Well, we took that attitude and that summertime rhythm and we played it here in a Tennessee summer. It did not work well. Tennessee in August has temperatures in the low nineties, sometimes in the upper 90s, very high humidity, and lots and lots of thunderstorms. In case that wasn’t enough, there’s bugs and mosquitoes that were just like diving bombing me all the time. As you guess, the old rhythm didn’t work well.
The surprising thing about going through this process is I did not realize that I was living the old rhythm in life. I’m sure some of you out there are just saying, “Duh, how come you didn’t see it?” I think some habits are very hard to spot, and I lived in Oregon for a number of years and I was just too close it. I just didn’t see it. But after going through this process and the deep dive reviewing our schedule and the results, this not living the right rhythm, it just popped out.
Well the story doesn’t end there. There are two more things that I did to make sure that the results that I got through the process, the planning and the strategy were all put to good use.
So I did a Set Goals Time –
After the baking stage, I was able to quickly prioritize a set of new goals. These goals I put directly into Evernote where I can access them from my desktop, my laptop, and my smartphone. In other words, I carry my goals wherever I go and that really helps me keep on track.
Action Time
The last thing that I did, I took my new goals and I use a quarterly method called12 week-year to break down the goals into weekly steps. Then I took each week’s steps and I put them into my weekly planner. So now I have SMART goals that I can implement each week and I didn’t have to rethink them. I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel as I went along. They were already in the planner.
OK, those are the eight steps that I did for the deep dive review of my business goals, schedule, habits, life and recapping here:
They were
- Prep Time
- Get away Time
- Review Goals Time
- Thinking Time
- Talking Time
- Baking Time
- Set Goals Time
- Action Time
Feel free to take a few of them or all of them. What I’d like to really see you is to reach your goals and your dreams. If you’re up to it, please leave a comment in the show notes or just send me an email. I would love to hear from you.
The importance of strategic planning-well, that’s kind of the fancy word for this process-and taking time to reflect in a defined process, it’s to prevent the life drift from your goals and dreams, to keep you on track for your business. I was too close to the grindstone to see that I was drifting away from my goals or that I was dancing to an old rhythm instead of a new one that I was supposed to. By taking a step back and looking around, it really helped me see the big picture. It helped me to spot some things that I would not normally see and help me keep on track.
I’m a strong believer in living life with intention. Of course, there’s going to be storms that come our way and we need to react to them. But life is not about the storms, it’s about what we do between them. It’s about Arise2Live.
Sponsor: Today’s sponsor is Arise2Live business coaching. A professional and structured system to get business owners to grow and gain freedom from the chaos of running a business. Scott uses a proprietary four step system to get you the results you need. Start running a thriving business, not a self-created job. Schedule a call today on the Arise2Live.com website.