I’m still under the weather and try to keep these posts a bit shorter in order to maximise on rest-time and sleep. I haven’t thought through the structure of my monthly reviews yet, but I want to take my blog as a way to force myself to actually do monthly reviews.
For years, maybe even decades, I haven’t done any weekly, monthly, or annual planning. I probably haven’t done any major planning at all in my adult life. Let alone weekly, monthly or annual reviews.
At the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 I did my first ever annual review. I spent hours thinking and reviewing 2019 and writing down what went well and what didn’t go too well. I thought about my lack of habits, routines and tracking as well as my inability to plan.
I sort of put down plans and strategies on how to fix this in 2020. I sort of.
I think two important parts were missing:
- Making it more actionable – creating bite-sized tasks within a project with trackable milestones in-between.
- Actually Scheduling it – actually putting those tasks and projects bit by bit into a calendar that exactly states when what part of the plan will be done.
By working on the bigger picture plan and a bunch of more detailed smaller plans and projects, but leaving out the final bit of scheduling it all, I completely screwed up.
I’d say January was a really bad month. That partly comes from the general expectation that the first month of the new year is always supposed to be so amazing. Hardly ever a January can live up to our expectations. I’ve also been ill and taken care of my ill daughter for about a quarter of the month. However, in the end it all comes down to the lack of planning and scheduling – poor time management.
I can add poor time management to my list of missing skills that already comprises of bad habits, and lack of habits and routines in general, lack of fitness and healthy food and missing willpower.
As soon as I got a bit ill my morning routine broke down and I stopped implementing my evening routine. I hardly worked this week too.
There are probably people dying of serious illnesses and they’re more productive than me. So yes, January was a shitshow and I wish to NOT REPEAT this in February. Too many days and months of my life have I continuously repeated my bad behaviour. It really has to stop now.
For the coming months I try to create a more structured and less free-flowing monthly review. I’d like to track my fitness, nutritional, business, family, travel and other numbers or KPIs in my monthly review to see how they are evolving over the year(s).