Most of the work is done—we’ve created our life vision and we’ve setup a system to achieve our life goals day by day.

Now we’re just going to make a few refinements to help us get there faster, with greater peace of mind.

Daily and Weekly Habits

In Step 2 we talked about

1. deciding each year which life goals we would focus on that year,
2. then deciding each week which specific next steps we would focus on that week to move us towards those goals,
3. and then trying to accomplish at least two of these tasks per day.

In our yearly planning session, there’s one more important system we can setup: our weekly habits.

Whereas a next step is a unique task that we generally only do once, weekly habits are activities we want to do every week, like spend quality time with our partner and kids and friends, take care of our body, or practice a specific skill.

We only need to write these down once, then we can refer to them in our weekly reflection time as a reminder, or copy some into certain days of our week plan if that helps.

Here are some example daily & weekly habits:

Catch-All Task List

We have a list of goals, a list of projects that relate to those goals, and the next step tasks within each project.

But how do we capture all those little random jobs and aspirations that arise throughout life that may not tie in strongly with any specific project and may not have a place in our current week, like catching up with an old friend, or switching mobile phone plans?

That’s why we have one more list to hold our miscellaneous tasks, our catch-all task list.

  The goal is to capture every single thing you need to do that you might not easily remember. This keeps your mind clear of clutter and focused on the present.

When you work on your plan for the week, and as you move through your week, you can slot in some of these tasks as time permits, according to their priority.

Priorities

You’ll notice that every table of tasks we’ve created has a Priority column.

Deciding upfront how important tasks are relative to each other will help you stay focused on the most important goals and activities and avoid getting caught in temporarily satisfying but ultimately insignificant busywork.

You can use any scale (1-3, or 1-5 for example). Try to get in the habit of noting the approximate level of priority when you first capture the task.

Now, when perusing your task list and deciding what to do, favour the high priority tasks.

  Don’t worry if low priority tasks remain undone–they were skipped for good reason.

They may continue being skipped for months or years as long as higher priority tasks remain, or until they become higher priority themselves.

These numbers are dynamic: feel free to change the priority of any task as circumstances change, like maybe a deadline approaches, or maybe you’re just sick of seeing the same low priority task hanging around your list and want it gone!

Conclusion

Congratulations on completing all 3 steps of designing Your Ideal Life!

After going through this process, I’m positive you will

• feel greater control of your life and therefore greater inner peace,
• see your life moving in the direction you’ve established, and
• obtain many of your most treasured goals and dreams!

Please do get in touch and let me know how your plan developed, and how it’s serving you.

Need A Hand?

I’m currently offering volunteer 1:1 support in creating and following your Life Vision to a few people who request it.

If you’re serious about working through this process and feel like you’d benefit from a hand, get in touch and tell me about yourself and your mission.

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