Creating Your Personal Life Plan by Michael Hyatt

I have previously shared my approach to life planning and many of my articles on here deal with making life plans, but I’ve never shared a tool that succinctly laid out this process, till I came upon this eBook, by Michael Hyatt. He the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Thomas Nelson Publishers. Prior to becoming the CEO of Thomas Nelson, he served in a variety of roles within the publishing industry, primarily in editorial and marketing. He also served as a literary agent for several years and is the author of this great blog, and the most organized person I know from his posts.If you follow me on Twitter, you probably know that Michael is one of my favorite bloggers, and despite reading all his blog posts, I’d not downloaded the free eBook till yesterday, and I regret not doing it sooner, because then, I’d have found the answer to how Michael Hyatt has managed to be so deliberate and organized in his living.

Creating Your Life Plan is basically a step by step guide for designing the life you wanted. It opens with a quote I immediately fell in love with:

“If we would only give the same amount of reflection to what we want
out of life that we give to the question of what to do with two weeks’
vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless
procession of our busy days.”
— Dorothy Canfield Fisher

His approach to life planning is in 4 distinct steps:

1. Creating a Life Plan

Without giving away too much, this section is basically about deciding the outcomes of your life. He suggests, that we should start with the end in mind. What do you want “them” to say when you’re dead? “Them” here are the key audiences that matter to you. Starting with the end in mind is something personal development guru Stephen Covey also talks about at length in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. After doing this, then set priorities among your audiences and action plans thereof.

2. Establishing a weekly review process

This was a moment of truth for me. I did the first step alright about a year ago (I updated an existing life plan), but have never sat down to review it. Worse still, I don’t have a set time at the end of my week, where I review previous week activities in light of the life plan, and plan ahead. As a result, every 6 or so months, I realize in a panic that I’m not on the right path. Most of my Mondays pass in a daze because that’s the day I use to plan for my week, amidst the confusion. Wrong approach.

3. Staying on track with a quarterly review process

Michael suggests taking time off every 3 months to pray (if that’s your thing), review, meditate on your life plan, set an agenda for the next quarter, but also to work on important projects you’ve been unable to tackle in the last 3 months. He proposes 24 hours away from your regular environment.

4. Creating and Annual Time Block

This is about setting an agenda for your year at the beginning, before other commitments take up all the time . A quote says it all

If you don’t have a plan for your life, someone else does.

 Saying any more about this would water it down, so please download, read and act on it!