My planning process is working pretty okay now. I am keeping track of where I am spending time. It isn't perfect but it is working. I have lists of projects and activities and I am keeping on top of them. And I am reducing the amount of time I waste. So it is all good. But I have to be realistic. I have a pretty poor track record of keeping up with planning and every other planning system I have used has eventually, and always within six months, collapsed when it became too big an overhead. Even when they work well they are hard to keep going on.
I am also aware of some weaknesses. I am not sure that what I am doing now is the best that can be done to achieve my biggest goal of financial independence. I don't think I am getting the balance between long term and short term benefits right, and I am still not really working in such a way that I can convince myself that 'I am a well organised person'. I really want being organised to be something that is manifestly and obviously true about me in such a way that it would be one of the first things somebody would say about me.
So I think I need to make the whole thing more efficient and more compelling. I don't think I will be able to sustain a system that is simply 'not bad considering'. I am going to shoot for 'exceptionally good'. After all, the only point of planning is to get where you want to be efficiently. If that isn't what it is doing it isn't going to be very motivating. And vice versa.
Financial Goals Need a Financial Plan
The main things I am weak on are that I have a planning system that is meant to achieve a financial goal that doesn't have any financial inputs. So I need to align spending my time with earning money. As I am self employed there are two aspects to this. One is that I need to make sure I am clocking up enough billable hours to keep the money flowing in enough to cover the bills. I also need to make sure I am doing enough to generate other sources of income so that I don't have to rely on selling time in the future.
So basically I need to balance the short term financial objectives with the longer term ones, while also living a good life while I am doing it. I think I can do this, but I will have to build it up over time. The first thing is to start looking at projects and tasks in terms of value. When I put something on my job list I need to assess what it is worth and how long it is going to take. I can see that this is not something that is going to fall into place overnight but I really need to do it.
Planning To Make Money
I need to be be able to come up with a plan for every day that works towards meeting my two financial goals of staying solvent now and getting rich soon.
The very first difficulty is how do I value the time I spend on planning itself. I have pondered this a bit and I will try this approach. I will look at a plan for the day, and assign the value of 10% of the value of the money towards both goals as the value I have got from the time I spent planning. I think that makes mathematical sense. It will take some working on, but I should be able to tell whether time spent planning was valuable enough and that should enable me to estimate how much time I should spend on it in future.
Back To Paper
I have a feeling that I am going to have do this kind of work on paper at first, so I have created a planning file. I am not sure how I am going to organise it yet, but hopefully that too will come in time. I may be able to switch back to computer only again in the future but for now I want to concentrate on getting it right.
The first
Photo credit: ansik via photopin cc
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