How one line can change your year
Every August our good-old news agencies down the road fills up with next year's diaries, calendars, and yearly planners. If you're lucky the local fire station will be raising money for a good cause selling their sexy-boy calendars in the local shopping centre 💪.
For years I have advocated for people to buy a yearly wall planner and fill in key dates for the coming year as a planning exercise. I believe, if you can avoid anything becoming an unnecessary surprise then go ahead and avoid it! Popping in key product launches, team member birthdays, booked holidays (for yourself and others), and public holidays are all great starting points. The problem with this is many people live in a digital world and the idea of a yearly planner seems tweedy and overly simplistic.
But, the premise remains a clever process to work through and then iterate throughout the year on your preferred medium. I call this Timeline Management.
The best coach I ever had told me at the very start of our relationship, "Paul, every change we make will be permanent". I always liked this idea as it yields immediate and lasting results. Effective Timeline Management is one of the highest Return On Effort activities leaders and professionals can do. Make this change permanent and it is a game changer for lowering anxiety and poor decision making under pressure or duress.
We start by getting a piece of paper and drawing a line on it. For those working paperless, the digital equivalent can be used. Allow me to demonstrate:
A simple line, a few minutes, and having it somewhere visible or easily accessible is all we need to do. In itself it is a game changer for the year coming. Or, if you're old school go for the Yearly Wall Planner - they work great!
Image Source: Paul Farina
This line represents the coming year. It is divided into quarters and eventually into months. I prompt people to enter their 'knowns' for the coming year until a picture of the year-to-come unfolds. We then work through more detail on the monthly and weekly rhythms until all the relevant info is present.
How is this helpful?
Inbound requests - when someone influential (aren't they all) comes to you with a problem, a request for help or to politely top-up your pile of tasks you can make better decisions. With a glance, or from memory you will know immediately if you have bandwidth for the request. However, if there is a surge coming up or are under-resourced due to staff leave you'll know to push back. Knowing this you'll be able to decline the request powerfully. With a clear mind, guilt-free and with a reasonable explanation you'll find it easy to say 'no' to requests, even from clients!
Realistic Activations - we all want more. We want to achieve more, please more, get more, build more, do more, even be more. It is in our DNA (The Endless Pursuit: Unveiling the Roots of Humans’ Insatiable Desire for More, David Priede, PhD) and tends to be fuelled in a capitalist society. With all this drive for seeking and evolving we can over-extend ourselves and over-promise. This is a dangerous decision-making instinct. It can lead to disappointment and exhaustion. When it becomes a habit you risk your credibility and even your health (been there, got the metaphoric T-shirt). Knowing your timeline means you can give educated deadlines and create expectations people come to rely on.
Better Communication - when people smash out their Timeline Management and get a good system up and running I am always stunned how much people instinctively want to keep it a secret. Somehow it is seen as a 'for my eyes only document'. I believe it is the opposite. Gaining contribution from your team/boss/colleagues creates buy-in (and ensures you haven't missed anything!) When anyone asks you to commit to something you can first refer to the Timeline. Look at it together and collaborate on the best way forward. This is so much better than taking the responsibility of the decision on your own shoulders alone and instinctively without a reliable tool that puts today's/next week's/next quarter's calendar into context. As a manager I often used this technique to reject holiday requests from my team. In this scenario it wasn't me saying no, it was the timeline saying no. Our agreed ways of working made the decision. People tended to accept negative news easily, and became more proactive and creative to avoid repetition (behaviour change - hmmm, very valuable indeed).
The consistency in one's decision making elevates out of sight with Timeline Management - effectively a horizontal line. This increases the power of our communication as decisions are absent of doubt. A new form of collaboration can start to breed into a team's ways of working. And, those scary emergencies somehow creep up on us to become non-existent.
