Thanks for the list, and to you and Lionhearted for the posts. I haven’t yet figured it all out. But I’m trying to get started on this approach:
Time “working toward your goals” as you usually do is habitual. There’s no harm in writing out a calendar for your pre-existing habits, and it’s probably very useful for most people to do so to form new habits. My system mostly revolves around calendars.
In my calendar, the habit I’ve written in is a bit of planning or “meta” time. Twice a week, I plan out a full week. By re-evaluating the course of action half-way through, I’m hoping it should be easier to track where I go off-track.
Once a month, this planning time must include meta-planning. During this time, the idea is to review that my planning method is the most effective. This is the time for reviewing the past month’s calendar, and also for reading any books on planning.
As for evaluating sub-goals, I’ve decided that the best step after some initial self-reflection is consultation. Therapy/coaching can be valuable for anyone working to solve an internal problem that defends itself, and it seems prudent to gain what I can from professional guidance. I’ve stated that I want my goal with that time to make evaluating my volition and turning it into action natural and habitual.
Finally, my current method (not perfectly successful, but a start) has been to keep a list of projects in a spreadsheet, each assigned a number for personal importance and for urgency, and each with a column for a link to an outline. Long-term projects are on a separate sheet, and short-term projects either belong to a long-term project or do not. On my calendar, I have a block of time simply called “Project Time” on Saturday, and open space on weekday evenings and Sunday. The idea is that during Planning Time, I take projects from the Projects List, allot them Project Time.
There is one more step I’ve figured out in this plan. Posting it here, mentioning it to others. Now I know people will ask me occasionally how it’s going, which will provide a bit of motivation to get started on using the system.
Has anyone made good use of a planning structure similar to this, with scheduled planning and meta-planning?
Having regular time which is explicitly for planning, not working, is vital. Daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly seems to work pretty well. Daily—what are my most important tasks? Weekly—how did the last week go? What are my critical projects/tasks for next week? And so forth. That’s one of the simple-but-massively-effective insights of things like GTD, even though I disagree with their tactics—regularly spend time explicitly planning rather than working.
I schedule planning time where the level of abstraction is proportional to the logarithm of the recurrence period, and it seems effective at pruning cached goals and sanity-checking my meta-goals. (However, it’s difficult to test because of the time scales involved and the fact that I can’t fork myself.)
Recently, I noticed that my general skills aren’t improving as fast as I’d like, so I decided to take advantage of compound interest[1] and created a parallel structure for working, learning, and meta-learning.
the level of abstraction is proportional to the logarithm of the recurrence period
This brings to my mind the idea of a complete n-ary tree (with n being the base of your logarithm), with the highest abstraction level at the root—if you spend equal time on each node, then you’ll portion time across levels as you described.
I found this amusing—I’m not sure I know of any generally meaningful meta-thinking levels beyond say, 2.
Thanks for the list, and to you and Lionhearted for the posts. I haven’t yet figured it all out. But I’m trying to get started on this approach:
Time “working toward your goals” as you usually do is habitual. There’s no harm in writing out a calendar for your pre-existing habits, and it’s probably very useful for most people to do so to form new habits. My system mostly revolves around calendars.
In my calendar, the habit I’ve written in is a bit of planning or “meta” time. Twice a week, I plan out a full week. By re-evaluating the course of action half-way through, I’m hoping it should be easier to track where I go off-track.
Once a month, this planning time must include meta-planning. During this time, the idea is to review that my planning method is the most effective. This is the time for reviewing the past month’s calendar, and also for reading any books on planning.
As for evaluating sub-goals, I’ve decided that the best step after some initial self-reflection is consultation. Therapy/coaching can be valuable for anyone working to solve an internal problem that defends itself, and it seems prudent to gain what I can from professional guidance. I’ve stated that I want my goal with that time to make evaluating my volition and turning it into action natural and habitual.
Finally, my current method (not perfectly successful, but a start) has been to keep a list of projects in a spreadsheet, each assigned a number for personal importance and for urgency, and each with a column for a link to an outline. Long-term projects are on a separate sheet, and short-term projects either belong to a long-term project or do not. On my calendar, I have a block of time simply called “Project Time” on Saturday, and open space on weekday evenings and Sunday. The idea is that during Planning Time, I take projects from the Projects List, allot them Project Time.
There is one more step I’ve figured out in this plan. Posting it here, mentioning it to others. Now I know people will ask me occasionally how it’s going, which will provide a bit of motivation to get started on using the system.
Has anyone made good use of a planning structure similar to this, with scheduled planning and meta-planning?
Having regular time which is explicitly for planning, not working, is vital. Daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly seems to work pretty well. Daily—what are my most important tasks? Weekly—how did the last week go? What are my critical projects/tasks for next week? And so forth. That’s one of the simple-but-massively-effective insights of things like GTD, even though I disagree with their tactics—regularly spend time explicitly planning rather than working.
Yes, my approach is similar.
I schedule planning time where the level of abstraction is proportional to the logarithm of the recurrence period, and it seems effective at pruning cached goals and sanity-checking my meta-goals. (However, it’s difficult to test because of the time scales involved and the fact that I can’t fork myself.)
Recently, I noticed that my general skills aren’t improving as fast as I’d like, so I decided to take advantage of compound interest[1] and created a parallel structure for working, learning, and meta-learning.
Richard Hamming, “You and Your Research”
EDIT: Fixed link misparse.
This brings to my mind the idea of a complete n-ary tree (with n being the base of your logarithm), with the highest abstraction level at the root—if you spend equal time on each node, then you’ll portion time across levels as you described.
I found this amusing—I’m not sure I know of any generally meaningful meta-thinking levels beyond say, 2.