By Ted McEnroe, The Community Roundtable
Welcome to the second full week of 2015.
Remember the vim and vigor with which you sat down at your desk last week? The whole year was ahead of you. A clean slate. You laid out a dozen priorities for the year and… haven’t started any of them. Last week you posted “I have a lot of big things to do!” This week it was more like “I don’t know how to get these things done!”
You’re not alone. It’s human nature. It’s why something like 90 percent of New Year’s resolutions fail and most fail rather quickly.
The Boston Post Road – Wikipedia
So how do you improve your chances of success in community planning this year? Have a roadmap.
The problem with goal setting is that it just tells you where you want to go, not how to get there. We are strong believers in the power of the roadmap to connect the dots between where you are and where you want to be. Your roadmap rationalizes your resource needs, your interim goals and measures, and more. Without one, it’s hard to show where you are going on how you are planning on getting there.
But in many cases, you may need more. You may want a TripTik.
For those of you under 40 or who never got loaded up into the Family Truckster for a cross-country adventure, a TripTik was AAA’s way of dividing your long-distance jaunts into manageable, notebook sized slices that broke your big trip into small pieces. Think of your 2015 roadmap to your goals, and break it down into some smaller slices. Going to launch a new initiative? Use your big roadmap to set all the targets along the way, and then break down those segments into manageable pieces.
At TheCR, the research and content team is sitting down to do just this. We are breaking up our year into our core research projects, our training development efforts, our benchmarking projects and our other content projects. We do a lot of that work in Trello, laying out the projects and subtasks to better understand
Breaking it all down does three things.
- It helps you acknowledge the little things that go into accomplishing your larger goals.
- It gives you a chance to see where things get crazy busy and where you might have some time to invest – and helps you plan accordingly.
- It lets you see more clearly how the small habits and daily efforts you make feed into the larger goals. There is great power in the reminder that the profile tweak that takes a few hours of your time to set up today provides the added insights that illuminate the subject matter expertise that feeds into your ability to better find champions in your community for the program you want to launch.
Driving from Boston to San Francisco means going through Omaha. If you don’t make it that far, all your big plans in the Bay Area don’t matter.
