A Life Framework

Enough.

I’ve had this unpleasant feeling feasting at my guts for too long.

The feeling of flying the worse seat of UnhealtyLifestyle Airlines. The feeling of being on autopilot as life passes. The sombre feeling of you are going to regret this. The unsettling feeling of you are going to die (moderately, I’ll admit) young.

I’ve been working too much, too boringly, too fuzzily. In the last few years, I’ve missed too many opportunities to make a better life for myself, my family, and everyone around me. I feel I will benefit from having a system, an explicit set of goals, a framework for life.

I’ve come to learn about this thing called the 12 Week Year. The concept is so simple you don’t even need to read the book: move from setting yearly goals to setting quarterly goals. Shortening the window makes it easier to accommodate changes in your life, correct undesired trends, review fails and wins… it just makes you more agile. Where may I’ve heard of that?

In a way, the “method” reeks of life-productivization, this terrible idea that your life should be managed AS IF it were a company/job. Left to its own mechanisms, productivity will percolate your life edge to edge, find even the tiniest single crevice, and fill it up with “a task”. I’ve fought that dragon before, so I feel confident I can rescue the good things of the method and incorporate them into my life.

One of the good and interesting things about the strategy is that it works backwards from a long-term life vision and shortens the scope in different cycles (10 years, three years, one year, and finally, the 12 weeks/quarter). This flow gives you short-term flexibility while keeping sight of where you want to be in a decade or two.

Additionally, inside each of these cycles, it proposes looking at six different areas of life -Physical, Business, Family, Community, Personal, and Spouse- to establish a broad set of goals for a balanced life.

I think this a framework that can really click with me -and with many technical-minded and process-oriented people- so I’m going to adopt it now, tweak some parts, and see if it sticks and how far I can take.

What is your take on life goals? Do you have a system? A framework? Another thing? Let me know by contacting me in twitter or by email.