I have mentioned in the past that I have retained a few coaches over the years, and very recently retained another coach that is helping me in two main areas of my life at the moment – with many of the strategies being dualistic.
The strategies that have been shared sometimes spill over into other unintended areas of my life resulting in even more benefit.
I recently sat down to spec out my Q4 key projects and milestones along with the beginnings of some key deliverables. As of today, I know what those key projects are and in many ways – what the key outcomes/deliverables are going to be.
However, I have stopped short of fleshing it all out as of tonight. No, I instead picked up one key goal for the upcoming 90 day period that will close out this year, and took a whopping 10 minutes to pound out the following in rapid fashion.
I deliberately did this in 10 minutes, yes everything I’m about to outline – I rocked out in 10 minutes. I’ll explain why 10 minutes is so important.
So what is a Ten Minute Micro Window?
It is a fixed 10 minute window where you will focus on nothing else but the task at hand. Before you start the 10 minute micro window – you know what the outcome is for that 10 minute slice of time.
In this case – it was the establishment of one my key 3 goals for Q4 of this year which was to include the following:
- Goal Statement – One plain English statement that states simply what success looks like for attaining this goal.
- Milestones – 3 Key Milestones that underpin this quarterly goal – these are deliverables to support the overall goal – progress is counted only in terms of completed deliverables, progress milestones do not count in this exercise
- Activities – A smattering of tasks and activities that underpin each milestone, bit size actions that are typically a few days in duration that can be lined up in terms of a week – this is key for scheduling later
- Habits / Routines – For this goal to be achieved, like any goal in my life – I know that a daily action or two must be taken. So I knew I’d have to take a few of these down on paper. Nothing too sophisticated – just some basic promises to myself to keep the momentum rolling – day in and day out.
All of this in ten minutes????!?
Well any goal worth setting, you have likely already been processing it in your head, and you likely have a bunch of this stuff already in mind. The 10 minute micro window technique was a galvanizing approach to getting this started.
So the execution of this was very straightforward — I went right into my OmniFocus and built out a new project on the fly – using my standard project build templates. Luckily, in this case – I was able to leverage some prior tasks and project structures to unlock this right away – it was at the activities/task level – so the detailed thinking was already jumpstarted.
I threw the goal title down as the project title. Whipped up the three main milestones that I had been rolling around in my head, and then filled in a few new tasks – all in under 5 minutes.
Then I went old school and grabbed one of my many numerous legal pads lying around the house – and began framing up habits and guiding principles for my daily life. Then I stepped back and fleshed out some weekly barometers with target ‘KPI’ measures that I would hold myself too.
Here’s the key for this goal setting exercise and the daily grind of hitting the goal – I set the daily targets and I will manage to those. However, my success will be based upon my ability to hit those weekly aggregated metrics. This gives me the flexibility to have an unexpected miss on the daily, while also providing me the benefit to overload or surge on a given day/night when I have the time and energy to pour into the goal.
This built in flexibility is crucial for those of us that are recovering perfectionists and self judging critics when things do not go according to our internal plans.
The fact that I did the Q4 goal definition coupled with the daily habit roster build – within a Ten Minute Micro Window is a result of a tip from a recent session with one of my coaches. She suggested that I establish a weekly commitment of time to be spent on this project, and to not get so fixated on my daily activity level. It was during this guidance that she offered up this notion of micro working windows.
Admittedly, it is a variation of the Pomodoro technique, however in this case it is exceptionally tactically focused with a bit sized outcome being produced – seemingly on the fly.
The next step will invariably be to come back around and iterate on the detail of the plan and to set dates on the next steps.
Those milestones will need to get flavored up with some times and dates, and I can tell you that the goal also has a set date for completion as well.
I have two more main goals to build upon for Q4, and I can tell you that those are going to be fleshed out this upcoming weekend as well. I’ll likely spend some more time than the Ten Minute Micro Window to round out the complete Q4 plan that will span all Dimensions of My Life.
I promise you this – it will not be an arduous task, as the goals have emerged over the course of Q3 where I deliberately did not set any hard and fast goals for many areas of my life. I pursued a number of things in the sprit of creating space for the next quarter of activity and of deliverables to emerge organically.
In my next post, I’ll speak to how not the act of not pursuing the traditional goal setting approach for many areas of my life worked out here in Q3.
To close this out – there is zero excuse now.
I have provided you a little technique that can be done in 10 minutes to set a goal for yourself that can be achieved in 12 weeks – with the definition of the goal success statement, 3 key milestones, a handful of underlying activities that support those milestones, and some daily habit development – all being a part of this.
Even the best artists start with a pencil and a sketch.
Well, maybe not Bob Ross, but you get the point.
What is your target outcome in Q4? I bet you can find ten minutes to do some sketching and painting…