Many of us create lists at the beginning of the year for the things that we are hoping to accomplish over the course of the year. Quite a few organizations have even formalized the process with objectives and tied it to performance reviews. Naturally, we all know what we are going to be doing come December.
The best intentions drive this desire to lay out strategic objectives. If we plan the year with the goal of accomplishing strategic things, we may be more likely to pull it off. Surely things written on paper have a greater probability of happening.
Sadly, this isn’t how things work. Come December, it is inevitable that some of these “important” activities got dropped and were replaced by something else entirely. I can’t remember the last time I had a year go to plan (it’s never happened). Adding these to next years list isn’t going to fix the problem.
The key to completing strategic activities is not to have them on some start of the year list, but to have them on your every week list. Most of us can’t come up with our personal two-year plan, why do we think we can come up with a one-year plan? We can change our behavior though.
If we decide to treat strategic activities the way we do everything else we work on, then we have a chance at completing them.