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💡 The Big Idea: 3 Planning Questions to Help You Do More of What Matters.

I recently came across a research paper that makes the case that we only follow through on what we intend to do about half the time.

The reason for this is something known as the intention-behavior gap, which is defined as the distance between what people mean to do and what they end up doing.

One of the big reasons for the intention-behavior gap is that our intentions simply are not strong enough, usually because the goal was never really ours to begin with. But that’s not a willpower problem; that’s a connection problem.

In this newsletter, I want to show you the planning rhythm that I believe is best suited to help you connect to your goals, manage your limited time well, and ultimately do more of what actually matters.

This planning rhythm can be summed up with 3 simple questions, each one representing a specific planning timeframe:

• What matters?
• What’s realistic?
• What’s next?

Let’s start with the big one.

Quarterly: What Matters?

Several years ago, I read the book The 12 Week Year, which describes a very real problem with the traditional annual goal-setting process: we tend to procrastinate for many months and then scramble at the end. By eliminating the procrastination period and staying focused for shorter periods (90 days or one quarter instead of a full year), we can get four feedback loops instead of one and make much more progress towards our goals.

But when I first tried the 12 Week Year method myself, I failed spectacularly. And I realized the reason was that I wasn’t connected to the goals that I set.

So I came up with my own Personal Retreat framework to help give me the motivation I needed to take consistent action on the things that are important and the clarity to cut the things that aren’t. By getting away and reflecting on the last 90 days, I can see things more clearly and pick priorities for the next quarter that will help move me toward my ideal future. And it worked. The quarter before, I didn’t hit any of my quarterly goals, but the very first time I did my Personal Retreat, I achieved them all. I literally went from 0% completion to 100% in a single quarter because I was personally connected to the goals I was setting.

What a quarterly Personal Retreat does is help you decide what really matters.

Quarterly is the right cadence for deciding what matters because it’s long enough to make real progress but short enough that you can’t put it off. It also lets you go all in because if you get it wrong, you’re never more than 90 days away from a fresh start.

Weekly: What’s Realistic?

Once you have your quarterly goals, you then want to make sure that you are consistently doing the things that will move you toward the successful completion of those goals that you set.

And the right cadence for this is weekly, not monthly.

There are 13 total weeks in each quarter (12 + 1 buffer week if you’re following the 12 Week Year framework), and each week gives you a feedback loop you can use to adjust as necessary and make sure that you’re moving in the right direction.

But you have to be realistic.

One of the major reasons weekly planning fails is that we try to do too much. We take the time-blocking approach for our entire week, which doesn’t give us enough margin to roll with the disruptions that will inevitably come.

The way I force myself to be realistic with my weekly planning is a simple planning grid I’ve built into my Personal Retreat planner (included in my Personal Retreat course):

This grid forces me to pick one thing that is most important to focus on for each block. So instead of planning every available hour, I’m picking one thing I want to make sure gets done in the morning and afternoon for each workday.

These aren’t the only things I’m going to get done during those blocks, but by forcing myself to decide what is most important in each block, I can make sure that I consistently take action on the things that matter.

Daily: What’s Next?

Weekly planning can help you decide what fits where, but where the rubber hits the road is in your daily time-blocked plan. This is where you give every hour a job and protect the time to do the things that are truly important.

Here’s how I time-block:

1. I schedule my appointments (the things on my calendar that have a specific time associated with them).
2. I schedule my most important tasks (MITs). These are the intentions I set in the blocks of my weekly plan.
3. I schedule my routines (i.e., morning and evening routines) to make sure I protect time for my important habits.
4. I fill in the gaps until every hour has a job.

By creating a time-blocked plan for my day, I go into it knowing what I should focus on instead of wondering.

In the words of former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, plans are worthless, but planning is everything.

Even though the day rarely goes according to plan, the act of planning my day like this helps me be intentional with every hour I have. That’s what allows me to focus on what’s next instead of feeling like there’s something important I’m forgetting about that I should be doing instead.

Seeing the Whole Year at Once

So those are the three different timeframes I believe you should be using for your planning, but it can be difficult to see how they come together.

And that’s why I’m such a big fan of the NeuYear wall calendars, which eliminate the artificial distinctions between months (the weeks run together) and make it easier to see the entire quarter at once. I’ve been buying versions of this calendar for 10 years now, and I’m excited to share that the 2027 Focused version is now available!

I helped design this custom wall calendar, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. It’s a 24” x 36” dry-erase wall calendar that shows the entire year at once, and is built around the planning rhythm I just walked you through in this newsletter. Each quarter is shaded so you can see exactly where one ends and the next begins, and there’s a buffer week built in between quarters. The weeks start on Mondays, there’s room for your yearly or quarterly themes, dots for tracking habits, and more.

This is a great tool for protecting time for the things that are important. If you could use a little help taking consistent, intentional action on your goals, you should check it out.

The Bottom Line: Start With What Matters

I’ve been doing a Personal Retreat every quarter since 2017, and this 3-phase planning rhythm has helped me make consistent progress on the things that are important to me.

What makes this work is that it’s detailed enough to connect to but simple enough to stick to. A yearly plan doesn’t really add anything to this, and monthly planning, I think, just adds an unnecessary level of complexity that increases the intention-behavior gap, not lessens it.

If you want to try this for yourself, I recommend you start with the quarterly plan. Once you have that, create your weekly plan before the week begins and make sure that it connects to that quarterly plan, then use that weekly plan to create your daily time-blocked plans.

Once you know what matters, it becomes a lot easier to make (and protect) room for it.

— Mike