Macro and Micro Planning

There are so many ways to plan. Trust me, I spend a whole lot of time on Pintrest looking at everyone’s pretty planners and bullet journal layouts. I watch youtube videos about it. Here’s a great one from Boho Berry. I also watched the whole Bullet Journal video, three times. I am a sick, sick human being, this is what I do in my free time.

I do use some of it. I use my bullet Journal, and I use my Erin Condron Planner. I like the SMART planning, the Level Ten Life planning, the Five Pillars planning. I try all of these things, but all of it boils down to one basic principle. It’s the principle on which I build my whole planning structure. Macro and micro planning.

This is the secret, my planning brothers and sisters! It all starts with this. Remember on Friday when I told you my big three goals for the year? If you missed it, I’ll paraphrase. Make actionable content for you, write entertaining stories for everyone and make a little money in the process. Those are big, lofty macro goals. I love them, because they are shiny and sparkly. They are huge, hanging high in the sky. I want to reach them, I want them so badly.

Here is the problem with the stars. They are vague. They are far away. So what do we do when there’s something out of our reach? You make a ladder. In other words, you do micro planning.

As an example, let’s take one of my macro goals.  Make actionable content for you. Now, I don’t want to give away any surprises, but here is an example of some of the rungs on my ladder.

• Make an effort to include actionable items in every one of my weekly posts. By this I mean include at least one thing you can do, right then, to make your writing life better.
• Publish Road To Full Time every month.
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• Create another Thirty Days, Thirty Ideas event in August, with a new theme. (Sorry, you’ll have to wait for July to find out what the theme will be.)

Those are great micro goals. Those are great goals for a whole number of reasons. They are specific. They are simple. They are things that I can do in at most a month. And they build up to my lovely, shiny vague goals. They are the simple, every day wooden steps that will lead to my shiny beautiful stars.

Another way to look at it is this. I wrote the three macro goals as my new years plan. I do this once a year, and I review them during my quarterly audits to make sure they’re still actionable and relevant.

My micro goals I make fresh every month, week and day. I’ve gone over this before, so I’ll breeze through this. I look at my goals, and figure out what I can do about those goals in a month. Then I figure out what I can do this very week. Then, what can I can do this very day.

So, to sum it up, macro goals are big, lofty, and usually part of a one to five year plan. Micro goals are specific, actionable, can be done in a short amount of time and lead you to achieving your macro goal.

Now, then, since I mentioned it, here is an actionable item for you. I just love that phrase, actionable item. It means something that you can take action on, right now. Write out your stars, your bright and shiny stars. They can be a vague and as grand as you want, so long as you can then build a ladder to them.