Mind the GAP

“Your action plan is your roadmap. It helps you get the wheels in motion, and it steers you toward long-term success: consistent, intentional practice. This is your path to creating and sustaining healthy habits that fuel you to keep going.”

― Melissa Steginus

Writing this from vacay :) While I was enjoying some coffees with people there were a lot of questions about my journaling and planning routine. With a lot of tools around is important to find the one that serves you best, or even design one that contains more methods aligned with your needs.

One tool that helps me map my year is the one shared here about goals and now I will build on that article with a second tool that I called ”Mind the GAP” :)

GAP is the one method that I can share with you for efficiency and productivity in a way that can give you a way to count the hours you put in for a certain project or the way to create an action plan. Establishing goals without timeline and actions is like telling that you want to gave up sugar but you keep buying and eating cookies.

GAP serves you on a weekly/monthly or yearly process.
G - comes from goals - write them down as realistic and specific as possible - learning a new foreign language is not a specific or realistic goal. Learning turkish level a2 until the end of the year is a realistic and specific goal.

A - comes from actions - write down what you need to do in order to achieve your goal. What do you need to do in order to learn turkish? Find a course, enroll, go to class, spend time practicing and doing homeworks, maybe plan a trip to Turkey so you can practice what you are learning. Write down all these.

P - comes from planning and protect - book time for the actions in your calendar. Schedule the hours in advance and make sure that you will protect the timeslots in order to create the space for you to go to turkish classes, have time to do the homeworks without taking time from things that are important to you.

You can use GAP in your day to day activity as a planning tool in the Sunday reflection process for the next week, where you get to see what you must negotiate to keep in your calendar.

Send me a message if this makes sense and you are willing to give it a try :)

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash