If you’re anything like most people, you have a dream. A plan for your life. Goals and ambitions. But you lack the ability to execute them. The goals seem too lofty. The finish line too far away. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You need a way to break down all of those amazing dreams of your ideal life into pieces that you can manage. What if you could break down your 5-year goals into self-projects that can be done in 6 months or a year? And those projects into smaller tasks that you can do in a day, a week, or a month? Here's how you can achieve your long-term goals by adopting an agile mindset.
Agile Planning
As a Product Manager, I take long-term initiatives (business goals) that span years, and break them into epics (or projects). These epics can be completed in a few months or less. They are then broken down into tasks, things that we can do within a week, two weeks, three weeks, or four. On my teams, we plan out what we can accomplish within two-week chunks out of a project. We also leave a bit of time for the unknown things that pop-up in life as well as a bit of time to do small tasks here and there, such as an update to a screen that will only take an hour or a day.
A great thing about the epics is that you don’t have to do them necessarily one-at-a-time. You can work on 2 or 3 simultaneously while still maintaining tasks that you can manage without burn out and without overwhelming your calendar. As I mentioned earlier, some tasks may take a day, some may take weeks. But just having those dreams and goals in manageable, achievable chunks will give you something to move forward every day.
My Personal Backlog
On my personal backlog, I have my sprints (the duration of my planning periods for tasks) only a week long. This allows me to plan out a certain number of tasks based on what I have going on that week. With a house full of kids, calendars can get full and I might not always have the same number of free hours to work on my personal ventures.
I have my to-do tasks related to my ventures planned out over many weeks for several months. I also have my list of blog topics and article ideas planned out long-term over the sprints. For example, if my goal is to write two articles per week, then I have created two tasks with the article title and a general description of what they will be about.
With two articles per sprint, along with whatever other tasks I need to work on, I never have to guess at what I should focus on next. These tasks can be moved to different sprints and rearranged, just in case the muse hits and I have a brilliant idea for an article for the current week.
Keeping It All Together
So what do I use to manage all of this? Surely not a notepad and a to-do list, right? Personally, I use Jira, which is a tool that I use in my day job to manage software development teams for the entire division. I have my own personal account which is free for up to 10 users (which would be great if I ever bring additional resources into the team). However, there are a few different providers that you can choose from, all with different features and price points.
To achieve my long-term goals for my personal initiative of Versatile Parent, here’s a snippet of what my layout looks like:
- Initiative (my high-level goal)
- Successful blog called Versatile Parent which helps parents be successful and happy in every aspect of their life
- Epics (smaller projects needed to make the initiative a success)
- Create the website
- Plan out categories for blogs
- Automation with social media
- Newsletter
- Tasks (bite-size pieces needed to complete the epics they belong to)
- Create the website:
- Find a platform to host
- Choose a brand/domain that identifies your overarching goal
- Define a template that works best
- Plan out categories for blogs
- Research on Quora
- Research on Reddit
- Define areas of focus needed to be a versatile parent
- Automation with social media
- Research platforms for automation
- Choose the best option
- Set up automations
- Create the website:
Visualization and Tracking
Lastly, keep an eye on your timeline to know where you’re headed, what you’ve accomplished, and your expected completion. Once you have your hierarchies set, it becomes easier to track what your long-term tasks and goals are. Jira does a great job of displaying this, but you can do similar functionality in excel (with gantt charts) or other online software. Just remember: even the most lucrative companies delay their release dates and extend their timelines. Don’t get discouraged when you have to delay your timeline here and there.
Execution
Now that you have a breakdown of your goals and dreams and a way to track everything, all that’s left is execution. Knocking out your tasks. You can add tasks or epics as needed as you move closer to achieving your long-term goals.
What dream or goal is waiting for you?