{"id":4399,"date":"2019-03-15T03:45:11","date_gmt":"2019-03-15T08:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hectic-dad.com\/hectic-dad\/?p=4399"},"modified":"2019-03-05T11:10:46","modified_gmt":"2019-03-05T16:10:46","slug":"free-trial-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hectic-dad.com\/hectic-dad\/free-trial-month\/","title":{"rendered":"Free Trial Month!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I saw a tweet the other day that made me laugh. It was so close to home!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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You see, I had\u00a0mega-plans<\/em>\u00a0for December. I was going to organize all of 2019 and hit the ground running. This year was going to be different than prior years where I stumbled through the first week of the year trying to figure out what to do. I wasn\u2019t going to be pondering what I wanted to accomplish. I was going to be ready to rock-and-roll.
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But life has a funny way of conspiring to ruin the best plans.
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November and December ended up entirely differently than expected. I didn\u2019t take into account how disruptive to my normal routine Thanksgiving-Christmas-NYE was going to be. I discounted the impact that all the kids being home was going to have.
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Essentially, I learned nothing from my prior forays into planning at the end of the year. I took insufficient steps to ensure that I was setup for success.
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By the time New Year\u2019s Eve rolled around, I realized I totally dropped the ball. It was a Monday to boot\u2026so the Monday blues was something of a factor.
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I decided over the next two days I was going to make a plan for January. Just one month of planning, not trying to figure out the entire year in 48 hours. I was going to get a handle on enough aspects of life that I could be\u00a0productive<\/em>\u00a0for the next 30 days.
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So I dug in.
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I started thinking about the things that I\u00a0could<\/em>\u00a0work on for the month. I made task lists. I cleaned up my project list and started adding to that. And the lists got longer and longer. I sorted tasks into projects. I allocated projects to my areas of focus. I worked and I worked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My eyes were bleary as I stopped working.
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In a fitting culmination to the way the year had gone, we couldn\u2019t even find a replay of the New York City ball drop, and my daughter and I rang in the New Year with a really lame broadcast from New Orleans.
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Within 30 minutes of the dawn of the New Year, the lights were off and I was fast asleep.
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When I awoke on New Year\u2019s Day my mind immediately started spinning. There was so much to do! I wanted to get\u00a0everything<\/em>\u00a0done, but I realized that it couldn\u2019t all happen in January.
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Then I had the revelation that I needed to get my act together. All aspects of\u00a0my act<\/em>. So I decided I was going to use January for\u00a0Review and Planning<\/em>. I struggled with the idea all day, vacillating between thinking it was the greatest idea ever<\/em> to thinking I couldn\u2019t afford the time<\/em> to just\u00a0Review and Plan<\/em>. There\u2019s too much to do. I have to get it all done\u00a0now<\/em>.
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I finally decided I was going to engage in a two week\u00a0sprint<\/em>\u00a0of\u00a0Review and Planning<\/em>. I was going to make the time to set myself up for success. I even made a mental agreement with myself that I could extend the\u00a0Review and Planning<\/em>\u00a0to the end of the month if that time was warranted. But I wasn\u2019t going to decide that now.
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The idea of the\u00a0sprint<\/em>\u00a0comes from the book\u00a0Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time<\/a><\/em>. No synopsis does it justice\u2026you should read the book. But the short version is you decide on an area you\u2019re going to work on for a\u00a0short<\/em>\u00a0length of time and you focus on that area, to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. You consciously set aside the\u00a0other stuff<\/em>\u00a0and make a deep dive into whatever the subject matter is for the sprint.
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So I kept working through my review of 2018. What things had gone well. What was still the same as 2018, but needed to get better. And what had deteriorated throughout the year. Then I started to consider how I wanted things to look this time next year. When 2020 dawns, what did I want my life to look like?
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I break everything in my life into five\u00a0Areas of Focus<\/em>:
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