Using Project Sprints to Plan Your Goals

Welcome to the Connect the Dots Podcast. My name is Matt Ragland and you're listening to the weekend edition of the show. In these longer 15 to 20 minute episodes, I'm literally connecting the dots from recent daily episodes, giving you context and detail for how different ideas work together. I draw these lessons from personal experience, work with clients, modern psychology, and real-world application. Thank you for listening, and here's the Weekend Edition. What if I told you that you could get more done by focusing on less? This is the counterintuitive advice of the Project Sprint, because it's January of a new year, and if you're like most people, then you have a big annual goal that you would like to accomplish to make this year special. The trouble that most people have though is taking that big goal and breaking it down into something that you can do every single week and even every single day. That will bring you closer to a successful achievement of that big goal. The shift that I went through in breaking down my big annual goal was to think about it in terms of what could I do each quarter? So what could I do every 12 weeks? And could I structure my big annual goal in such a way that it was really just me achieving 4 quarterly goals to the culmination of a successful annual goal? As I focused on quarterly goals for the past 5 years, I realized in this past year that I was actually breaking down that 12-week goal into 2 different 4 to 6-week sprints. This kept my focus even clearer and closer to the day and to the week that I was in so that I could structure even my quarterly goals into these smaller 4 to 6-week sprints. The sprint methodology has been incredibly helpful to me and many others because it helps me get ultra focused and clear on the goals that I have that will lead to a successful outcome. Of this short sprint. And as I stack these winning weeks, as I stack these 4 to 6 week sprints on top of each other, I know I'm going to have a successful quarter. And if I have a successful quarter over and over again, that's going to lead to a successful year. So if we look at the annual goal as the macro, as the big thing that we want to get done in a year, then we can start to chunk that down, get more and more focused all the way down to the micro of what is the goal that I have for this week? What are the actions that I need to take each day? And then how much time do I have to protect in order to get those actions done so that I can achieve my goal? Because I know that if I achieve my goal each week, I'm going to have a successful sprint at the end of this 4 to 6 weeks. Do that twice, I have a successful quarter, and all of a sudden I've zoomed back out to the macro of having a really productive year. What I've just done is given you a complete productivity stack from the macro view of what do I want to get done this year? All the way down to just the daily micro of what do I need to do this day that will lead me to a winning week. And as I stack those winning weeks on top of each other, one right after another for 6-week sprints, for 12-week quarters, all the way out to a 52-week year. But as I'm learning and as I'm able to work in these short sprints, I can pivot really quickly as new experiences come in, as new opportunities arise, as I start to learn things about how I'm working. I can make those pivots and shifts because I'm focusing on the week and then the 6-week sprint and then the quarter. So you can see how I can zoom in and zoom out and still stay aligned with the things that I want to be doing in my work and in my life. There are a lot of productivity systems and strategies that you can use to organize a sprint for your own work. And so ones that I like to use are of course QMWD, which is my way of breaking down the quarter, the month, the week, and the day. There are also ones like OKRs, which we've talked about in my Productivity Power-Up course. We use them at ConvertKit. They're very popular in tech. And the OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results, which for me is a lot like what is the quarterly goal? That's the objective. And then the key results is a combination of what are my monthly milestones and even my weekly deliverables. What OKR is doing and what QMWD is also doing is saying, here's my top-level goal. What are the milestones or key results that I can be working on every single week to make sure that I'm staying on the right track to achieve a desirable quarterly goal or objective at the end of the end of the term. My friend Ken Rice, who's also an alumni of the Productivity Power-Up, works at Adobe, and he talks about how his team actually breaks their work into 2-week sprints that he calls epics and stories. I'll let him share it with you right now. So as you can see, you can break down even a 6-week sprint into something that is a smaller 2-week sprint, but you're just thinking about how you can stay very agile, how you can stay quick to pivot, and how you can make decisions based on new opportunities and information that you have about the work that you're doing. The biggest takeaway that I want you to have from this video is understanding that you can design a timeline that works best for you based on the information and the data that you currently have about the goal that you want to achieve. If you only know what the first 2 to 3 weeks of your project is going to be like, then just design a timeline and a series of goals and related tasks or key results that you can do that will lead you at least to a successful 2 to 3 weeks. Then once you have more information, you've done that 2 to 3 weeks of work, do that again for another 2 to 3 weeks, and all of a sudden you have a 6-week sprint. Maybe you can widen your timeline, you maybe you can widen your focus at that point to say, okay, now I understand what I have to do for the next 6 weeks. You may just stay at that 6-week cycle for a really long time. That's kind of the sprint duration that I tend to work on is these 4 to 6-week cycles. And then I review, I do a retrospective, and I see where do I need to pivot or how do I need to keep progressing as I go into the next 4 to 6 weeks. The simplest system that I have shared with you many times, and we talk about it a lot in the Productivity Power-Up course, is using the gap and wrap methods to preview and review your productive weeks. So if you look at it and say, I know that I want to complete this one goal by the end of the week, here are the actions that I need to do to complete that goal, and here's the time that I'm going to protect to do that. When you do that, then you can start to stack those winning weeks and you'll understand, okay, if I do this 3 weeks in a row, I'm going to have this outcome. If I can knock out these 4 to 6 weekly goals, then I can have this outcome. I'll have a successful sprint. And then what you're doing at the end of each week, and even at the end of each sprint, is you can say to yourself, okay, how do I wrap this up? W-R-A-P. What were my wins? What were the results of the plan that I set for myself? Is this aligned with my quarterly or annual goals or themes, or even who I want to be as a person? And then how do I need to pivot or keep making progress going into the next sprint? So you can use this gap and wrap method really well to do both a weekly deliverable that you want to accomplish, a weekly milestone or key result, all the way out to how do I stack 6 gaps or 12 gaps altogether to have a successful 6-week sprint and a 12-week quarterly goal. There's one more piece of key advice that you need to know about this type of planning and execution. And it is to only work on things that you control. Like, for example, I could have a goal of reaching 100,000 subscribers on my YouTube channel this year. That was actually my, one of my goals last year, and I fell well short of that goal. Totally fine. Well, maybe not entirely. I had a goal. I wanted to hit it. I didn't quite hit it. But part of my problem, part of the mistake that I made, was that I don't always control how people, how and when people will subscribe to my videos. I certainly don't entirely control who all sees my videos. Now, can I create videos that are more likely to get subscribes? Are there ways that I can change my videos so that people are more interested in watching them, they watch longer? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. But the number one thing that I totally and completely control is how frequently I publish on YouTube. And so instead of saying that I wanted to get 40,000 new subs last year to get me to about 100,000 subs for my YouTube channel, instead I should have said, I'm going to produce and publish a weekly video on YouTube. Maybe even I get to the point of saying like, I'm going to publish 2 videos a week on YouTube, or maybe it's 1 video a week on YouTube and 1 new reel on Instagram or TikTok. So I'm publishing more. That is what I control. Not the total number of views or subscribers. So I want you to take that lesson to heart when you are planning out what are my goals for this? What are the milestones that I need to hit? Do your best to only select those goals, milestones, or outcomes that you control, or you have the vast majority of control over. If you're going for things like top-level sales or new subscriber growth or new follower growth on Twitter, whatever it might be, Those aren't things that you control. However, and this is the good news, the more experiments that you run, the more outcomes that you achieve, the more goals that you hit that you control, you will start to see, this is the type of work that I create that has the biggest impact on those less controlled goals that I have. So the more videos that I publish on YouTube, the more that I can see This type of video resonates, so I should do more of those if I want to increase my subscriber count. If you're trying to hit a certain level of growth in your business, maybe you see that certain types of products sell better. Maybe there is a new type of customer that you can reach and you have to do a number of sales calls. Well, you can control the number of sales calls that you do. Focus on the outcome that you control, and then you'll start to see which type of actions and experiments has the biggest impact on the other things that aren't so much as you're in your control. The point is you have the biggest impact on your life by doing and reviewing, not just by estimating, planning, and over-researching stuff. The more things that you do, the more that you will be able to review and be able to take better action, more informed action going forward with new bets, new experiments, new tests, and new actions that you want to take for your goal. If you would like some more help from me stacking those winning weeks into a successful sprint, a quality quarter, and a wonderful year, then go ahead and check out my course, Most Productive Week Ever. Subscribers can save by just clicking the link in the description below. You'll learn everything you need to about the course, and you'll also get an extra little discount on the next round of the Productivity Power-Up when it opens. Thanks for listening to Connect the Dots. I really appreciate your time. Don't forget that every single day I share a short 5-ish minute episode about how to be more focused and productive. The best way to help the show grow is by sharing with a friend, but the other way is to rate and review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I'd love to hear from you on Twitter or Instagram as well. You can find me in both places @MattRagland. Thanks again, and I'll talk to you soon.