Follow This Formula To Have An Ideal Year

Do you want to get more out of your days, weeks and ultimately, more out of your year?

Are you spending your time the way you want to?
If you’re not, this is for you.

About three years ago I was in a really tough state in my life and in my business.
I wasn’t covering the mortgage,
I wasn’t present as a father,
and I was just generally, not doing too well.

I found a way of using my days and using my weeks so that every year I have a fantastic year.

Here’s the simple equation that I used to change my life around…
You can use the same simple equation to change your life or your business around.

What I realised was that a great life is literally about having twenty, thirty, forty, ideal years.

If you have that many ideal years, you’re going to have a cracker of a life.
And that’s kind of what we want, right?

So the equation for a cracker of a life is really to say “If I want that many ideal years, every single year I’m going to aim to have, at work, 48 ideal weeks.”

So, minus the holidays, (they’re pretty ideal… even better than ideal) I’m going to aim to have 48 ideal weeks, and each one of those weeks I’m going to aim to have seven ideal days. If you work backwards from that and if you aim every week to have seven ideal days, you can have every week an ideal week and ultimately you’re going to have a cracker of a year and a cracker of a life.

And that’s the simple equation that I work to.

How do you do that? You might say: “What does that actually mean to me?”

With most people I recommend starting with their weeks, because a week is long enough to change your pattern, it’s long enough to change your rhythm but it’s not short enough, like a day, where sometimes you don’t get as much done as you’d like to. In a week, we can really shift that.

We start with the five principles that I’ve talked about before.
Eliminate, Focus, Sprint, Renewal and Fun/Rewards.

The first thing I get people to do is to plan their ideal weekend. An ideal weekend for you might be about exercise, it might be about family, it might be about having people over for dinner, might be a bit of sport… but what does that ideal weekend look like for you? Plan it out specifically, how does it actually look?

What we’re not aiming to do is make every weekend the same, but what we’re doing is just knowing what to aim for. What does ideal look like for you?

Now with your weekend, you want to make sure you get enough time for renewal. Enough time to rest. Enough time to recuperate, knowing that the five days ahead you’ve got to be at your best. You’ve got to have enough time for fun.

And I also use the weekend to help me focus on the week ahead. Give me some focus for the things that are going to be important in the week ahead.

So this is how I do that: First I split the week up into three lots of activities. Core Activities, Personal Activities and Stretch Activities.

Firstly Core activities, or what I call “Dollar” activities: KPI activities.
These are the things that you just need to get done to get through the work and get the money in the door. And what I do first of all is split the week into segments and work out when does it suit you to get those core things done? Let’s say you needed 40 billable hours in the week. You could split those 10, 10, 10 etc. Or you could have a couple of sprint days where you actually got a lot of that core work done done which frees your other days up for other activities.

The second thing is to put in your personal activities for the week. Your five key personal activities. It could be going to the gym, it could be making dinner with the family, it could be a concert… each week that’s going to change, but you put those into your schedule. Actually what I do a lot of the time is I put those in there first before I put in the KPI activities so they’re locked in and you know what time you’ve got available.

And then the third thing is to play with these “vision” or what I call “Stretch” activities and these are the ones that are either going to generate success in the future, or they’re about stretching you and developing you. Find time for those where there’s a lot of non-core activity.

So here’s the thing: I want you to have an ideal year.

And to have an ideal year every one of those weeks, those 48 weeks in the year that are available for work, you’re going to have an ideal week and the way I do that is by applying the principles Eliminate, Focus, Sprint, Renewal and Fun to every single week.

And what I’ve given you is a way you can structure that for yourself. You can have an ideal year, but it’s only an idea, if you don’t execute it.
You’ve got to tailor this to make it work for yourself.

The way it works for me will not be the way it works for you, and the way you make it work for you is to play around with it, to get started next week on what your ideal rhythm might look like for the week, in terms of how you earn money and the core activities, what are you going to do to stretch yourself into the future or develop yourself? And what are your key personal activities for the week?

If you factor all these into your week you’re more likely to generate a rhythm that’s going to lead to you having an ideal year.

If you have any questions about how to do this for yourself, get in contact with me and you can do that down below with the button, but every single person that I’ve ever taught this system has made it their own.

Leave me a comment down below: When you make this your own, what changes did you make to it or how did you make it work for yourself?