A Workshop For Your Life

In yesterday’s email I discovered that Cue is going to be a planning workshop.

(Just as an aside, I really did discover this while writing the email, in case it wasn’t obvious. Writing is an amazing activity, and often leads to insights that just cannot be found by merely thinking, even thinking hard, about a subject. Writing forces you to clarify and crystalize your ideas into words. That is real work. And there are real rewards. Honestly, it’s one of the reasons that planning is so powerful. You are writing down what you plan to do. You are creating something by the power of your words. And you will discover things as you do so.)

Ok, back to the topic at hand: a planning workshop.

You are the planner. You need a place to work. You need tools, ready at hand, to do the work.

In that workshop, you will forge a life, craft a future, create the future you.

It’s real work that happens there, whether it takes a long time or not.

It’s the first work. It’s deciding how you’ll spend your time, not in months and years, but in hours and minutes.

What you’ll make happen.

Where you will go.

Who you will work with.

It’s not the final work, that’s when you go out and make your plans a reality, adapting them to the chaos of life as it happens.

Nevertheless, without the plan in the first place there is nothing to adapt.

So, you’ll take five or ten minutes each day to plan out your day. In your workshop. The tools at hand that will serve you well are:

A tickler file, to remind yourself in the future.
Somewhere to record your plan. Writing it out leads to discoveries.
A journal for brainstorming, calming your monkey mind, exploring the unknown within you.

Over time, you’ll discover and create other tools for your workshop. Those will get built as you use those first tools, write about what works and what doesn’t, see your own progress and see what is blocking it. You may decide you need to track habits with a tool that motivates you to not “break the chain”. You may need a place to keep track of larger projects and work out how to make regular progress on them. You may want to write down and envision a future in a mission statement, vision board, or some other way. These are all potential tools in your workshop.

Create your workshop now.