Strategy to Manage Your Life

Developed entirely by RHW Designs, out of frustration for the lack of consistency in tools available to help individuals develop a way to manage their own accomplishments, passions and goals.

Each person should approach this tool subjectively and in response to their own life.

Process

The sticky notes – although wasteful – were used as an easy way to move individual life items around and arrange them for different purposes. Use one color of sticky – more colors are fun, however multiple colors will negatively affect decision making later.

1. Accomplishments: The first strategy is to write down every major accomplishment from the past – one item per sticky note. Example: Snowboarding Champion 2014.
2. Passions and Goals: Next, write out all current and future incomplete goals. Examples: Purchase a new computer; or Become an Architect; or Pay off school loans. All goals – no limits.
3. Timeline: The strategy seen in the image with sticky notes, aligned vertically, can be used to roughly place each item in time – past and future. Notice in this image there are a lot of small, easily accomplishable, goals grouped in the near-future, whereas the more difficult goals are higher/later in life. Take a picture of this and assure the items are readable.
4. Arrangement: On the floor, wall or any large flat surface, arrange the stickies into categories of your choosing. Try to group them so that they are easy to associate with a big life category. Example: Home; or Career; or Travel.
5. Categories: Acquire a large piece of paper. Write out each item from the stickies under their respective categories, then circle them with a nice big title for each next to the bubble. This is so that the stickies may then be placed back in time or used in others ways, so that you may see all of the items easily and to purposefully commit to the goals by having them *somewhere* other than in your head.
6. Congratulations: You’ve taken a huge step in organizing the goals and accomplishments in your life.

RHW Designs developed the categories into a pie chart, then strung each category together. As it turned out, each sticky item was a single branch between categories – an amazing revelation. From there a cool graphic with colorful arrows was developed to give the whole process a definable image.

The Life Management Strategy is still under developement. However even in its early stages, it has had major positive effects. Example: creating a budget and plan targeted at actually accomplishing the items, then triumphantly crossing off the items with a fat marker, then moving the sticky from future to the past section.

#rickitect