January 3rd of 2019

January 5^th, 2019,

Hey, I hope you guys are doing well today!

Today I would like to talk to you guys about planning out a year and a few strategies that I use in teaching, my work in philosophy and my side businesses that help me in planning. Hopefully, you guys can find some value in this blog post!

You see the thing with planning is that I try to have a plan that is aligned with my life’s work, so that each day, week, month, quarter and year that passes, I know that I am moving towards my goals and towards becoming better at servicing others. I have 3 different styles of planning, each stemming from the 3 ways that I view myself and from my means of being in servitude to my times and the world that I have been thrown into. Hopefully, at least 1 of these styles is something that you can apply to your life.

The first style is one that stems from my background in philosophy, which is basically the concept of reverse engineering my whole life. I begin by asking myself what do I want to become during my life based on who I am right now? This forces me to meditate on my own identity and the ideal identity that I have for myself. With this planning technique, I borrowed a method that I learned from Jordan Peterson, where I essentially think of my ideal life and what that looks like, as well as my personal hell and what it would look like if I completely screwed my life up. Once I have point A (my personal hell) and point B (my personal heaven), I think of 3 actions or 3 practical steps that I can take to move from away from hell and towards my heaven. This is essentially an exercise so that I can establish what 3 habits I must have so that I can achieve the life that I dream of as well as avoid my own nightmares from happening.

For me, my personal hell is that I become sick and unhealthy to the point where I can no longer teach, write philosophy and that I become a burden to my family without first having created enough passive income to protect myself and my family. I am also terrified of losing my teacher’s license. I have come to terms that this is most likely a very irrational fear, as I am good at what I do and I intend to constantly improve, however teaching is something that I love, so this attachment may be a reason why I am so afraid of losing that which I love. My personal heaven is that I am able to teach and point people towards the truth for my whole life, write books that transcend my own existence, meaning that these works of philosophy will continue my work even after I have serviced my time here on Earth and that I have passed, and that one day I can have enough passive income so that I can teach for free, thus eliminating money from the equation of just doing what I love and that I can do this simply because I love doing it.

The next style of planning that I use stems from my formal training as a teacher. This method of planning takes place in three parts: 
1) long-term planning, which is general planning for the whole year,
2) mid-term planning, which is planning each quarter or term of the year, breaking down the general planning into more concrete, but still fairly general timelines and/or deadlines that must be met, and finally,
3)short-term planning, which is the day to day and the week to week planning that moves me towards hitting my midterm deadlines and also assures that I am able to accomplish that which needs to be done by the end of the year.
So, in short, I start by establishing general guidelines on what I need to do for the whole year, as well as inserting the specific dates into my year-long calendar. Once this is done, I break up the year into 4 quarters and see what needs to be done in each quarter to move me towards accomplishing my year-end goals. Finally, I break down each quarter week by week and then day by day so that I now have daily and weekly tasks and represent the journey of the whole upcoming year.

Finally, the third planning strategy that I use is one that I learned from running multiple side-businesses. This is like how I reverse engineer a year of teaching, but instead I of breaking things down for the year, the quarter, the weeks and the days, I am reverse engineering the year so that I can represent it in a weekly schedule of weekly tasks. For example, if I want to purchase 2 properties this year, I need to reverse engineer how much I need to save each week, how many properties I need to look at each week so that I can have enough leads to make offers on when that time comes. I also need to calculate how many times I am marketing for these leads as well as what day of the week will I decide to carve out some time so that I can focus on the long-term vision. This is long-term vision planning is another mini exercise that I acquired from running a small business. This is when I take an hour or so a week to reflect on what my business will look like not next quarter, but a quarter that will be ending 5 years from now. This exercise has forced me to think about how I can automate my business or even delegate certain tasks that would simply take away from my primary task when I am wearing my entrepreneur hat, which is operating the business machine that I am building.

In conclusion, I personally use 3 different planning strategies just so that I can have 3 different views on how I use my time based on the 3 different roles that I have been graced with. These seem to work for me as I can find a balance between work and play, as well as order and chaos. The funny thing is since I am a person that likes to plan heavily, I must plan in rest days (3 days every 3 months minimum) as well as blocks of time where I can freestyle and do whatever I please. I am intrigued in finding out what are you planning techniques and strategies? Do you guys like to plan, or do you prefer to freestyle how you use and allocate your time? I would love to hear your guys thoughts on this so comment below! 

Thanks again for reading! I hope I was able to offer some value or insights and I wish you guys a great Saturday!

Until next time!

-PJH

Ps: follow me on Instagram @patrickjhilario for more philosophy, pedagogy and investor content!