Why Quarterly Planning Instead of Monthly or Annual?

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:00:03.360 | All right, our next question comes

00:00:08.280 | from Preet, who asks, why quarterly planning instead

00:00:14.160 | of monthly or annually?

00:00:18.800 | So in my philosophy of multiscale planning,

00:00:21.360 | as you know, there's three scales--

00:00:23.720 | daily planning, weekly planning, quarterly planning.

00:00:28.040 | So the quarterly plan you look at when you build your plan

00:00:31.120 | for each week, your weekly plan you

00:00:32.840 | look at when you build your time block plan for each day.

00:00:36.080 | Why, as Preet asked, did I choose

00:00:37.960 | the scale of quarterly for that biggest scale plan?

00:00:43.520 | Well, it's because monthly is too small of a scale.

00:00:47.040 | It's too similar, I think, to the weekly plan.

00:00:49.800 | There's not enough time in a month

00:00:52.920 | to really dig in and accomplish a project of non-trivial size

00:00:58.020 | for most things.

00:01:00.280 | And so it overlaps the weekly plan

00:01:02.480 | you're doing, I think, a little bit too much.

00:01:04.480 | Annual planning is, on the other hand, too big of a scale.

00:01:07.600 | I have a plan for the whole year.

00:01:09.120 | I make the plan in January.

00:01:10.400 | Now it's mid-February.

00:01:12.680 | Am I really going to feel a lot of motivation,

00:01:15.880 | like I better get to work?

00:01:16.960 | Do I even know how to break something up

00:01:19.020 | over that big of a time frame?

00:01:21.360 | And if I sign a book contract on January 1,

00:01:24.240 | and just for the sake of this example,

00:01:25.880 | let's say the book is due on December 31,

00:01:28.820 | what should I be doing February 1?

00:01:30.980 | I don't know.

00:01:32.140 | Scale's too big.

00:01:33.500 | So I like quarterly.

00:01:34.580 | And if you're an academic, then call it semester.

00:01:37.020 | But roughly the same thing.

00:01:39.940 | I do it fall, winter, spring, summer usually.

00:01:43.420 | So I do more like semesters.

00:01:44.620 | But roughly that scale, three to four months.

00:01:47.300 | I think that's the right scale.

00:01:49.180 | You can lay in pretty big chunks of work.

00:01:52.220 | And it really feels separate than the weekly plan,

00:01:54.340 | because you're not at that level of granularity of like,

00:01:56.260 | well, there's a meeting in two Fridays from now,

00:01:58.100 | so let's not work on that day.

00:01:59.500 | But it's still tractable.

00:02:00.740 | You're like, look, I have three or four months to do this,

00:02:02.340 | so I can be pretty clear about where I should be this month.

00:02:04.460 | So that's where I came with that.

00:02:05.820 | It's not set in stone, but it tends to be three or four

00:02:08.140 | months.

00:02:09.340 | The three or four month granularity is about right

00:02:11.260 | for most people for that largest scale

00:02:14.180 | of multi-scale planning.

00:02:15.460 | (upbeat music)

00:02:19.040 | (upbeat music)

00:02:21.620 | (upbeat music)

Why Quarterly Planning Instead of Monthly or Annual?

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