Any of your practices can become more harmful than helpful if you don’t adjust or prune them from season to season. This is the primary reason for the Quarterly Checkpoint. It is a check-in to help you evaluate how things are going and to establish the practices you think you will need in the next quarter in order to meet the demands of your life. It’s like climbing a really tall tree to get your bearing and take a look at the upcoming terrain. It may seem like a temporary diversion, but this can make you much more effective as you continue your journey.
The Quarterly Checkpoint is the longest horizon planning you will do. While many productivity experts recommend annual retreats to examine goals and objectives, I (Todd Henry) find that these are often too long term to provide an accurate analysis of upcoming work. Ideally you will be able to take an entire day for this quarterly session, but, understandably, you may not be able to break away from your life in order to do so. If this is the case, the Quarterly Checkpoint can take place an hour at a time in the mornings or evenings over the course of a week.
There are two main priorities for the Quarterly Checkpoint: establish your focus for the upcoming three months and set general rails around your practices.
Quarterly Checkpoint Prompts
Focus
Establish areas of focus. Divide a sheet of paper in two and on one side write “work” and on the other write “personal.” Spend twenty to thirty minutes thinking of all of the commitments you will be accountable for. You want to be as comprehensive as possible because this will provide the working template for how you structure other elements of your plan.
A commitment is anything that you will be accountable for delivering. This can mean a large work initiative that will require a lot of creative effort, or it can mean a small personal project you’re personally committing to get moving on. This is not a wish list of things you’d like to do someday; it’s a list of things you are actually committing to doing or are accountable for doing in your work. If it’s on the sheet, it’s something you’re planning to get done in the next three months (or planning to spend a significant amount of time working on).
What are the Big 3 for the quarter? These are the big conceptual hurdles you will need to jump this quarter in order to succeed in your work.
Establish Challenges for each of the Big 3. These should be phrased in the form of a question, and they should capture the main creative problem you need to solve. For each commitment you’ve listed, you should be able to answer the question “What am I really trying to do?”
Relationships
Once you have a sense of direction for the upcoming quarter and for the scope of your commitments, you can begin setting some rails for the other practices. Your relational rhythms are best examined on a quarterly basis to make sure that you are filling your schedule with stimulating interactions but not becoming overwhelmed with obligatory ones. Doing this will also help you determine where there are gaps in your existing relationships that you may want to fill in the upcoming season.
Who are the people you will be setting head-to-heads with this quarter? Have you thought through how this will happen? What is the best timing for your meetings? What kinds of things will you discuss? Take the opportunity afforded by your Quarterly Checkpoint to do an audit of all your relationships and to set new expectations around them. Perhaps you have standing meetings that need to be reevaluated. Maybe there’s an old friend or colleague whom you’d like to spend more time with. Maybe there are some relationships that need to be put on temporary hold in order to account for the rhythms of the upcoming season. You have total permission to evaluation all your relationships with a clean conscience, then to make decisions strategically.
To some this may sound a little harsh. After all, how can we treat our relationships as a matter of convenience and discard them when they become cumbersome? To be clear: that’s not at all what we’re talking about. In fact, this is actually about making the relationships we choose to maintain more productive and meaningful. When we are selective about how and where we spend our relational energy, we find that our connections deepen and that we’re actually able to give more of ourselves to the people in our life. It’s when we’re not selective that we end up living on the margin and giving leftovers to others.
Will you be meeting with a circle? If so, what will that rhythm look like for the upcoming quarter?
Think about your core team. When will you meet with them? You need to give these people enough notice so that they are able to give you their full attention when you meet.
Whom are you going to purposefully spend more time with this quarter? Are there people with whom you would like to spend more quality time in order to develop your relationships and possibly to gain mental traction on your work?
Energy
After you’ve listed each of your commitments for the upcoming quarter, you will begin to gain a sense of what you’re expecting of yourself, or others are expecting of you, in the next few months. If you’ve never performed this exercise before, seeing the entire scope of your work laid out before you can be an eye-opening experience. It may even be a little overwhelming to see all your work and personal creative aspirations listed side by side. Not to worry—that’s precisely the reason we’re doing this exercise. A little discomfort now will save you a tone of stress down the road.
Each of these commitments represents not only time and creative work that you’ll be accountable for but also energy that you’ll be required to expend. As we discussed earlier, sometimes projects—even very good ones—can steal needed energy from more critical, productive projects. Many people don’t realize the cumulative effect of their choices on their workflow. Ongoing, recurring creative commitments are often the result of a decision made once upon a time that continues to require energy and focus many months, even years, later. As these commitments begin to show up on your list, you see the true effect of choices you’ve made and how they may still be limiting your ability to engage with more pressing work.
Are there any projects that need to be pruned? Of all of the things on your list, is there anything that needs to go away this quarter so that you can focus your efforts on more productive work?
Is there anything else coming up this quarter that is abnormal but that needs to be considered? Are you taking vacation, or are there any other trips on the calendar? You need to take these into account, because they will affect your workflow and your energy. Often we don’t look at how things like trips, time off, or family commitments will affect our ability to engage, and as much as possible, it’s best not to plan our critical work around times when it will be difficult to mentally engage, like the last few days before a critical trip or the first few days back.
Remember that the purpose of looking at the scope of your commitments through the lens of Energy is to identify any easy decisions about what needs to be scaled back or where you may have unwittingly made long-term commitments that are becoming unwieldy.
Stimuli
What kinds of stimuli will help you with the projects you’ll be working on? Can you identify any knowledge gaps in the commitments on your list? Are there any projects that will require special information? Now is the time to identify those needs and to list a few resources that may be able to help.
What are you curious about right now? List a few subjects that you’re curious about or that you’d like to explore. If you can, list a few resources that are interesting to you and that you’d like to add to your Stimulus Queue.
How will you challenge yourself to grow? List a few items that you are going to study or experience this quarter as a way to grow your mind and stretch your experience base. These can be books, places you’ll visit, meetings you’ll attend, or anything else that causes you to see the world in a new way. The important thing is that you’re listing concrete items and at least tacitly making a commitment to them.
Hours
Which of the projects on your list will require the most creative thought time? Can you identify four or five projects that will require an extra amount of creative effort? Not that you are going to do anything about it at this point, but it’s good to begin identifying them now, in advance, so that you can earmark Idea Time against them.
What will your Unnecessary Creating projects be? Some of these may be listed already on your commitments list, but spend some time thinking about the kinds of projects you would like to initiate or continue this quarter. These items will be added to your Project Queue, and you will work on them during your Unnecessary Creating time. Again, it’s not critical to get these exactly right. The whole purpose is simply to do an analysis of the kinds of things you’re currently interested in working on and to make a commitment to trying new things and creating unnecessarily this quarter.
* Source: The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry