Agile Planning for Achieving Success

Agile planning is a concept of short-term flexible planning, originally used in IT for software development teams. This concept has also been applied to managing personal goals, self-development, and achieving success.

The core of Agile is action-orientation, adaptability, adjusting priorities and goals, and obtaining valuable results. All of this applies to personal planning as well — Agile Life Planning.

Principles of Agile Life Planning:

• The main priority is achieving an important goal, which may evolve in the process.

• Being ready for changes is more important than strictly following a preset plan.

• Tasks and goals can always be revised in accordance with external and internal changes.

• Making mistakes and gaining experience is more valuable than error-free planning.

• Personal motivation, which depends on your values, and self-organization are key to achieving any goal.

• The main measure of success is satisfaction with the achieved goal.

Stages of Agile Life Planning:

1. Defining and forming a list of goals.

2. Detailing goals and creating a task map to achieve them.

3. Regularly updating the list of goals and tasks.

4. Regular planning and managing the flow of tasks and projects.

5. Analyzing results and applying gained experience.

How to Start Using Agile Life Planning

Psychologists say long-term planning almost never works, and most big yearly goals are rarely achieved.
Research shows that 80% of plans for the next 12 months are not realized.

Instead of setting large-scale yearly goals, try to focus on one specific, relatively small goal for the next 9 weeks.
Make a plan to achieve your goal or task, break it down into concrete steps, and move daily in the chosen direction, tracking all your actions.
Write down daily what you do to achieve your goal, and plan each day based on your tasks.
Evaluate your actions daily and revise tasks. You will see that goals may transform and change in the process.
At the end of the sprint, you will see real results, be able to assess your achievements, and work on mistakes. After that, you can choose your direction for the next 9 weeks. This helps develop a useful habit of clearly formulating goals and prioritizing to achieve them.