Blueprint
My Personal Roadmap for Living Well
Many of us have goals, hopes and intentions floating in our minds. How can we integrate these aspirations into a coherent way of living?
My answer has been to create a life planning document I call my Blueprint, which I review and update frequently. I consider it my best personal effectiveness practice and essential to my well-being.
Notice that I don’t refer to my Blueprint as a productivity system. That’s far too narrow. This is about living well.
My Blueprint
My Blueprint is organized around the following 10 areas of my life: Mind; Body; Spirit; Marriage; Family; Friends; Writing; Home/Cars; Financial; and Recreation. This reflects my mental life “buckets” that deserve my ongoing attention.
For each life area, the Blueprint summarizes what I believe to be essential for personally effective living in that area.
The Blueprint also describes my 7 core values and summarizes a few key Habits/Routines. I see my values as my compass. Habits and routines are critical to how intentions get expressed in daily living.
Since I return to the Blueprint frequently, it needs to be concise and never exceeds two pages.
The Blueprint in Practice
Although it is perhaps the most personal, I don’t mind sharing my Spiritual summary:
“Spirit: sit zazen; pray; listen to The Way (a guided meditation app); practice stillness; practice loving-kindness; practice mindfulness; study wisdom; practice slowing down.”
Here is the Writing summary:
“Writing: write to understand myself and share insights; honor Sacred Writing Hour daily; publish weekly essays on Medium; kaizen writing skills; write and publish Life Lessons Learned book in 2027; journal daily; write ad hoc haiku.”
My seven core values are: presence; integrity; kindness; simplicity; curiosity; stillness; and mastery.
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The Habit/Routines summary currently focuses on strengthening an early morning brisk walking habit and protecting my mid-morning writing ritual.
The Blueprint serves as a living reference document that provides high-level direction and organization for my day-to-day living. The secret sauce for me is to conduct thorough and effective Weekly and Monthly Reviews.
The Weekly Review
My action planning focuses on the coming week, including getting done during the week what will set me up for future weeks. Then I back into planning the day, which is highly dependent on what is going on that day.
I enjoy doing the Weekly Review on Sunday, my day of reflection. It takes around an hour and a half to do the review and then to modify my task planning and goal/habits programs accordingly. The Blueprint itself, and the weekly and monthly highlights, happen to be in Apple Notes, but the tool is unimportant. The tools are servants to the process.
When I do my Weekly Review of an area I look at key metrics for the area, what went well, what didn’t, and what needs adjusting or initiating.
I document the weekly review with a one-page, more or less, summary of the week’s highlights, key metrics; insights; and intentions for the coming week.
If it’s possible for a review process to be simultaneously tedious and exhilarating, then that’s a fair description of my Weekly Review. Over the years, I’ve disciplined myself to methodically go through each life area and every single word in the Blueprint. This granularity keeps the process alive and fresh.
I do frequently feel exhilaration when I’ve completed the review and know that I am primed for the week ahead.
The Monthly Review
At the end of each month I do a high level review of the Blueprint. The purpose of the Monthly Review is to highlight what areas need more attention and effort and how to go about that.
I used to do this quarterly but realized more urgency would be helpful given that I’m in the winter of my life. Understand I still buy green bananas but maybe not by the truckload. If I want to get something done in my life, it behooves me to get rolling.
In the Monthly Review, I rate each area on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being excellent) based on how I’m doing with respect to that area. For example, I may still give myself a 5 for “Body” even though I know I need to lose 20 lbs. That’s only if I know that I’m doing my best and most/all of the right things to be healthy and vibrant. Likewise, I might give myself a 3 or 4 for “Marriage” notwithstanding that I know I have a great marriage. That’s because I know I need to work on my listening.
The Monthly Review necessitates being brutally honest without getting into self-flagellation. If I’m giving myself a 1 or 2 in an area, it’s a code-red call to action. A 3 score suggests that I need to kaizen my efforts, but it isn’t the highest priority. A 4 or 5 score signals to keep up the good work, improve where I can, and guard against complacency.
Keeping the Blueprint Alive
I make no pretense of being a productivity savant or lifestyle guru. Nevertheless, I will say that my Blueprint and the supporting review processes have been extremely helpful to me in both my professional and personal life. Without question I am more organized, focused and intentional relative to my activities and relationships as a result.
I’m not suggesting that everyone adopt my Blueprint process. My life areas, values and review process might not be right for anyone else. Everyone has to create their own roadmap.
What I am suggesting is that creating a source document that answers the essential question of how you want to live your life can have a powerful influence on the life you’re actually living when you return to it often enough.
