Personal Strategic Planning – Design Your Life and Career

Personal strategic planning is very similar. However, instead of return on equity, personal strategic planning is aimed at increasing your return on energy. Put another way, it is to increase your return on life. The equity in a business is measured in terms of financial capital. Your personal equity, on the other hand, is measured in terms of your own human capital.

Your personal equity is composed of the mental, emotional and physical energies you have to invest in your career. Your goal should be to get the very highest return possible on the investment of yourself in everything you do. How well you invest yourself determines your income. This is the point of personal strategic planning.

You can tell that it is time to revisit your strategic plan when you are no longer getting the kind of results you want from your work or from your life. Whenever you feel frustrated or dissatisfied, for any reason, this is often an indication that you should sit down and ask yourself some good, hard questions. Whenever you experience resistance or stress, or you find yourself working harder and harder only to feel that you are getting fewer and fewer rewards, you should stand back and consider revising your strategy.

Parkinson’s Law – Do You Know How it Will Impact Your Life?

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In 1958, C. Northcote Parkinson wrote a satirical book describing human behaviour. The book was entitled, Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress and is the source of the well known maxim: “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” In a very short period of time, Parkinson’s Law has been incorporated into mainstream thinking.

One everyday example given in his book is that of two people writing a postcard. An elderly, retired person might spend hours choosing the right card, take great pains to craft a personal message and then walk to the post office to mail it. On the other hand, a busy entrepreneur is more apt to pick the first card he spots, jot a quick note and mail it on the way home. Same work. Different time allocation.

A more alarming example emerged from Parkinson’s study of the civil service, where he found a propensity to continue hiring more and more people to achieve the same results. What happened to the “free” time now available to those who were responsible for the results in the first place? Parkinson was surprised to discover they were just as busy as they had been before the addition of layers of assistants. The end result of all of their business was the same economic output as they had achieved before the hiring binge, but they found ways to expand the work and remain “busy.” Emails between the various layers of employees exploded. Of course, this internal correspondence had to be checked for proper spelling and grammar. And someone had to manage the escalating staff. In fact, in the specific case he describes in his book, seven officials ended up doing the same amount of work as one had done before. In short, “Officials make work for each other.”