Plan visually

One of the items on my list of things I absolutely LOVE was making visual plans about how to develop myself or my business. Let me be clear here: visual is the word. Not just listing things, one item per row, neatly in an order. Visual plans and lists are, well, all over the place.

Find a large piece of white paper and plenty of different colored crayons, and go crazy!

Unleash your inner child to draw mind maps and drawings and icons and emotions and weather signs and whatnot. Draw lines to indicate connections between different things on your plan. Organize or unorganize their respective locations. Use colors! Be creative! Unleash the artist within!

I admit my own technique is kinda boring - I always make a mind map, starting with a heading in the center of the paper, and then organize different categories that spring from the center, starting from the upper left corner and going clockwise from there. But apart from that, there's no logical order - except that I attempt to make the connective lines somewhat coherent (for example, running is a subset of exercise).

The point of the process is to see that planning whatever you're planning can be fun and creative - instead of the dull note-taking you remember from school that depresses your enthusiasm at best. When you make a visually aesthetic plan, you get more excited to actually execute it. Plus, if you decide to frame it and hang it on the wall (so you can see it everyday and so remind yourself of it), it'll become a piece of art as well.

Don't dread the idea of improvement. Instead, make it fun - like a game. It all starts with design.

RK