13 Have a short-term plan of activities!

One of the most useful hints I ever got was from a young politician, who didn’t have any sophistications or advanced degrees in management. He happened to become a first-time Minister  for the Environment, while I became a first-time Secretary (a civil service, or bureaucrat’s, position) in the same department. In the first flush of enthusiasm (power and position are such energy boosters), I told him of my 2-year planning horizon, to achieve this, develop that, envision the other. That’s when he gave a bit of sage advice... he said, who knows, in two years’ time, where you and I will be, why don’t you first draw up an action plan for next two months. After overcoming my initial chagrin, I realized the merit in doing that, although in my heart of hearts I must have harboured a bit of resentment. His words, however, turned out to be prophetic: in a few months, I was out of that position (environment is a hazardous portfolio!), and he followed soon after… so whatever we left behind, was what we achieved in those few months.

This is often the story of most of our lives: just when we are getting going, it’s time to go! Or rather, let me say that we often start feeling a surge of energy just around the time that events—and our dear comrades and colleagues-- are conspiring to hive us out of our position. So we need to come to every new assignment with a pretty good idea of what we can achieve in “the first 90 days”, as the leadership mantra goes nowadays. Using another metaphor, life is what happens to us even as we are planning for our life… go figure!

How then do we relate to long-term goals, which from all accounts are what give us meaning and consistency in our lives? Here is where a corollary of our 20:80 rules comes into play: the front burner--back burner approach. Be aware of the long term, but in the meantime be focused on outputs in the short and medium term. Why I relate this to the 20:80 rule is that there is a very similar thinking involved here: the 20% of stuff we actually have some degree of control over can satisfy pretty much 80% of our life goals (of course, the numbers are not precise, maybe it’s 25:75 or 30:70, but the idea remains). The remaining 80%, which to our mis-aligned psyches looms larger than life, can well be relegated to the back-burner. We don’t need to completelt forget that part, but we could relegate it to a background activity of general data collection, background research, traveling, with a view to hearing, seeing, and collecting references, analysis, and so on. These activities, which form a bed for the flowering of our more immediate actions, can and should continue throughout our life.  It will gradually influence our active life, and who knows, may even become a foreground activity at some point in time.

At the risk of sounding stylistically incorrect, let me add a few more metaphors. Fortune favors the prepared mind, but there’s no sense planting in the wrong season or in an unprepared bed… as the Preacher said, there is a time to sow, and a time to reap. In life, as in growing flowers, we need timely actions, combined with the patience to wait in the long term, like the gardener… we don’t keep pulling up the plants to check on the growth of their roots!