An Alternative To Top-Down, Bottom-Up Planning

July 9th 2008   Personal Development   4 comments

When it comes to planning out your life there are two approaches. You either plan from the top down (start with where you want to be and plan how you’re going to get there) or plan from the bottom up (start with what you’re doing now and plan how you going to get to where you want to be). Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages but is there another way?

The top-down approach, as recommended in Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People, is great for laying out a path towards your long term vision. However it’s often difficult to reconcile that path with your current situation. The focus is so much on your aspirations and dreams. Trying to turn such visions into actionable, here-and-now goals that you will get you towards them is not easy.

The bottom-down approach, with it’s initial focus on what you are doing in the short term, suffers from the reverse. The focus is on what you’re doing now and inevitably leads to your long term vision being stunted by impracticalities and pessimism that may exist in your life. It’s difficult to align the short term with the bigger picture.

If you have used either of these approaches in your planning, whether it be with a GTD vertical map, Seven Habits mission statements or something else entirely please share your experiences in the comments. I have detailed the basic disadvantages but there are plenty of benefits too.

There is one other approach that I’m currently trying that to my knowledge hasn’t been covered in any depth. Instead of starting from the top or bottom, how about beginning from the middle? I suggest reading my three stage guide to mapping out your life to understand the basics beforehand. Start from your medium term goals which when achieved will result in big positive steps in your life but which are still practical and achievable (examples include getting a promotion, getting married and getting the grades to go university). How do these align with where you want to be in life? If you have a goal of getting promoted in the next several years, where do you ultimately want to end up? As a member of the board? With your own company? Or do you just simply want to be a success in whatever you do?

If there is correlation, what next actions and projects can you then define for those goals? For instance, one of my current aims is to get a new house. I want to do that because my vision of ultimately having a great family home. With all that in mind I can then plan out various short term projects such as decorating and improving my current property and putting money aside for it all.

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Thought-provoking post! Perhaps you could see this as similar to the “do you need more clarity or more action on this project?” question that David Allen explains in Getting Things Done. For projects, if you need more clarity then you move higher up clarifying the primary purpose, standards, and successful outcomes of the project. If you need more action then you move further down, brainstorming, identifying mission critical tasks, key milestones and deliverables, organizing pieces of the project to the required degree and specifying next actions on those that can be moved on now.

Something similar can be done (as your post suggests) with the vertical dimensions of your life - the Runway to 50,000ft of GTD (your short, medium, long-term goals) - where instead of starting at the runway, you start at 30,000ft (one-to-two year goals) and decide to move up or down in altitude depending on the kind of perspective you need.

I like the middle ground idea. For me, short term goals like not being late to work and turning in my homework seem not as satisfying as long term goals. Those include having a family and having a great career. These seem far too distant to be feasible. Alternatively, like you said, I could just aim for good grades and getting married, work out short term goals to get there and work out long term goals that also coincide. Nice insight.

Great point Tage, it is about those incremental steps that lead to the completion of long term goals.
Depending on how old you are, those goals can seem a long way off indeed. I remember when I was a kid we thought that there would be flying cars in the year 2000, it seemed so far away. Now it seems like 2030 is right around the corner and I may not have time to be ready…

Thanks for the comment Stephen. Perhaps it’s worth taking into account the age of a person when it comes to focusing on the future. Young people tend to live in the here-and-now but as we get older we start to settle down and focus more on the long term.

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