Comments on: An Alternative To Top-Down, Bottom-Up Planning

By: James

James — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:51:00 +0000

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.

By: Stephen

Stephen — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:47:40 +0000

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…

By: Tage

Tage — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 07:59:19 +0000

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. Yet, those 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.

By: Todd

Todd — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:37:05 +0000

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.