Timelining your tomorrows

Sheet of paper. Check.

Writing implement. Check.

Plan of action. (Not necessarily.)

Potential plans of action. Check.

Now what you should do here is create a horizontal axis that is the time you are concerned with. It should start now and maybe end somewhere in the future where you’d like one of a number of things to have happened. Arbitrary I guess. Mine is next fall.

You’re going to make a number of lines here and mark them up with a number of things that have to happen to reach whatever goals are at the end parts of those lines. There should be different lines for different goals and any major caveats that substantially change the goal.

Say your goal is to buy a house. And you have to do x, y and z to get there. But x is get a job a kick ass job, say. And for x, where you thought you’d find a job in your home town and then buy a nice little place, instead you go and get an amazing job in, say, South Africa. Well then, probably that isn’t the "buy a home" time line any more. Unless you wanna live in South Africa. That’s cool too, but it goes in a different time line.

Anyways, here is the most important part, here is what makes this different than a list. Shove all of the good things into these lines as you can. And make these good things line-specific. The result will be something like distinctly different paths you could take into different, distinctly awesome, futures. If you wanna you could use this list as a sort of guide to choose which you’d prefer. But I’d prefer you just look at it like a number of potentially great ways you could go.

And obvs all of these will include specific and different forms of work on your part. And maybe you wanna start working towards a couple at once. And then just roll with ‘em punches. Cause they always come. Inevitable. But we’re playing with potential here. And probably a spot of hope too.