2 management activities that I don’t enjoy as much – are planning, and summarizing. It feels to me like there’s an overhead involved in both of these activities that takes my energy out of the “actual work”.

So, in the past several months I played around with the idea of “reverse journaling”. Which is like writing a journal, a summary, a review, but – doing it at the point in time where the planning usually takes place – before I put my energy into things. Which turns the “summary” activity into a planning activity – and – it has the added benefit of actually becoming the summary when the activity ended.

2 birds, 1 stone.

And, for some reason – I think it’s more exciting. But this may be a bias because of what I think is novelty at the moment. We’ll see what I think about this blog post a year from now.

The idea can be played in different resolutions, and different contexts, and it’s actually the same age-old idea from “The 7 habits book” – “Start with the end in mind”. So – I’m doing this with career planning, project planning, weekly planning, blog posts (ehm, I actually wrote this blog post several months ago…), and even a 1-hour task that I put into Jira. And indeed this idea pops up again and again. A habit

Obviously, this activity creates an extremely crisp and vivid vision, about what is about to take place – and how it will look like in the end. Key people can both share and enroll in the vision, and shape the outcome – right from the start.

Rumor has it that some big companies’ product planning works this same way – start to develop products by first creating public relations materials.