HALO Planning Method E-Book

This page was created to give you inspiration the moment you open the HALO Planner. If you already have a defined Mission Statement, you can put it here. You can also write inspiring quotations. You could even paste a picture of your family. The idea is that you if you need to remember why you are working so hard you can turn to this page.

In my experience, Impossible Goals are as easy to achieve as Regular Goals because they are motivating and exciting. However, what Impossible means depends very much on your stage of life. For example, one of my busy working mom friends set an Impossible Goal to read to her children every day. For those of us that have been there, this is as an Impossible Goal as any. Ask yourself what is possible in each area of your life. Dream Big.

The Top 3 on the Daily Page will usually link back to weekly, monthly and quarterly goals. For example, if you set a goal to write a book this year, you might have a Top 3 to write 500 words each day for a month. A Daily Habit usually tracks something you are already doing but want to increase accountability. So for example, drinking 8 glasses of water and you can check it off each day when you are done. You can have a Top 3 that is a habit that you are trying to cultivate. For example, if I sent a goal to run every day of the 30 Days in April, I would put that in my Top 3, because getting it done today leads to my bigger goals.

The Weekly Layout is a planning tool. As you plan your week ahead with all of the formal commitments of your time for the coming week, this layout shows you clearly where you have blank space. It is in this blank space that you can plan the other things besides outside commitments of your time. It’s usually these other things that get us to our Impossible Goals. It is meant to be a forward-looking "week at a glance" rather than a moment by moment updated calendar. So, if you a meeting on Thursday afternoon cancels, you don’t have to go back to the Weekly Layout it cross it out. I use the Schedule on the Daily Pages for time-blocking. Each evening I plan exactly how I am going to use the 24 hours in my day including non-meeting items such as writing, research, reading, exercise or reviewing things. It is in this Daily Pages Schedule, I fill in the blank space with tasks.

After you have used the big boxes for Monthly Goal accountability, you can highlight other things you achieved or are grateful for. I use one box for the "Books Read" and one box for "Friends Met". As I look back on the month, it helps me to feel grateful for how much I accomplished and how many wonderful things I did in addition to progress towards my goals.

The big grey boxes are for categories. These will be different for each person and sometimes change month to month. One category might be “Work”. Another category might be “Finance”. However, if you have a big project at work that is due next month, it might get its own category “Strategy Presentation”. Then all the tasks in that category can be grouped together to increase efficiency.

No. We are sticking with paper. The beginning of my career largely coincides with the advent of mobile devices. I used to sleep with my blackberry. However, our electronic devices have morphed into distraction machines. While I am working, mine goes in a drawer.