Slow Down to Speed Up
In wilderness navigation, a single degree of compass error can throw me off course by 100 feet over a mile, which quickly adds up the faster I walk. I’m mindful of this concept where the faster life moves, the more I deliberately slow my thinking for reflection.
Otherwise I might just wake up one day wondering why I’m not where I’m supposed to be despite all the hard work.
It’s for this reason that I’m such a big fan of daily journaling and doing monthly retrospectives. These orientation activities help me analyze the past to improve my future trajectory.
Today I’ll introduce a simple mind map that’ll allow you to see:
How “great” your month was from a productivity standpoint.
Your real priorities (vs aspirations) based on your time investment.
The results and progress of your work and how they fit into your bigger ambitions.
What you need to do next month to continue leveling up in those areas.
The Template
Here’s the mind map structure:
The Stats node is optional and applies if you use my Pomodoro Tracker, which gamifies our productivity.
Progress is all the areas that we, you guessed it, made progress in the past month. Dev Areas is where we want to continue improving ourselves into the next month.
Stats
In my custom Notion table, I track my performance across four major Focus Areas (Create, MMN, Other, and Self) in 25-minute Pomodoros (time blocks - I’ll refer to these as “pomos”), record my Daily Retro, and note a subjective rating of how productive I thought each day was on a scale of Poor, Good, and Great.
This simple tracker kept me hyper focused and productive in launching MMN, making two mind mapping courses, and producing most of my videos and articles, so it’s pretty effective. Here’s the walkthrough if you want to learn more. Astute productivity nerds will recognize that my Daily Retro acts as interstitial journaling to provide continuity across tasks and reduce switching costs.
It’s also fun to tabulate the stats and be reminded of highlights during my monthly assessments 🙂
Subjectively, 70% of my days were highly productive (i.e. Great), which was a huge win for me. I’ll be in good shape if this trend continues.
By dividing the monthly focus area Pomo count by the total monthly Pomo count, I calculated that I spent 50% of my time on Creation (content-related activities like filming, editing and writing), followed by Other (hiring, system building, socials, meetings, coaching). The remaining 25% was on Mind Map Nation (events and engaging with the community) and Self (working out, meditation and reflection). This acts as the quantitive measure of my priorities as reflected by where I actually put my time.
Also note that I overshot my Pomo estimates for Creation while falling short on Self, especially in meditation. MMN and Other are pretty spot on. This reveals that I prioritized work over stillness. This is valuable information because if I begin to feel burnt out next month, I’ll know how to improve the situation.
Progress
This node expands areas of significant progress in the past month. My major focuses are 1. Content, 2. MMN, 3. Coaching and 4. Personal. I try not to overthink the categories and just draw out topics that most resonate with me. You’ll notice that it’s closely tied to the Pomodoro Tracker. After I fully expand each focus area, I note the most important elements with red stars.
1. Content
Under Content, the main focus was building a System* that supports my video and article production. To this end, I hired and onboarded two part time video editors; created Notion boards, Loom, and Slack channels for team coordination; and came up with social media publishing procedures for my assistant Stefanie to schedule my content.
This allows me to focus on synthesizing my learnings into useful lessons (i.e. the Creation stage). We just had our first sync meeting, which was a huge milestone because after 3 years of solo creation, it finally felt like I had a team to work with. So the accountability box is also checked. I’m basically running a media company now.
I’ll share how I designed my content strategy with you all in an upcoming video 🙂
2. Mind Map Nation
For MMN, I implemented a redesign of the community to make it easier to navigate for new members (we grew 3x since launch!). Stefanie and I developed a new AI-assisted system to reduce the time spent on event summaries by 70%. I also started a new monthly event called Mind Map Q&A to address mapping specific topics.
The most significant development, however, was our first member-led event by Lewis Holland on External Brains . This milestone marks the beginning of our community’s self sufficiency without my direct involvement, which exactly embodies MMN independent thinking ethos.
You’ll notice that the words Scalable and Sustainable are annotated in red. These are the two major themes for my life and work this year. January was all about designing and building POCs (proof of concept) of systems and procedures to test Scalability, but given how many hours I put in, it’s not yet Sustainable. That’s what the next two months are for!
3. Coaching
I recently closed a contract with a corporate client that had been in the works for months. This is a major accomplishment as it provides me with new challenges (i.e. opportunities to level up as a coach) and brings me closer to achieving financial sustainability.
4. Personal
I’m proud of sticking to my morning routine of early rise, workout, cold shower, and reflection through writing and mapping. These activities provide mental alertness and grounding going into each day. I don’t think I could’ve achieved that 70% Great Day rate without them.
My wife Olivia also moved into San Francisco with me after half a year of being apart. The last week of the month was dedicated to prepping my apartment and helping with the move. I’m looking forward to sharing all my experiences in the city with her.
Development Areas
The Development Areas node is about finding continuity from the last month going into the new one. Dev Areas is forward looking while Progress is reflecting on what happened. The focus areas are the same unless you want to discontinue or add something.
1. Content
Building the content system remains my focus, which is divided into three steps of Create, Make, and Share. I try not to complicate this map by expanding out all my to-do’s and instead just list out my main priorities for each step.
For Create, I'm learning how to make TikTok content. For Make, it’s to have a 4-week content buffer (i.e. having stuff scheduled so that I don’t have to scramble every week just to make a post, which frees me up to be more intentional and strategic). For Share, it’s to delegate more of my publishing tasks to Stefanie. As the red annotations indicate, these projects make my content production more scalable and sustainable.
2. Mind Map Nation & 3. Coaching
My main priority for MMN is to foster more member-led events. The feedback from Lewis’ event was overwhelmingly positive and I want to fuel the momentum. Things are going to get a lot more fun and engaging in the community!
On the coaching side, I’ll be adapting to my new client’s style, learning about their challenges, and crafting a system that will manage their chaos.
4. Personal
Now that Olivia’s moved in, it’s time to actually figure out how we can live and grow together in the same space. That’s figuring out habits, routines, and carving out quality time.
I’ve also noted potential trips to Los Angeles and New York so that they don’t sneak up on me as I execute another intense month.
The BIG picture
I zoom out after completing every mind map to get a peak-level view of what’s happening.
At a glance, I can see:
How “great” my month was from a productivity standpoint.
My real priorities (vs aspirations) based on my actual time investment.
The results and progress of my work and how they fit into my bigger projects.
What I need to do next month to continue leveling up in those areas.
I’ve done several videos and articles on retrospectives in the past in the context of 2-week sprints so check those out if you’re interested in diving deeper!
I’d also love to know:
Have you done self progress assessments? If so, what’s your method?
What is one of your major focus areas and how you intend to make progress on it this month?
Tweet or DM me on Twitter / Instagram @shengsilver.
Make the most of your mind maps
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