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I earn my living working as a Workforce Management Planner ( don’t know what workforce management is? Click here ). If I would to explain my job in a very basic way is that I do forecast for various data and agent management.

We use some best practices in our work, practices that help us to have a good process and, of course, reach our goals every week, month and year.

I realised at some point that the things I do at work, could help me manage myself better. We could use them in various area of our life money, time, goals, projects, etc. I won’t stretch the intro too much so here it is:

• Gather historical data. 

First of all, to be able to do a forecast, you have to have some historical data to base your forecast on. Even the fortune tellers ask things about your past, so they could predict your future.

How do we do this? How do we gather this historical data?

This depends much on what things do we want to improve. If it’s money, you could take a look on our past spendings.  Maybe you kept a log on how you spent your money or you check your bank account balance.  If you want to improve your time management, you should check your daily schedule.  I could continue on and on about this; maybe I will write more detailed posts in the future.

If until now you didn’t take notes on how you spent your life, start doing it from now. Write a journal, make daily notes about your day, keep track of what you are doing.

• Understand your historical data 

You have to understand what happened in the past. You have to understand the reasons, why have you succeed, why have you failed.

Most of the time, we just take what is happening to us without investigating all the reasons. This is why is important to have historical data, going back as many years as possible.

Ask yourself “WHY?” as many times as possible until you find the root of the problem. And then apply this to your future planning. Maybe we failed a goal because was too high; maybe there were some external factor that influenced our projects. Ask yourself “why” and look from different perspectives, to understand better the past, so you could predict your future better.

To summarize what I wrote until now a key piece for improving our life, it’s to understand our past. The more we track our daily steps, the better we will be able to plan our future.

I still have material to write, but I think the article would go way too long for my taste. So I will come back with a part II as soon as possible.