The March issue of my Personal Strategy Compass newsletter is out.
This month’s piece explores something I’ve been noticing about strategic planning. The hardest part is usually not the work of planning itself. It’s the residue that planning drags along with it.
Ideas, priorities, and intentions tend to accumulate. We carry them forward month after month, often by default. Over time, they become ghosts that are still present on the page but no longer truly alive.
The issue describes a small experiment I’ve been running to counter that tendency. It’s deliberately simple: a single page in a notebook that resets every month. Nothing carries forward automatically. If an idea still matters, I rewrite it.
The experiment grew out of my preparation for my upcoming Q2 Personal Quarterly Offsite (PQO). A PQO is a dedicated block of time (usually a couple of hours) set aside each quarter to step away from daily execution and think more deliberately about priorities, direction, and strategy.
What has surprised me most is how quickly things disappear. In the first forty-five days of trying this approach, more than half of what I thought was “strategic” in January evaporated.
That preparation led me to a question that sits at the center of this month’s issue: how much of what we call strategy is actually just momentum or, perhaps just the current mood?
The piece also introduces two ideas that I expect will show up in future issues: a small “Safety Rule” for distinguishing between dead ideas and difficult ones, and a new step I plan to add to my Personal Quarterly Offsites called a friction audit.
Also, a small note: beginning last month, Personal Strategy Compass is now fully open and free. That shift felt like a better fit for the spirit of the newsletter, which is exploratory and reflective rather than gated.
If you’re interested in how small changes in attention and friction can reshape strategic thinking, you might enjoy this issue.
[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]
DennisKennedy.com is the home of the Kennedy Idea Propulsion Laboratory
Like this post? Buy me a coffee
DennisKennedy.Blog is part of the LexBlog network.