Your step-by-step roadmap to achieving your dreams in 6 months.

Here’s a secret tool and strategy that super achievers use

11 min read2 days ago

Is the title of this blog a clickbait? Sorry to disappoint you, but it’s not clickbait — I will actually talk about the technique that most startups and companies working in an agile format use to make their quarterly, half-yearly, and yearly plans!

Now — if a business can use this strategy to achieve its goals and make money — why can’t you apply it at a personal level?

The answer is — that you ABSOLUTELY CAN apply this technique for your personal goals. After talking to a few high achievers, I understood that they already apply the same technique for their personal goals and this is the secret of how they became “super-achievers”.

So, what’s this magical tool and technique I’m talking about?

Okay, the wait is over, the tool that I’m talking about is “Jira”.
And, the strategy I’m talking about is a combination of “Objectives and Key Results” and “Sprint” that I’ve somewhat customized for personal usage.

Ok, if these terms got you scratching your head and you’re like — “Madhav! That’s too much information for me to grasp, go slow”, then continue reading, I’ll explain everything to you in detail,

If you are already familiar with these terms — “Jira”, “Project Management”, “Objectives and Key Results”, “Sprint Planning”, etc, then you can directly skip to the “How to use Jira to make your half-yearly roadmap” section

The “Agile” Framework

While I won’t go too deep into it, but you need to understand the agile framework before we dive into the sprint model.

Ok, here’s a question for you, let’s imagine you’re running a small startup, what are the top 3 things that you need from your business/company/team?

Take a moment and try to answer it.

Here’s the correct answer (let me know in the comments if you guessed it right). You need to take care of these 3 things -

Speed
Flexibility
Responsive to change

The world is changing at a very fast pace and your idea should be open to the new changes that come in.
People now have a lot of options to choose from — the worst thing for your business is — slowness. You need to optimize on speed.

This is exactly what the “agile” framework is — a set of techniques that can help your team/business stay focused, aligned, and adaptable for faster production.

While many techniques come under the agile framework, we will be focusing on only two for now

OKRs — Objectives and Key Results
Sprint Model

If you’re still reading, do leave some claps on this article because I spend hours on providing you with the most quality information — your claps and shares on this article will motivate me for more!

Objectives and Key Results

The first step of achieving your dreams is having clarity on what they are. This is where the OKR framework comes into play.

This is a goal-setting framework used to define and track objectives and their outcomes. For a business, it helps teams align their efforts with overall business goals and track progress toward achieving them.

As much as it can be applied at a business level, it can also be applied to personal goals.

For example — the OKR given below can be very valid at a personal level and writing such OKRs for each half-year will give you clarity on what you actually want to achieve.

Objective: Build personal brand on LinkedIn.
Key Results:
- Increase followers from 10k to 100k
- Have weekly post impressions of 1M
- Build solid engagement with audience

I hope now you’re clear with what does an OKR mean, now let’s cover a final concept before moving forward — Sprint.

“SPRINT”-ing towards the goals!

A sprint is a component of one of the most popular agile methodologies — Scrum. Now I’ll not go too deep into it otherwise this blog will become lengthy and boring, but I’ll give you some quick tips about sprint.

A sprint is a fixed-length iteration (typically lasting 1–4 weeks) during which a set of work is completed.

The sprint model promotes regular inspection and adaptation while allowing you to quickly prioritize and complete the work.

A sample sprint board is given in the photo above. The idea is simple, maintain a list of tasks, and daily move the tasks to “In progress” or “Complete” based on the status of each task.

Now you can do it through sticky notes on a whiteboard, or you can use online services like Jira. In this blog, I’ll teach you how to do this using Jira.

Ok, before we move on to the strategy, would you mind following me on Instagram? I promise to give you free fitness motivation daily if you follow me on the gram ;) (https://instagram.com/ProgrammerWhoLifts)

FINALLY! The Magical Strategy…

Failing to plan is planning to fail

Now here’s the magical step-by-step process that you need to follow to set goals for the next 6 months for maximum results on your personal goals within that timeframe.

STEP 1: Take a paper and write down 15–25 things that you want in the next 6 months.
STEP 2: Now, circle out the 5 things that you want the most. These 5 things will be your objectives for the next 6 months.
STEP 3: Create a sprint for each of those 5 things on Jira. Don’t worry, I’ll teach you how to use Jira.
STEP 4: Create multiple Stories (Key Results) for each objective/sprint board.
STEP 5: Assign items (sub-tasks) for the next month for each story (key result).
STEP 6: (Optionally) You can also assign an ETA in hours for each sub-task that you open under a story (Key result).
STEP 7: Start the sprint and use the sprint board provided by Jira to pick up items one by one daily and achieve maximum results in the upcoming month.
STEP 8: Repeat from “STEP 5” each month.

Okay Madhav, that sounded good, but can you share a sample so that things are more clear?

Absolutely! Let’s discuss each step in detail with some sample data.

STEP 1: Top 15–25 Goals

Todo: Take a paper and write down 10–15 things that you want in the next 6 months

Sample:

STEP 2: Select the top 5

Todo: From the list of 25 “wants”, select the top 5 objectives that you want the most and cross out all the others

Here’s a quote that’s very close to my heart -

More ventures die of indigestion rather than starvation

Ask yourself — if you’re not where you wanted to be, is it because you are not good at anything or are you trying to be good at many things?

For most, the answer would be the latter. Even Warren Buffett talked about it when he gave his legendary 5/25 Rule which is similar to what we are doing here — Write down 25 things you want to do/achieve and do only 5 of them, and completely ignore the other 20 — you don’t want your focus to be diluted by these 20 things that will not generate any results.

Sample:

STEP 3: Create Jira Sprints

Todo: Create Sprints on Jira for each of the 5 goals you’ve selected above. Don’t worry, I’ll teach you how to do it in just a minute.

Benefits:

Jira is a project management tool as I’ve discussed above which is being used by many companies/businesses to track their quarterly/half-yearly goals.

This tool can help you track and prioritize all your work at a single place in a smart manner.

You can create an “Epic” for each of the goal (objectives) you’ve set above,
You can create “User Stories” within an epic that can act as your Key Results.
And, you can create “Sub-Tasks” within each user story that will act as work items that will help you achieve the key results you are aiming.

For Example:

Epic: Learn Frontend Development
User Stories:
- Complete Udemy Tutorial for React.JS
- Make a portfolio website
- Make a web app
- Create a resume
And, each user story can have Sub-Task, for example for creating a portfolio website:
- Finalize the sections in portfolio website
- Have rough mock ups
- Prepare wireframes and designs
- and so on…

Now let’s go over the process of creating sprint boards on Jira.

Part 1: Create an Account

After signing in, you will be redirected to Atlassian’s website, from there you can easily navigate to Jira by finding “Jira” on “Our apps” section. Alternatively, you can directly click on the link I provided above again.

Part 2: Select Jira for Software Development

Once you reach to Jira’s homepage after logging in to Atlassian, it becomes slightly confusing as you can find tons of templates, and each template is different based on what type of profession you are into.

You can try out each one of them, but if you want to listen to someone who has tried all of them (of course that’s me) and take feedback, I would say the “Software development” category will fit your needs even if you are not into software profession. Plus, the template I will show you today is on the sprint board which you can access if you select “Product & Issue Tracking — Software Development” from the above page.

So, select the first option and click on “Get Started”

You’ll be prompted to create a site, you can choose any username and build a site, this is where you will be able to see your sprint board.

Then select the second option — “Scrum”

Then, Jira will try to create a project for you, you can do it now or later from the “Projects” dropdown. I’d prefer you to do it now. Name your project anything, for example, you can name it — “2024 half-year planning”

And voilà! You’re there, you’ve just created your first project

Part 3: Let’s create our sprints

One sprint is automatically created for you when you create a new project, let’s create 4 more sprints for each of our objective that we narrowed down from the 15–25 list of goals above.

Then, rename each sprint to the name of your goal. Pasting our goal list here again in case you forgot the sample we were going over.

In each sprint, click on the “3 dots” at right hand side to open an options dropdown, and then click on edit sprint.

Then, you can give a name to your sprint as well as a time duration

Similarly, do the same for 4 other sprints as well.

Step 4: Start creating User Stories

Okay, hope you are following me so far, if you face any issue, please feel free to leave a comment with your issue, or contact me on LinkedIn, I’ll try my best to help.

Now’s the time to create user stories, user stories can be seen equivalent to key results from the above example I mentioned.

This is just an example, you will have to create user stories based on your own objectives and goals. Process to create them is simple, go to Backlog from the side panel and within a sprint, click on + Create Issue

Select the Issue type as “User Story”

Create User Stories as your Key Results

Step 5: Add Sub Tasks

For each of your User Story, you can add sub tasks.

Click on the user story, that will open a preview at the side and click on Scrum-n to open the user story in a new tab

Now, click on Add a chile issue to start creating sub-tasks

Step 6: [Optional] Attach estimated time to your task

For each ticket (sub-task, user story etc) you create, you can add estimated efforts.

Step 7: Start the Sprint

And, that’s it! Once you’re done populating your sprints with the tasks you can go back to Backlog and click on Start Sprint

This will automatically take you to the Sprint Board , alternatively you can also go there by clicking Board option from the left side menu

But, there’s a catch here, you won’t automatically see all your sub tasks, you need to Group By sub task

Aaannnddddd!!!! You’re done! That’s it, now you will be able to see the sprint board.

Now each day, before starting your work, you can simply plan out the items that you are going to pick that day and drag and drop those items to IN PROGRESS when you work on them and DONE when you’ve completed the task.

That’s it! If you need any help from me, don’t hesitate to reach out, I’m active on Instagram and LinkedIn -

Instagram: https://instagram.com/ProgrammerWhoLifts
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/madhavbahl/

Feel free to drop a “Hi” if you want to connect :)