Honestly, this book should have been a blog post, so here are my notes.
The annual 88-Day Promise formula looks like this:
- First Quarter—88-Day Promise
- Second Quarter—Post-88-Day Promise: Refresh, Regroup, Recharge
- Third Quarter—88-Day Promise
- Fourth Quarter—Post-88-Day Promise: Refresh, Regroup, Recharge
“Plan, Do, Review, and Adjust with All-Out Intensity and Focus.”
The quarterly 88-Day Promise Formula:
Week One
- Identify your clear objective.
- Determine your daily habits and schedule changes.
- Determine your appropriate daily behaviors and activities.
- Identify your top two or three critical behaviors or activities that are required to achieve your objective.
- Implement your changes immediately.
Week Two
- Go through this week implementing your chosen behavioral and activity changes.
- Review what’s working and what’s not working at the end of the week. Adjust as needed.
- Develop a phrase to say to yourself when you want to quit during the 88-Day Promise.
- Follow the “Plan, Do, Review, and Adjust” formula.
Week Three
- Increase the intensity of your daily activities.
- Identify any schedule gaps and fill them with activities that support your objective.
- Make sure your schedule indicates focus on the “critical few”, not the “trivial many”.
- Follow the “Plan, Do, Review, and Adjust” formula.
Weeks Four to Twelve
- Be at full intensity, all-out behavior.
- Assess your attitude and have a provision to keep you engaged when you want to quit the 88-Day Promise.
- Commit to having no schedule gaps.
- Remove all distractions from your objective.
- Confirm your schedule indicates focus on the critical few, not the trivial many.
- Follow the “Plan, Do, Review, and Adjust” formula.”
Follow this three-step Post-Promise Plan:
- Refresh
- Regroup
- Recharge
Week One: Refresh
- Refresh mentally. Take a week’s vacation or place your focus on something entirely different. It is a time to focus on your health and well-being.
- Refresh physically. Eat right. Exercise. Drink lots of water. Get lots of sleep. Get your mind, spirit, and body in a good place.
Week Two: Regroup
- Regroup. Take the week after refreshing to assess your 88-Day Promise.
- Document in a journal everything you did. Document your experiences, thoughts, feelings, and ups and downs.
- Assess what the reinvented you looks like. What areas do you still want to hone? What adjustments and tweaks do you want to make?
- Think back on what you accomplished. Start planning what the best use of your time and energy is over the next ten weeks to support and tighten up the results you created during the 88-Day Promise.
- In business, regrouping means focusing on the team you have built, investing in them, and providing the leadership and training they need.
Weeks Three to Twelve: Recharge
- Recharge mentally. This is the time for you to grow, read, study, and learn. Read stories of people who have done what you’re trying to do. Absorb industry periodicals and training. Take your personal knowledge, skill, and training to the next level.
- Recharge physically. Rebuild your physical strength. Your body cannot catch up on sleep by sleeping a lot. It takes two or three weeks of getting the right amount of sleep every night after an 88-Day Promise to recalibrate your body.
- Recharge emotionally. You must prepare yourself mentally and emotionally for the next 88-Day Promise so you have the physical capacity to make it happen.