What's On the Agenda?

Corporate America is obsessed with agendas. Every orientation, meeting, and conference has its accompanying agenda letting you know exactly how long you'll have to wait before peeing, grabbing a coffee, or checking your phone for the latest box scores. And the agenda mania isn't just limited to offices. See, we here in America instill the love of agendas in our citizens from a young age. Tell me you remember your agenda from elementary school. You do, right? Every month was a different color, every week had an inspiring quote or fun fact, and the back cover was a wealth of useful information: a world map showing every international time zone, a conversion chart, and a list of national holidays (which always included Boxing Day for some reason, even though NOBODY knows what that it is). I even had teachers that were so obsessed with getting us to use our agendas that they designed "agenda scavenger hunts" at the beginning of the year. Sounds silly, but this agenda indoctrination worked -- at least it did on me.

See, I LOVE agendas. I buy them all the time. Like all the time. Seriously. Not just once a year like normal folks. Also, I write EVERYTHING in them. I write all the normal stuff in there, like my appointments, my meetings, my very important lunch dates, etc. But I also write crazy things, like: "go to gym," "floss," "vote for Russell 35 times after So You Think You Can Dance airs tonight."

Given my agenda obsession, it should come as no surprise that Tink and I have worked one out for this project. Tink introduced you to the first item on the agenda, "Taking Stock," in her previous post. ** Here, I'm going to give you a a brief overview of our entire agenda. As Tink said, we're dividing the year into four quarters. Each quarter will be devoted to one "BIG TOPIC." Combined, we think that these four big topics cover all of the major areas that we'll need to focus on as we try to become fully-functioning, happy adults. The four big topics are: Self, Career/Finances, Relationships, and Goals. To make these topics more manageable, we'll divide them into smaller sub-topics that we'll spend approximately one month each focusing on. To makes these sub-topics even more manageable, we'll divide them into weekly or bi-weekly topics that will be fashioned more like individual tasks or goals.

For example, say the "BIG TOPIC" for Quarter 3 is Relationships. To make tackling this topic easier we're going to break it up into: Family (Month 1), Friends (Month 2), and Significant Others (Month 3). Then, in Month 1 we might have weekly topics such as: "Developing a Mature Relationship with Your Sibling" or "Making Peace with Your Parents."

Fun stuff right? I hope all of that made sense to you. If it didn't it's most likely because I had the master outline for the project written down in my agenda....which I just threw out and replaced with a shinier version. Whoops.

-Wendy