Personal Strategy Compass - March 2026
The Hardest Part of Strategic Planning is the Planning
Personal Strategy Compass
March 2026
The Hardest Part of Strategic Planning
The burden in planning is not the work. It is the residue the work drags with it. By March, most New Year’s Resolutions have transitioned from goals to ghosts that haunt our to-do lists. Too often, we build elegant systems to carry these assumptions forward under the respectable label of continuity.
We spend too much time building systems to preserve the past. We forget the most strategic tool in the shed: the delete key. The best way to lighten your mental load is to stop inheriting your past self’s unfinished business by default.
Last month, I wrote about disappearance. The experiment was a filter. Items that had been carried by inertia for months finally fell to the wayside because they lacked a current intention and genuine resonance.
The 7 x 10 Ritual
In last month’s issue, I talked about a new approach of using a monthly buffer of ideas that actually matter to have in hand before my Personal Quarterly Offsites (PQOs). I use a 7 x 10 leather-bound notebook and a high-quality pen. The size is intentional. It is large enough for expansive thought but restricted to a single page per month to force prioritization.
No tasks go into this notebook. This is not a to-do list. It is not another productivity system to layer onto an already crowded stack. It is a filter. It is a temporary holding cell for three categories that help me separate noise from strategy:
· Signals: Raw material. A phrase I cannot shake, or a book that feels charged before I know why.
· Synthesis / Focus: What is gathering force. The moment a trip stops being just a trip and starts becoming a frame for a real project.
· Judgments and Wicked Questions: Settled beliefs like “Frameworks matter more than tools” and the harder questions underneath them.
The Half-Life of a Strategic Idea
The system relies on manual friction. Nothing carries forward by default. When a new month starts, I turn the page and rebuild the categories from scratch. If something appears again, it is because I consciously rewrite it.
In February, I wrote down only nine items from what started as an overwhelming list. In March, that list decreased. That’s still less than half of what I started with in January and it’s a cleaner, more focused, and more engaged list. I’ve worked on several important issues that were able to surface from the open space I created after hitting the delete key.
In forty-five days, over half of what I deemed strategic in January evaporated. I now believe that most of what we label as strategy might actually be just current mood. For me, manual rewrites filter for staying power, freeing up mental room for the surviving convictions.
Disappearing is not always clutter elimination. Sometimes an item is fully internalized. In February, I carried a Signal about an AI Anchor: a Venn Diagram showing the intersection of Single Source of Truth and Expertise in using AI.
Once I internalized that intersection, I stopped rewriting it. It graduated from a Signal to a permanent Constitutional Principle. It became part of the foundation. (I will detail where these graduated ideas live in the April issue.)
The Safety Rule: Dead vs. Difficult
Avoidance is the primary enemy of the manual rewrite. I use a Safety Rule to keep the filter honest. If I am about to let an item drop, I must ask: “Is it Dead, or is it Difficult?”
If it is dead, let it go. If it is just difficult, it stays on the ledger.
Looking Ahead: The Friction Audit
As I approach my Q2 PQO at the end of this month, the clearing this approach has created is visible and tangible. To be fair, I am only two months into this experiment, so I keep checking that my sense of spaciousness is not a mask for avoidance.
Starting with this upcoming offsite, I am adding a final step to the ritual: the friction audit.
I will look back at the monthly pages I have turned. I will review everything that disappeared. Most of it was noise from the “ghosts” of old resolutions that no longer serve me. The friction audit is there to catch the difficult truth that I tried to bury.
This audit turns the delete key into a high-trust tool. I am not arriving at the PQO with a month of current moods. I am arriving with just a few things resilient enough to survive and the hard truths I retrieved from the trash.
Clarity is the residue of disappearance.
What Is a Personal Quarterly Offsite (PQO)?
A PQO is a dedicated block of time (typically a couple of hours) to step away from daily execution and think strategically about the next quarter. The goal is clarity about where you are investing your strategic attention.
A Quick Note on This Newsletter
Last month marked a small shift: Personal Strategy Compass is now fully open and free. That was not about reach or growth, but fit. This newsletter works best when it is exploratory, reflective, and shared, and I’m glad to keep building it in that spirit.