Think Weekend
Posted by Jeff Tue, 13 May 2008 20:08:00 GMT
Just got back from my Think Weekend. It was fantastic!
What is a Think Weekend? Every 6 months, I reflect on what has happened in the past half year, set goals for the next couple of decades, and reshuffle short-term priorities to align with long term goals. This is something that was originally recommended to me by my graduate advisor David Patterson. Here’s rationale behind it: In normal everyday life, we have to make day-to-day decisions such as ‘Should I go work out?’, ‘Should I go to the movies with friends?’, ‘When am I going to leave work today’. It’s very easy to get lost in the woods and loose sight of the bigger picture. Although true in school and big-company environments, it’s even easier to forget and loose sight of the mission as no one governs CLZ in starting companies to changing the world.
Think Weekends remind me of these goals and reinforces them.
As an interesting side note - a friend of mine recently pointed out that BIll Gates is someone else who also shares this ritual. Based on the WSJ, it seems that Gates does this for a whole week and reads everything about Microsoft. Needless to say, mine is much less formal.
Here’s a peek into what I did over the weekend:
I booked a quiet and cozy room in Santa Cruz where I spent most of my weekend organizing thoughts on my Mac, in the morning and afternoon, I would pick out certain topics and go to my favorite view point at the Sea and Sands Inn.
It’s gorgeous:
Agenda for the weekend looks like:
Friday Night:
-Read over notes from the last Think Weekend
-Come up with core topics to think through
Saturday/Sunday
-Reach conclusions or action items on core topics
Sunday
-Write down notes from the weekend
What are the long term goals?
1) Start a Public company by 2018
2) Save 1 million lives and reduce global CO2 emissions by 20% by 2023
After every Think Weekend, I always come back much more motivated and focused on long term goals. I would highly recommend it to everyone.