The other day I posted a brief summary of the wild ride that was 2011.

Today, I want to turn the page and focus on the new year.  In actuality the new year is already a couple of weeks old and the plan is taking a more definitive shape.  As I spent a little bit of time looking back on 2011, including the business and personal plan that I put together prior to the year, I was immediately struck by how complex it was.  Its no wonder that the overall structure of the plan was abandoned early on.  The whole irony of that situation is that prior to the year, one of my focuses for 2011 was to simplify.  In some respects I did.  However, my initial “plans” for 2011 were anything but simplified.

This year, I’m taking a slightly different approach – the 3 words approach.  This is something that I borrowed from Chris Brogan who is a well-known and publicized business, media and technology voice.  If you are not familiar with Chris, I’d recommend poking around his website, perhaps following him on Twitter and at the least, reading his post about using 3 words rather than complex and vague resolutions.  Chris adopted the 3 word approach years back as a compass to guide him in all facets of his yearly journey.  Seeing how I wanted to find a way to simplify my purpose for this year, I’m giving the strategy a test drive.

What I did was first analyze the hits and misses from 2011 to figure out what areas of business and life I wanted to see the most improvement.  Then I made a list of habits to support those areas of interest.  I followed that up with a list of 10 areas or so that I wanted to focus on business-wise this year.  Using those 3 lists, I started to jot down some words that might encompass various aspects of those general purposes.  It’s easy to just spew out 3 words like focus, enjoy and grow.  I mean, who doesn’t need more of all three of those in life?  Actually, as I first started this exercise, I thought I had my three immediately.  However, as I sat there and really looked at what I’m trying to accomplish and what each word actually represented, I came up with 3 slightly different variations that I like much better.   These 3 words will serve a lens through which I view almost everything I do and decisions I make this year.

My Three Words for 2012

• Prudence
• Execute
• Edges

Click on the links above for a more detailed explanation for what each word means to me and why I ultimately chose these three.

Photo Credit, Flickr – stockerre

Related posts:

1. 2011: A year of Growth, of Joy, of Transition & Momentum
2. Are you Protected from Identity Theft?
3. The New Normal?