How We Built Our Plan
Introduction
Any decent plan is put together with building blocks. A business plan, for example, is often built on these components: Executive Summary, Company Description, Market Analysis, Organization and Management, and so on. A strategic plan may look like this: Analysis and Assessment, Strategy Development, Execution, Evaluation and Refinement. A Project Plan may be organized thusly: Goals and Project Objectives, Success Metrics, Stakeholders and Roles, Scope and Budget, Milestones, Deliverables, and Project Dependencies, Timeline and Schedule, and Communication Plan. If you’ve ever participated in a formal project, you’ll certainly recognize these parts and the skill of the project manager.
Our Plan
For us, we wanted to build a methodology to capture our thinking on surviving prosperously, so we started with these categories:
Categories
Energy, Food, Water, Shelter
Mobility & Communication
Safety & Security
Health & Sanitation
Somewhere along the way, we added these categories:
Minimalism
Money
Privacy
Humor
Education (training & spiritual)
Tech
Business/Income
Survivorship
Most of our conversations, research, preparation, purchases, and much more fit into one of these “categories”. However, we needed a way to manage the plan.
We started with a definition of utopia, (for us) meaning a description of the desired end state, free of any restrictions like money, time, or our capabilities. For example, Water: our end state is to have a well plumbed to the tiny house, have four IBC tanks configured to catch rainwater from the roof, have three developed springs, have one 5,000 gallon in-ground cistern, a large pond, and one 9,000 water tank on the property. The tiny house should have a UV, charcoal and paper filtration system. We should have four year’s supply of Zero water filters for our various pitchers, and we should have a system of chemical testing both on site and in an accredited laboratory for our water. (NOTE: This statement is still under development!)
With this utopian definition, we then split the effort to achieve, the perhaps lofty goal, into four quasi equal “Phases”, with the quantity loosely defined in terms of percentages, although suspiciously absent the percentage of “what”.
On Sale Today! 50% off! Ok, off of what, exactly? Math matters!
Our first attempt to make a plan featured a timeline against real time. In this fantasy world, we created our dream end state in a matter of two years. Yea, right! If we were to write checks, hire construction companies, and oversee the project, it may have worked that quickly. However, we want to build and do all of this work ourselves, and neither of us are in our indestructible twenties. We seriously underestimated the amount of time it would take to get things accomplished. So, now we have our “phases” expressing a percentage of a goal, instead of a definitive block of time. Even other quantification attempts gave us fits, such as “One Years Supply of Food”. Well, what does that look like for two people? Do you count calories, meals, cans of soup? Do you use the government’s food pyramid? In a grid down situation, you will burn many more calories because you’ll certainly be more physically active. We make our attempts to define quantities as necessary, and give our rationale along the way.
Each “Phase” is further divided into two columns: “Do” and “Buy”. The “Do” is essentially a list of projects and sometimes simple tasks. The “Buy” is a list of things we plan to purchase. In this way, we build a to-do list, and a shopping list based on where we think we should be, phase wise, along the path to tiny house off grid living. Here’s a crude, and still under development, example for water:
Each “Category” gets one of these pages; we ruminate each page regularly, and decided to add a row at the bottom of each page to list our rationale and/or reasons “why” we chose something. As the saying goes, “hindsight is 20/20” and sometimes having a reminder of why you made a decision helps when new information comes to light.
Progress Through The Phases
This next concept is still under development for us. We presently think the progress through each of the categories’ phases should be aligned with every category. Or said differently, you can’t move on to “Phase Two” of any category, until every category’s “Phase One” purchases and tasks are completed. However, we suspect this self inflicted rule has hidden flaws.
For example, in the Money category, one of the Phase Four goals is to be financially independent, meaning we have enough investments earning interest to replace our incomes completely, and enough money to meet our needs and wishes. Well, that directly conflicts with the Alpha Strategy concept, and the need to purchase big ticket items along the path. After all, those dollars spent on expensive solar systems could be lumped into an investment account. Where’s the sweet spot? How do you balance your time, and resources (meaning time and money mostly) against ALL of the requirements to achieve utopia?
For us, this planning tool is the answer.
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