Today I did, for the first time, a monthly forecast.
Now, this isn’t the most interesting of subjects so I’ll keep it brief. Basically, we work on the simple principle that what gets tracked gets done and what’s done can be improved upon.
I’ve never made a forecast before, but honestly, it’s pretty simple.
Firstly, you write your goals for the month. I picked five and then upped it to seven when I realised that I’d missed a couple.
Then, write what you think will happen. This is a time for honesty and educated guessing. If you have spent the last five years saying you’re going to get in shape but sitting on the sofa, then this is the section where you state that.
You do this because you need to separate what you think you can do from what you actually do.
It’s also about knowing yourself and all that sort of stuff too.
After that, and here’s where it gets interesting to me; you forecast like a weather person does.
With weather, the timeline is important. On a second, minute and hourly basis, weather prediction is incredibly accurate. A few days out; less so. Months out; very much impossible to get exactly right.
Most people trust their intuition a lot. I certainly do. However… there’s only so far that can take you. And trusting your intuition can lead you into incredibly difficult scenarios. Think, “The GPS seems to be taking me the long way. I bet going in a straight line will be faster.”
Before you know it, you’re swimming through icy waters being chased by a polar bear.
We’ve all been there.
Likely Scenarios
There are various means of predicting the future. From reading news headlines through browsing social media predictions and industry forecasts through reading tea leaves, you can find a million ways to predict the future.
Some are more accurate than others.
That said… you never really know until you try. So part of your monthly forecast should be to pick some ways you personally tell the future, and see how accurate they are.
For a lot of us, a good exercise, (that I think I’ve recommended before,) is to write down the news headlines of the day.
Then check in a month and see if they were correct.
See, most people take in the news and assume that it’s broadly accurate. Sometimes it is. A lot of the time, it’s not.
See also political polls, your favourite talking head on Twitter, the aggregate of a sub-reddit that’s supposed to be, “In the know.”
You can track this over time, and you’ll find out whether a source is worth listening to or not.
If a person is continually wrong, you might as well read the tea leaves.
However, something I took from Twitter buddy Ryan, (@AXQ62) is that if something is wrong, it can be used as a contra-indicator.
In our personal lives, we all know one person who seems to be wrong about just about everything.
This is useful in and of itself. If you have a favourite talking head who is always wrong, you simply bet against him or her. If you find that a particular clique of people tell you it’s raining and it never is, that’s a contra-indicator.
This is more difficult when it comes to your own personal forecasting, (because nobody is ostensibly as good a source as you,) but pick a few things, see if you can add them to your forecasting.
For instance, let’s say I am an ecommerce person and I source things from China. I can read the news, and see that there are various talking heads saying everything from “Coronavirus isn’t even real” to “It only kills 0.2% of people” through to basically it being the end of the world.
Two headlines I saw say that Iran is on the brink of complete collapse and could cause a chain reaction, and the Singapore minister for health saying it’s barely even a problem.
Is the Singapore minister more accurate than the right wing American news channel?
The tendency is to assume according to our own biases – but don’t. Instead, make a note of who is saying what, see what the results are in a month’s time, and adjust accordingly.
Who knows, you might stumble upon a way of seeing the future.