How to Manage Your Personal Development

Learning how to manage your personal development can be challenging because there is always something else that can be improved or optimized. Even for me, who runs a personal development blog around the idea of continuous personal development. Sometimes this endless cycle feels repetitive and can feel like we hit a plateau in our personal development.

Besides learning how to motivate yourself every day, and seeing your development in permanent beta, you can try to see your personal development through a management method used in business for the control and continuous improvement of products.

Manage Your Personal Development

The method used is called the Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle, commonly abbreviated PCDA, and is also known as the Deming circle. Named after W. Edwards Deming invented this method and is considered the father of modern quality control.

The cycle is “an iterative four-step management method used in business for the control and continuous improvement of processes and products.”

It is seen in companies like Toyota, and Lockheed Martin who pride themselves in continuous improvement of their products.

However, this cycle can be used outside of the manufacturing environment as well.

What are the steps in the PDCA Cycle?

As defined by the ASQ organization, the PDCA cycle follows the below steps.

• Plan: Recognize an opportunity and plan a change
• Do: Test the change. Carry out a small-scale studyCheck: Review the test, analyze the results, and identify what you’ve learned
• Act: Take action based on what you learned in the check (also called study) step. If the change did not work, go through the cycle again with a different plan. If you were successful, incorporate what you learned from the test into wider changes. Use what you learned to plan new improvements, beginning the cycle again.

When should I use the PDCA cycle for Personal Development?

The PDCA cycle can be used to improve any process that you are currently working on

• Helping implement quality alternatives to what you are doing currently
• Exploring a possible range of solutions for what you want to do
• Helps you see the progress you are making
• If you are on a plateau in your current project
• If you are feeling unmotivated in personal development
• Can use iterative tests
• Avoiding waste

Using the PDCA cycle is a lot like changing habits. To help see how you can use the PDCA cycle to help your personal development I wanted to provide a few personal examples to illustrate how it can help you.

Also, if you want insight on how to change your habits for good, check out this post here!

Example 1: Using the PDCA Cycle to work on my art

As you can probably tell from some of the hand-made drawings and social media posts – I like doing art. Developing my art hobby is something that I have been working on for five years. Unfortunately, I get really into my art and then fall off for months. Then I get back into it with online classes or doing Inktober during October (link off to it), but then it falls off again. Besides the quick doodles for the blog, I wasn’t doing as much art so I wanted to see if I could implement it into my life more regularly.

• Plan: I can do art more weekly. I will set 10 minutes every day to do art.
• Do: I set time for a week to take 10 minutes at night (9:50-10 PM) to at least sketch something.
• Check: I only did it twice during the week, and felt bad about not doing it the other five days.
• Act: I learned I am too tired at night to do my art drawings. Plus, I became too flustered trying to figure out what to draw, that I had to look before drawing.

That test was helpful. I learned two things, I get tired at night, and I get stuck on what to draw. So I went back to improve my process.

• Plan: Pick three things to draw during the week, and get to them when I have twenty minutes uninterrupted.
• Do: Write up a big list of things I want to draw. Assign three for the week and have reference photos already on my phone ready for when I want to draw.
• Check: I did it for the week without many fuses and got to enjoy 3 different art drawings where I could improve my skills.
• Act: Keep the big list of items I want to learn to draw and assign 1-3 a week based on how busy I am.

I am still doing this practice to this day! Personal development improves after these little exercises. I found something that works for me. That lets me work on my art with a little bit of pre-work the Sunday before but lets me leisurely improve without much pain.

Example 2: Spending money on ordering in .vs cooking

My family is trying to move towards FIRE. One of the ways to save money is cooking in for every meal. However, as good as a chef as my fiancé is and even though I am learning from her, we still get tired of cooking all the time, so we had to refine our ordering in/eating out. Eventually, we settled on

• Plan: order food at variable amounts to see what works for our budget and our time.
• Do: Try various ordering in .vs cooking methods for a month.
• Check: See which one works for us that saved the most money, and brought the most enjoyment.
• Action: Implement that plan.

We now order in 1 breakfast, and have 2 lunches/dinners out or ordered in. it costs more money than cooking all our food but it brings in the most joy to our lives. When we spent less than that, we felt over-burdened with cooking. When we spent over that, we felt guilty for spending all our money on ordered food.

Photo by Edgar Castrejon on Unsplash

Example 3: Your turn.

What is something you want to improve about yourself? Do you want to optimize something you are already doing, pick up a new hobby, or start a new habit?

If you need help finding a new hobby, check out this guide!

Tips on how to use the PDCA Model for Personal Development

1. Remember it is a small-scale study you are testing.

Personal development isn’t supposed to be a major life change. It should be something less than thirty minutes but could make your life exponentially better. Start small and see if you like the change before you flip your whole life upside down.

2. Take your time with the check/study.

Reflecting is the most important step. What did you learn? Are there areas of improvement? Did you even benefit from this change? What would a better change look like? Ask yourself these questions to help align your thinking of building towards something that helps you.

3. Remind yourself personal development is continuous.

By doing little tests like this, they help break-up the seemingly monotonous task of constantly bettering yourself.

Main Take-Aways

• Personal development is a lifelong pursuit. That doesn’t mean it has to be monotonous.
• Run mini-tests to see what change (either in action, habit, or even attitude) helps you the most.
• Analyze the results from your mini-tests and continually optimize when you feel like you are hitting a plateau, getting bored, or feel like you need a change.

Action item

Your turn! Pick one thing in your life to run the PDCA on. Plan your mini-test today and execute it this week.