There are many of us on TAS whose smallholdings will require a great deal of work over many years to bring them up to standard. In our case, that's sorting out an old house and putting in fences, or as others are doing, even moving country and building houses and barns from scratch.
I've been using something called "
Transformation Maps" at work for a while now, but it never occured to me until now to do one for the smallholding.
Basically the idea is that you have various 'streams' of activity (in the example above: Service, Process Improvement, Organisation Design etc), and then show the activity in each of those streams converging towards a future goal in the top-right of the diagram.
You can then plot all your various activities or milestones on the diagram, showing the key things you have to achieve each year to stay on track to meet your future goal.
So in our case for the smallholding, I've got the streams as Smallholding, House, Career, Holidays and Free Time, and we are converging on a goal of total self sufficiency, featuring in Ideal Homes magazine, debt freedom, a two-day working week and general Utopia by 2017
.
So, I don't know if this is useful to anybody else, but if you like the idea I'd encourage you to give it a go. It's certainly helping us to feel a bit clearer on our future direction!