How do you plan?

Shownotes:

How many plans of yours succeeded? How many of them failed? The success of your plan depends on many factors including planning -- which most people don’t pay much attention to. Many people would rather go unplanned, but that’s not advisable if your plan is to achieve a goal. In today’s episode, I want to dive into planning and some tips that would help you stick to your plan and achieve consistency.

Hello, and welcome to the Traveling Introvert. Today, I would like to talk about planning. It's an area that I haven't covered, and I'm not going to talk about travel planning. Well, in a way, I am. But I want to talk about just planning for the upcoming month.

Now, most people sort of know how to have a rhythm of what's going to happen. At some point maybe you have kids and they're going back to school, or you know you have a big trip planned, or something else. But with your business, how much do you plan? Do you do a plan at the start of the year? Do you do a quarterly plan? Do you ever look back and see what you originally planned and see how far you did or did not get? What do you do to plan your business?

And the reason I ask this is because a lot of the time we get stuck in the weeds and we're just trying to get going. We just kind of keep going, trying to get clients, trying to keep those clients, and trying to get new clients.

But is there a plan? Do you have a goal? Do you have a direction that you want to go in? I know there are a lot of marketers out there, there's one marketer that suggests that you make one big, in depth, juicy blog post per quarter, and then use the theme of that blog to create other content for the rest of that quarter.

So, it could be Instagram, it could be Facebook, it could be how to get clearer skin, it could be beach body. Whatever it might be, but to write one big, juicy, in depth piece of content that then can be reused and repurposed and split up for other months.

And then, build the rest of your efforts with your business around that. Do you have a particular product that you could promote during that time? Could you run a challenge? What your emails to your subscribers going to look like? Making sure that everything is cohesive.

And one thing that I know another planner who's super into analytics does is each month, they name their month. It's normally something like, "Go-Getter Month," or I know some sports athletes use like [inaudible 00:02:28] or target, or whatever that one word will be so that when you wake up in the morning, you think, "Okay, I'm going to do this." And it has to be very, very specific to you and what you want to do.

Is it team work? Is it get stuff done? Is it automate? Is it get help? Is it delegate? Whatever that word is, it's really powerful if you have it for like your theme of the month. And you can have that one word, no more than three word theme, and then break that down into like what does that mean to you?

What does automate mean to you? Does it mean automate all of your accounting systems? Does it mean automate all of your customer service systems? Don't make it mean automate everything because you'll never get that done in the one month. But think about what that specifically means to you.

Document everything was one of my months, and that was a case of, I know at some point, I am going to hand stuff off to somebody else. And so, I need to start documenting now what I do and how it's done, so that someone else will have an idea and that I'm not stuck when I hire someone to be like, "Ah, I've got to do all this documentation now." I'm already doing it as an ongoing process.

So, that's one part of planning. The other part of planning is not stretching yourself too thin. We only have a certain amount of hours in a month, and during that time you have to sleep and eat and have a life and do things. So, the rest of that time, maybe 50 or 60% of your life can be spent on your business and gaining visibility and getting clients.

So, how do you want to spend that time? And you should go and look back and think, "Okay, what is my one goal for this month?" And then, what tasks do I need to do to get to that goal? How much time will those goals roughly take me? And then, how can I fit them in, in the time that I have left in the month, not forgoing whatever else that I'm doing.

So, planning is really, really important and will help you, if you have an overarching theme over a set period of time, to get stuff done and to move you forward. Like, one quarter, my specific thing was visibility.

And so, I made sure that I recorded a bunch of podcasts [inaudible 00:04:51] I was interviewed on other podcasters' podcasts. And so, I did many episodes. One was focusing on my book. One was focusing ... there's the different things. And so, it's really useful to have a micro focus within that month to get stuff done.

Thanks for listening. This is Janice from the travel ... actually, the Career Introvert, helping you amplify your voice through podcasting and publishing, and making sure that people know what your wonderful skills are as an introvert.