I planned my entire year in 1 day

Happy New Year! Today I’m going to show you how I plan my entire year in one day. I throw out every single productivity tip, book, app I had ever had about a year ago and use this minimalistic approach to planning to have my best year personally and professionally. So I thought I’d take you behind the scenes to show you exactly how I do it.

You’ll need a piece of paper or a whiteboard, post-its, dry erase markers, and a year at a glance calendar. The biggest key to simplifying your planning comes down to starting with the end in mind. So I showed you last week that I write myself a letter every single year and it’s everything that I envision and want to accomplish for the next year. I then take that letter and that brain dump of everything I dream of and want, and I put it into categories.

As you can see here, they are broken into my five categories. We have family and friends, relationships, finances, spirituality, and fitness and health. So you’re going to determine these on your own, but for me, I wanted to share an example of what you could put down for the specifics of what you want to achieve i.e. One date night a month, 75% increase in revenue, daily meditation, doing meal prep.

And the next thing here, which feels really weird is to actually subtract or minus things from your list because what I know is that in order to achieve big things you can’t be going after a million different things at once. So I know I need to be laser focused on only the things that really, really matter to me.

So this is where we go into the want, work, and stop doing category. What does that mean? Well, basically it’s what do you actually really want or what do you think you want? So get clear on that. What are you willing to do the work for? And then what are you going to stop doing in order to make sure that you achieve what you want?

So let me give you an example. Let’s say I’m really determined to meal prep to eat more healthy. So want, meal prep. Work, I’m going to block off my Sunday and I’m going to make sure that I’m cooking every Sunday and going grocery shopping to get what I need to meal prep. What am I going to stop doing? I’m going to stop going out for dinner or ordering in dinner more than two times a month.

In order to know if things are actually working, you have to set benchmarks and KPIs. These are just a few examples. In my relationships do I have a sense of peace? Do I feel joy in my home? Finances? What are the key metrics I need to know how much traffic do we have? What kind of leads are we getting? The units that we’re selling on a monthly basis, revenue, cash, collected profits. Spirituality. Do I have peace of mind? Am I being reactive or proactive? Am I present in my conversations and relationship? Am I having a masculine and feminine balance? And how many minutes am I meditating on a monthly basis? Fitness and health, how many workouts am I doing per week? How many dinners am I ordering in versus making myself? Do I fit my clothes and do I have peace in my body?

The next piece, which is super important to ground you throughout the year is to pick keywords and feelings. So my keywords for the next year are simplify and proactive. And how do I want to feel for the next year? I want to feel strong, creative, abundant, focused, and peaceful.

Then we take it to the calendar, so I mark down key dates for the year, personal events, vacation time, team holidays, and days off, and key business events or marketing initiatives. Even though my business runs entirely ever green, I like to know when we’re going to do a bigger push during some months and some days. Which basically means for the internal months, I’m doing things like prep, planning, working on SOPs, processes in the business, updating or tweaking our programs, anything that is behind the scenes. And then our external months, we do pushes. We do webinars. We do live trainings, I’m doing content creation, I’m doing podcasts on other people’s platforms. It’s anything that’s outward facing.

The final piece of this is to take everything we’ve just done and put it on a white board so I can see it every day and remind myself what I’m working towards and what I actually need to be focused on so I don’t get shiny object syndrome. I decided to make my business a lot more simple last year and I only have four key focuses every single day, and it’s the flywheel and the engine that runs our entire business.

You have programs and having the best in class programs at the very top, and then we focus on enrollment, getting people into our programs, and then we focus on transforming those clients and getting them the best possible results, and then we focus on creating ambassadors because they love our programs so much that leads to more people enrolling in the program.

That took less than two hours, and I do this every 90 days. So I set up the plan at the beginning of the year, and then every 90 days I reassess and reevaluate because now I have the bones and the benchmarks that I want to hit to achieve everything that I dream of in the next year, but we all know that you just can’t predict the future and things might change. So that gives you wiggle room and a little bit of freedom.

Plus, if you do this every year, it makes it so much easier to plan and become better at all of those things year over year, because you know the baseline and you have the data to look back at. Because remember, you are always the scientist of your own life and of your own business, and we always have to remember to test, fail, learn, grow, repeat. It’s not failure, it’s just feedback.

I hope this is helpful for you and makes productivity less of a job so you can actually do the work on the things that you want. 

Are you with me?