I’ve already taken the time last week to help you choose your goals, if you haven’t listen to the last episode, I definitely recommend you pause this and listening to that first and then coming back here. For the rest of you self-made listeners it’s time to pair those goals with a bulletproof plan. I’ll be referencing different ideas and concepts from three of my favourite productivity, goal-setting books, The One Thing, The 12 Week Year and Atomic Habits. Take time in making a bulletproof plan for your goals in 2022, if your currently busy Marie Kondoing your desk draws from the last episode you can Listen to this one on the fly! – Episode. 018 available on >>Apple Podcast<< or >>Spotify<<
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Thank you, Olivia x
A plan does many things to help us, the main are it can help us reduce mistakes. If we have plan in place we’ll hopefully save time and this is probably the obvious one but I give us focus and direction. Think of you plan as a cheat sheet for you goals.
Re-thinking how much time you have
Time: 01:10
When we make yearly goals, it’s so easy to think that we have all the time in the world. A year sounds so far away right now. But, when we actually break it down realistically we have less time in a business year then one might actually first think. So there are 325 days in a year, but need to take out weekends, which leaves us 235 working day, we also need to take out bank holidays and actually holiday to take off, which then leaves us 202 working days. Then you should also think about the business days when you’re working on admin tasks, client work and other things you just have to do to keep everything afloat and running smoothing. Obviously this will look different to all you listening. But I just want you to realise that a year isn’t as long as it appears.
New Year Momentum
Time: 02:04
We all get this New Year momentum, but by February maybe even March, it starts to dwindle and that fresh New Year feeling and excitement has come and faded. So the question is how do we stay just a motivated in our small businesses? I must credit The 12 Week Year By. it is a must read, I cannot recommend it enough! It completely changed that way I looked at my business-working year and has done wonders on keeping me on top of my goals.
The 12 Week year Recommendation
Time: 02:35
I would defiantly recommend you implementing the 12 Week Year in 2022. So instead of looking at your year as a chunk of time, but rather break it into 4 sub section, so focusing on shorter time frames 12 weeks at a time to be specific. It will push you to get more done, 12 weeks at a time really isn’t very long time. We realises that every week, every day, every hour counts more than ever, it generates urgency. We change the narrative in ours heads from we’ll get round to it, or it can get finished next month, to we have to get this done now or this week. Because a year is no longer 12 months to you, but 12 weeks, a week is now a month, a day is now a week! Every moment counts!
Refer back to your goals
Time: 03:21
Let’s refer back to your goals, goals alone won’t get you so far, we need to familiars ourselves with a plan. Without a plan it’s like we’re driving to place without any directions, and its most likely well end up somewhere else we didn’t expect to be. We must facilitate a plan for each and every one of our goals.
If you haven’t picked your goals yet?
Time: 03:45
If you followed the last episode you should have three goals that are based on the outcome you want to achieve. Now it’s time to decided who route you’ll take either a project based task, like launch a course or more actionable task that you’ll have to repeat and monitor throughout the year. So firstly look at your goals and work out the best way to achieving that goal. If you pick a project-based task for that goal, you’ll then need to map out milestones, so you can visual see the route you’ll take.
The two different types of plans for your goals
Depending on the project you’ve picked you’ll have a different number of milestones or actions. Let’s pin point the main milestones towards that goal, not every to-do under the sun. Make sure your carefully identify the best possible steps that are actually going to move the needle towards that goal.
Goal Example
Time: 04:43
Your goal could be, increase income by 10%, you might decided you’ll pick a project type plan to meet that go by add an extra income stream through launching a digital show.
Project Based Plan – Milestones
Therefore your milestones might include, Create a collection of Digital Products, Write T&C’s, build the digital shop pages, Integrate and connect payment processor, Test Digital shop In working order, Create promotional material for launch, Launch Shop. It definitely worth doing a little bit of research before coming up with your milestones, if your unsure what it would include.
Please however, don’t have milestones like Build shop home page, build shop payment pages etc. just pick the main key moments. These milestones are like stepping-stones across a river from one side to the other. It’s not every single actionable step that you will need to take place to reach the goal, but it will give you enough direction so you know what you have to get done to move onto the next step.
Task based plan – Actions
You goal could be exactly the same, increase annual income by 10%, and you don’t want to launch a digital shop or already have one set up then it’s time to think about other avenues you could take to meeting this goal. Take time in decide how you plan on do this, will you increase income through raising prices? Have an extra sale instead? Launching more products? Up your marketing efforts, maybe you’ll pick a few different ways. You can have more than one specific tasks to accomplish one goals. They might be seen less as milestones and more like actions you have to complete daily weekly or monthly to help you support and reach that end goal.
Finding the planning sweet spot
Time: 06:37
If we really think about planning for the next 12 months for our goals is a bit insane. Where you’ll be in 6 months from now is probably to difficult to predictable who know where you’ll be by then. If you’re planning for 12 month, you’ll be making far to many of assumptions around time frames and the progress of your goals. Assumptions that might not actually be you’re reality at that time, this then makes most of your planning redundant. Making a plan for your goals based on assumptions leads to disappointment, period. But there is a sweat spot that lies between having a plan that’s overly complex or too sparse.
Giving your milestones or actions Deadlines
Time: 07:11
So we have a clear plan of milestones for your project goals and actions for your goals. Now it’s time to refer back to your 12 week year, and give a deadline for each of those milestones within your new calendar. Now obviously some goals might take longer than 12 weeks, so you might not be able to fit every milestone in your first 12 weeks, but place as many as you think and want to complete by a certain dates. You can look at each milestone as a percentage towards your goal so if you want to get at least 50% of that goal down get half of those milestone slotted into your 12-week calendar. Now you’ve provided deadlines for your milestones. If your goal is more action based, you might have repetitive actions that you need to complete every week.
How to track and monitor your goal progress
Time: 08:05
Now it’s time to stay on top of your progress by tracking your actions and results. Now that 12 weeks is actually a year to you now, you will definitely want to be regularly checking your milestones and actions to make sure that every ounce of your time is helping you reach your goals. By not tracking your goals you can waste a lot of time and be doing tasks that aren’t necessarily providing with the results you want to see.
To track your goals you’ll need to come up with a statistic value to measure your goals against. So for example if you want to increase your revenue by 10% it’s pretty easy you can measure this through your income and sales, you’ll be able to instantly identify what your doing is helping. But if your goal is more project based like implementing a new automated income stream, you’ll need to track with percentages on how much progress you’ve made to completing that goal. So you might need to scan over your milestones and allocate each one with a percentage, so that once all completed they make up 100%. So the first milestone I mentioned could be, create digital shop products, this might be hefty chuck of the project so you might actually allocate a bigger percentage like 30% towards that milestone. But something like sorting out your T&C’s might not take as long so might only be worth like 10%. When you come to tracking your progress week on week, you can look at how much you’ve got completed under that milestones, so for instances if your on your first milestone and your half way through creating the digital products you’ll now you’ve completed 15%, and got 85% more to reach your goal.
The importance of tracking your goals
Time: 09:53
The best thing about tracking your progress is we can start to see whether our daily milestones and actions are really providing us with the best results. I suggest tracking weekly, so you know exactly were your sitting with each goal and have clarity on how much you’ve got to do left. It will also help you to detect straight away if after 3 weeks and your income has not increased and you’ve been completing all your actions, that it might be time to revaluate and tweak your plan for that goal. But it’s important though to try and stick to your plan, we can be too impatient too quick to deviate from a perfectly good plan sometimes, so make sure you’ve given it
A. Enough time to prove it isn’t working and
B. You’ve actually been completing the milestones and actions to the best of your ability, before even thinking about altering your plan.
The great plan and tracking goals complete
Time: 10:44
It’s time to draw this goal-planning episode to a close, by all mean feel free to come back re-listen for when you have your goals set. And for those of you who already have them sorted, start implement the 12 week year concept into action, plan the most important milestones and actions for your goals, provide yourself with tight deadlines and most important track your progress with each goal weekly. There no reason why this year can’t be your year to make the biggest and bested impact, and actually achieve all your goals! I’ve only given you a taster o the 12 week year, and I’ve already altered it to my needs, if you like this episode I would definitely recommend you go buy the book! Remember it’s your daily tasks that will predict your future, make this year your year with this bulletproof goal planning strategy!
You’ve now got the bulletproof plan for your goals learn how to 100% fully committee to it, with next week episode on how to hold yourself accountable.