Being busy is not the same as being productive so today I want to talk ‘planning’.

Planning is what ensures you actually GET to where you want to go to.

So first the basics.

Having a plan keeps you focused, gives you complete clarity over what it is you need to do on a daily and weekly basis.

It’s what gives you focus and direction in your day so that you always know what you need to be working on next.

There are ladies out there who are over planning, and there’s definitely plenty under planning too.

Ok so we know that having a plan is pretty critical to our success and it is also directly responsible to how much you get done on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis. Yes a plan has got a place in your life!

Growing a business is a bit like climbing Mount Everest – you don’t start this journey without fully planning out how on earth you’re going to do it, and that’s pretty much how I approach every single month!

But it’s important to me to make things really simple for myself – otherwise I just don’t do them, so the most powerful planning for me is my monthly planning process.

Yep if I focus on nailing each month I will naturally end each quarter and each year having achieved what I wanted to achieve BUT it was simple to implement because I just tackled one month at a time, one project at a time, one day at a time.

I do think planning is a bit like building a muscle. It gets easier the more we do it but it’s done incrementally.

We start with monthly planning, once you find this easy, and it becomes second nature, once you’ve learnt how to set goals that work for YOU (everyone is different), then you can start moving on to 90-day plans and beyond.

Here’s some tips on monthly planning:

1) KEEP IT SIMPLE – it’s easy to overcomplicate a monthly plan and in this case simple really IS enough. I find that most people under-estimate what they can achieve in say 5 years but overestimate what they think they can achieve in a month.

So if you over-estimate what you think you can achieve in a month, then what happens, surely it’s the old “if you shoot for the moon and you miss at least you will land among the stars” scenario right?

Nope not exactly.

What tends to happen is you overestimate what you can achieve, then you get really overwhelmed, then you don’t get anything done and before you know it, every day reaches 5pm and you’ve got nothing, nada, zilch done! Sound familar?

2) BREAK YOUR GOALS DOWN – What steps do you need to take in order to make your monthly goal a reality? Break your goal down into small, achievable steps.

I suggest you brainstorm the 4-5 bigger milestones that need to happen for your goal to be achieved.    These basically become mini projects.

This is the start of your roadmap for making it happen and also your weekly 7 day goals.

Breaking goals down into manageable steps is how they easily get achieved, almost without you even realising!

I am a big fan of setting 7-day goals every single week – I like to set one business goal and one personal goal, as potentially you could end the year having achieved 52 things for each area – I mean what would that do to your life and business?!

3) REFER TO YOUR PLAN REGULARLY – which is at the very least weekly, and if you follow the system I use then that’s all that’s needed because you have already identified what you need to do every single day. So a weekly check in is what will keep you on track.

You are going to be focused on the right tasks every single day, it’s a simple way to keep yourself moving forwards.

Since the day that I started planning out my most important actions each month, I’ve noticed not only increased revenue, traffic, and growth in my community but way LESS STRESS. And I think that might be one of the most valuable benefits to getting clear and directing your time.

A plan gives you focus, clarity, direction AND it gives you momentum.  What’s not to love.

There’s the popular quote by Benjamin Franklin – “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail” – to be fair, if you don’t have a plan it definitely doesn’t mean you’re going to fail, it just means you won’t achieve as much as you would WITH a plan.

There’s nothing I want more than to see you put a solid plan in place and set yourself up to knock it out of the park next month.

Keep it simple – what do you want to have achieved by the end of the month?  break that down into 4 mini projects which become your 7 day goals and stay focused on achieving each weekly goal.

The result – watch yourself roll into the end of the month feeling accomplished!

Are you ready to plan the heck out of your month?

Big love Jo xx