Dream+Do for the Best 2023 - Come Plan with Me!
It’s the end of the year and it feels like everyone is talking about annual planning… myself included.
Thinking about the next year might be the furthest thing from your mind right now. You might be just hoping to make it through the holiday programming, massive schedule changes, and trying to make sure everything happens during this busy time.
And for those of us who love a good planning process, we are gathering our favorite markers, color-coded sticky notes, and fresh new planning pages.
On the last ECBME episode, we walked through how to do an end-of-year review for your business so you can end the current year on the right foot. Today, I am back to share about how to plan the new year in style!
It's an exciting time for goal setting and prepping for success in the new year. We hope this episode gives you some great insight into yearly planning as an Early Childhood business owner/manager. This process can be so fun (and not as overwhelming as you think!) if you go into it with a plan.
What we’re discussing today:
What annual planning looks like compared to quarterly planning
Why you need a big-picture vision and not an just annual plan.
Learn to put your energy where it matters most with quarterly goal planning.
Guard your time.
Why you need a big-picture vision and not an just annual plan.
When you are confused about what you need to focus on, you waste time and ultimately waste money. With a clear Big Picture Vision, there won’t be any confusion or fog about what you need to be working on this year and why.
A clear Big Picture Vision will ensure you find meaning and purpose in your work and your life. You are defining a clear direction for where your life is headed and a path to get you there. Your Big Picture Vision should be reviewed every year. It is your big-picture ideas and motivations. No details or specifics like you would find in the Early Childhood Business CEO Vision Planner.
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that best-made plans are wasted if we don’t have flexibility built in. Things change. Life happens. Your business moves in a new direction; you get a new idea; you need to take a break… There are so many reasons why making a concrete annual plan (with no flexibility) is a problem.
The exercise of creating a simple Big Picture Vision is to help you gain confidence and clarity about your year ahead. This is important and worth a little time at the beginning of each year. When you take control of your life and stop giving in to letting the daily chaos control how your day will go, you experience clarity and confidence in your everyday life and your business.
Areas you can look at to help you think about your Big Picture Vision are:
Discover your why.
Your guiding principles.
What do you want - business and personal goals.
Skills to master.
People to meet or work with.
Finding more fun and joy.
Learn to put your energy where it matters most with quarterly goal planning.
You’ve reviewed the previous year, outlined your Big Picture Vision for the year and now it’s time to make a realistic quarterly plan.
Creating a quarterly plan is much more helpful in the long run because it gives you the flexibility to roll with the punches, create new ideas and all in all embrace the possibility of more time+freedom in your lifestyle.
Quarterly Planning is organizing your business in a way that allows you to see if a goal can actually happen in a given time frame. For many of us as EC business owners/managers, we may be really good at vision casting and seeing the big picture, but we have a hard time actually making that happen. Quarterly planning actually does that for us. When you slowly work through goals in 90 days at a time, you have a better grasp on everything that is coming and gives you a chance to reevaluate and pivot.
In our Quarterly Planning process, found in our Time+Feedom Lifestyle Planner we take the 3 main goals we set for the year and we break them into the 5 areas operating an Early Childhood business:
Operations
Leadership
Team Building
Marketing
Momentum
Then, they are broken down further into NOW, SOON, and FUTURE. As you are coming up with your list of things that need to be done during the quarter to achieve one of the goals, decide the timing of what needs to be done.
There is also a section for you to plan your personal priorities as well. Remember we are creating a Time+Freedom Lifestyle. One that will gives you more joy in all areas of your life.
There is also a place for planning your business goals including:
Financial targets or milestones
Enrollment numbers
Services
Marketing states
Big wins
People to connect with
Every quarter you will list your current 3 Big Annual Goals you identified in your Big Picture Visioning process. They can remain the same all year or change as you complete them, or something comes up and they need to change. That is the beauty of quarterly goal planning. You will identify targets or milestones. At the end of the quarter, you will then follow the review process on the back and repeat the entire process when planning the next quarter.
Later you will use this quarterly goals list to help you identify your weekly tasks. We go over this process in a future ECBME podcast episode so stay tuned!
Guard your time.
There are a lot of problems that come from distraction, but the main issue we need to look at here is how it fogs our focus. Instead of being able to attend to our tasks, we’re pulled away every few minutes—sometimes every few seconds—to answer this message or check that issue.
We sometimes pretend that this is fine. Some of us like it. We’re multitasking, we say. But we’re not. We’re really just fragmenting our attention. And that makes us less effective, not more. Study after study has shown that multitasking decreases our productivity and creativity. There’s a big difference between being busy and being productive. Multitaskers may indeed work faster, but, while producing less.
Instead, we need to employ some proven tactics to help us regain and retain our focus.
Turn off all of the ringers, pings, and notifications.
Avoid mindless surfing.
Batch processing together all our tasks that require similar resources.
Use technology to manage technology.
Listen to music to get out of the world and into your work.
Only read each email message once, then take the appropriate action.
Usually, we’re as distracted as we want to be. We can blame all the noise and stimuli out there—or we can take the necessary responsibility to change our behaviors.
Recognizing the futility of multitasking is not the same as discontinuing it. I know because I still struggle with the temptation to feel like I’m doing more when I’m really doing less. I bet most of us do. These tactics will yield results if we employ them. But they only work if we want them to.
You should not be left feeling daunted about planning. I want you to feel confident going into the next year. If you struggle with feeling like your year is planned strategically and with intent, then be sure to find a system or process that works for you. Planning shouldn’t be scary or stressful. It should be something empowering that will allow you to feel great about the next 12 months.
Resources
If some of the strategic planning processes talked about today intrigued you, check out our Work+Life Strategic Planning Bundle. I’m so excited about this exclusive planner and training! I wanted you to feel confident about planning out your new year. So, what better way than to plan alongside me? Together, we’ll go through the process of planning your new year so that you feel confident about reaching your goals AND having time off to enjoy your family, friends, and life outside the office. What I call a time+freedom lifestyle. I truly believe that when you plan with strategy and intent, you’re bound to have an even better year.
Be sure to get on our email list so we can send you more information about our Shine Membership for Early Childhood Business Owners/Managers that is now Open!
We give Early Childhood business owners/managers the operational strategies and tools they need to grow their profitable businesses with more joy, confidence, clarity, and less overwhelming.
You will learn how to spend less time on small details and daily tasks. You can spend more time doing the things you truly enjoy. Focusing on the things that really matter, your top priorities, your key relationships, your most important projects, all the things that will bring you more joy and your business more success.