How I Plan My Year - Part 1

In this episode, you'll learn:

• How I plan my year
• New Year's Resolutions
• Vision
• Mission
• Values
• Strategy

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Transcript

There’s a wonderful quote from former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower who said “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”.
It’s that idea that while your plans may change, the real value in planning comes from the strategizing and thinking through the various steps you need to achieve, the skills you need to acquire and the connections you need to make to reach your goals.

Hi, I’m James Taylor, business creativity keynote speaker and in today’s episode I’m going to take you through how I plan my year, and why I don’t make New Year’s resolutions.

Every December/January time since I was 16 years old I’ve sat down with a notebook and pen to reflect on the previous 12 months and look forward to where I wanted to go next. However pretty early on I discovered that making ‘New Year’s Resolutions’ didn’t really suit my personality. I’d write out all these resolutions only to feel anxious and overwhelmed. If I stopped failed in one of my resolutions after a few days I’d feel terribly guilty.

Now if your the kind of person who gets really fired up by New Year’s Resolutions and they work for you then stick with them. However if resolutions aren’t your thing I’d like to share how I plan my year and how you can too.

And here’s the most important idea upon which all my planning is based. I don’t think in terms of one year planning. The danger of using 12 months as your frame of reference is that for many things it’s too long and lacks the sense of urgency or alternatively it just feels too short and doesn’t allow you to connect it to your larger mission in life.

Instead I’d encourage you to do your planning in 90 day blocks of time. 3 months is enough time to get most projects accomplished but not too long for you to lose focus or interest.

The first thing I suggest you do when you you sit down with your notebook and pen is to really try and define or reconnect with your mission. We all have a limited amount of time on this little blue planet. What do you want to do with it? Why is the core thing that drives you? A mission is not something you achieve but rather something that propels you forward. It might be to make the world a more peaceful place, or to make people laugh through stories, or to reduce human suffering. In my case it’s to unlock the creative potential in a billion people worldwide. That’s my ‘why’. What’s yours?

Next I suggest that you list the top five values that are most important to you and their order of importance. Our core values are what we believe, and they are a great tool for making decisions. In my case I know ‘Learning” is one of my top values and ranks higher than financial abundance, so often I will decide to do projects because they offer more opportunity to learn rather than the money they will bring. What are your core values? What do you believe in?

Then we have to create a Vision for our life, to not just write it down but to be able to visualize in as much detail as possible, what we want to be, where we want to be and who we want to be with. You might have one sentence that sums up this vision but it will be even more powerful if you can have a vision board in your home or office or somewhere where you will see it everyday. I visualize it as my ideal week as this allows me to easily ask myself “how different was last week to the vision of my ideal week” and then change course accordingly.

Next I think about my strategy. This is your game plan, the major steps or areas of focus for how you’ll achieve your mission and vision. GE’s Jack Welsh wrote his strategy on the back of a cocktail bar napkin. I have my own five-step strategy to achieving my mission and it’s pretty simple. It’s important to remember that strategy is as much about what you decide NOT to do. You might also have different strategies for various parts of your business. For example your strategy for become a best-selling author is going to be different from that of building a million dollar consulting or coaching business.

Once you have your strategy then you need to begin to move towards implementation and focus. A simple tool for this is called a Balanced Scorecard. Let’s say for example you have four key parts of your strategy. You’ll want to know what the key performance indicators are for each of these parts. If part of your strategy is to spread your ideas through speaking publicly then you might have a lead indicator (how many conferences are you contacting and offering to speak at each month), a lag indicator (how many speaking bookings have you secured) and another KPI like how many times this week did you practice your speech.

By this stage you’ve identified your mission, values, vision, strategy and how you are going to measure progress. It’s almost like a plane which operates at 40,000ft, 30,000ft, 20,000ft and so on. When you get to around 10,000ft you are now deciding what your strategic initiatives are going to be. What are the three or four strategic initiatives or larger projects that will be taking 80% of your focus over the next 90 days.

In the next episode I’ll describe to you how to move from the strategic to the tactical and we really get into how to plan out your year in 90 day cycles. We’ll cover how myself and my team use 90 day objectives, targets and two week sprints to achieve more in less time.

Until then I’d love if you’d leave a comment on how you plan your year.