When one year is ending and a new one is beginning soon, we get so motivated to plan! It’s like a fresh start and that can fee really inspiring and motivating and pushes us to strategize and plan so we can reach our big hairy goals.
But you don’t have to wait for a new year to plan out the next – do it anytime you’re feeling lost or confused or lacking motivation to get that “fresh start” feeling.
In this post I’m going to show you the 4 main steps to planning your entire year! I want to give you an overview of how to plan your year, so you’ve got a place to at least get started. If you’re feeling overwhelmed at the thought of planning out your whole year, feel stuck with it or you want to make sure you’re planning effectively and not being random about it, then read on! 😉
This involves looking back at your previous year and how that year went for you and your biz.
Ask yourself a lot of questions about how the year was, questions like:
✍️ What went well?
✍️ What didn’t go well?
✍️ What was challenging?
✍️ What lessons did you learn?
✍️ What do you want to keep doing?
✍️ What do you want to change or let go of?
Taking the time to reflect will give you clarity about how you want to move forward and in a way that feels good. ❤️
And this clarity also makes the upcoming prioritizing – step 3 – much easier! It’ll be easier for you to identify your top priorities and make decisions about what to work on and what to let go of or pass on (both during this planning process and throughout the year!)
I talk about braindumping all the time – I feel like it’s all I talk about LOL 😂
But it is soooooo good for so many reasons! By getting literally all your ideas, thoughts, goals, projects and to-do’s out on paper 📋 in one place (that is key, a braindump should be in just one place) it will reduce your overwhelm and stress, clear your head and give you a realistic picture of just how much you have on your plate.
Once it’s all on paper your brain can relax a little (or a lot!) because you’re not trying to remember and work through all this stuff in your head, and you can take a step back and get honest about where you’re at right now.
As with the reflection – step 1 – this makes your prioritizing and decision making step easier and allows you to move forward intentionally (meaning you are making plans for the important things and not just a bunch of random things in your biz).
—> 3rd Step: Prioritizing <—
Now this is a big topic all on its own, so I’ll do my best to sum it up!
Without priorities, you’re giving everything equal importance. 😮 And that is not good for your sanity or your business.
If everything is equally important you’re going to gravitate towards the easy and familiar things on your to-do list and/or react to stuff as it comes up during the day.
And the truly impactful and important things that you want to get done, and that will help your biz grow and thrive, will get pushed aside. 🤦
So pull out your top 3 priorities out of that massive braindump you did. A maximum of 3! Any more than that and things start to get scattered and overwhelming.
Some examples of big picture priorities you might set for the year are:
👉 Doing a major launch
👉 Creating a new product
👉 Growing your community by X number
👉 Writing a book
👉 Increasing your email list to a certain number.
They’re big projects.
There is a system to do this priority setting thing! I created an entire bootcamp on it, called The 5 Day Know Your Priorities Bootcamp that you can sign up for totally free, and you’ll get each step in your email inbox with video tutorials, worksheets and transcripts, so you can take it at your own pace.
So if you’re thinking “Dear gawd I have no idea where to start with this priorities thing!” the bootcamp is your answer.
Time for the last step to plan your year…drum rollllllllllll 🥁
—> 4th Step: Plan Q1 In Detail <—
It is way too overwhelming to plan out your entire year in detail 😭 And it doesn’t make sense to plan in detail too far in advance because things do change sometimes, and we want to leave enough room in our plans so that we can easily shift and adjust and pivot when we need to.
So plan your 1st quarter in detail and then create a very overarching outline and general plan for Q 2, 3 and 4, and that’s all that’s needed for now.
For each quarter you want to decide on and plan for about 3 🤟 major projects or goals (maximum).
You’ve already chosen 3x main priorities for your year, and now you’ll break those priorities down into 3x smaller goals or projects for each quarter, that are steps to achieving your priorities and take you closer to achieving those.
So using the previous example of “doing a major launch” during the year, of a product or a service you’ve created, it can be broken down like this:
👉 Q1: you’re going to create you plan, outline and strategy for the whole launch.
👉 Q2: you’ll get all the tech and funnels set up (this could take a whole quarter, especially if you have to learn a bunch of tech and funnel stuff!)
👉 Q3: you’ll be in launch mode (so lots happening!)
👉 Q4: you’ll be servicing your clients who signed up at launch time, teaching, fulfilling orders, doing whatever it is that you launched.
📩 If you’re wanting more support with all this planning stuff (so you can grow your business and income faster), get in touch here and tell me what’s up.
I really appreciate the way you laid this out – I quite like your framing of this, it makes it fair less overwhelming and daunting. I especially like you permission to start fresh whenever is best – “But you don’t have to wait for a new year to plan out the next – do it anytime you’re feeling lost or confused or lacking motivation to get that “fresh start” feeling.”
Glad you found this helpful Chelsea! And yes, I think that was the most important point I wanted to make – don’t wait, just do it! 😉 Happy planning!
I like how this is an easy to read process. Planning prevents added chaos in our lives and helps remove stress. Thanks for the post!
You’re so welcome Christa! Making things easy it my end goal so glad you found the post to be that way 🙂