Transcript #146 Get Going to Review Your Yearly Goals (Productivity)

Arise2Live Podcast

Transcript for Episode #146  ‘Get Going to Review Your Yearly Goals’

Intro:   Welcome to the Arise-2-Live podcast, episode #146: Get going on setting up your Annual Goal Review, that is time-block today a special time to do your yearly planning for next year and help bring freedom to your business and family life. Let’s get started with today’s episode..

Scott R. Weaver: Welcome to the Arise2live podcast. I am your host, Scott Weaver, and today I will be sharing a trick that I use, and many others use this, too. It is to get a step on being productive and to reduce stress by setting up a special time to review and plan.  Now, this episode is being released mid-November so you have time to set a date for your yearly planning session. In other words, find time now, as in today, so you can help yourself and your business next year.

Before we get too far down the road, I would like to share that I have introduced several new coaching packages for business owners. It is in a series that begins with creating your vision path to map out your future. A coaching package that dives deep into planning for profits and it ends with implementation of your plan. These three packages start where you are and guide you to where you need to be to reach your goals. At the end of this episode I will tell a bit more, but if you like, details are at Arise2Live.com/coaching.

Prepare to be Successful       1:43

The motivation of this episode is about preparing yourself to be successful by schedul your yearly goal review. It’s sort of like, planning to plan to be successful. At the time of this release, it’s mid November and it’s about 6 weeks till the end of the year. I am encouraging you to be intentional about scheduling time to figure out where you are and where you want to go.

Mapping out next year at high levels is what separates you from the competition.  “The separation is in the preparation.” That is how football star Russel Wilson puts it. Business owners and champions do this because there’s so many benefits.

Some people call the action to map out the next year an Annual Review, others call it Yearly Planning or Goal Setting, but whatever you call it, somehow it needs to get done. So, I’m here to say to be intentional about being intentional for your future.  This is a trick that business owners have in their playbook and you should be playing it.

The What  3:00

Before we get into the benefits, let me describe a little bit about what I’m talking about. An annual goal review and planning is setting aside intentional time to work on your business and future. Just like there are many ways as they call it, there are many ways that people do this. Some take a day or a half a day or so just to reflect on the previous year and take what has been learned and apply that to next year. Some take a week away from home just to get that focused time they need. In a past podcast episode, I suggested a series of 3 sessions: create time blocks for next year’s high priority events, updating your goals, and dreaming of what could happen.

The exact ‘how’ is not nearly as important as setting up time to do it. Just move forward and figure out the ‘how’ later. The time is now to put it on the schedule.

The Benefits or Why   3:59

So why do this at all? Well, taking time to be intentional to think things through by reviewing last year’s performance, updating your goals, and developing high-level plan for the next 365 days is basically a very good thing.

And here is a list of benefits for doing this. This is not an exclusive list but here it is.

• It sets the tone for the whole year, a positive tone that you can dance to and feel comfortable with. If you don’t set your own tone, someone else will and that generally is not a good thing for business owners.
• Planning can help set reasonable expectations of goals. Us business owners have been known to be very optimistic that the 5 or 10 simultaneous projects will all converge on the very scheduled day and on budget. Yeah, every time. We all know that it doesn’t. However, often a high-level year plan catches questionable assumptions, like realizing that certain employees might have to work, say 28 hours a day for 420 days next year to finish on time.  Yes, sometimes, bad ideas just need to be nixed early on before anybody knows about it and the yearly review is a good time to do that.
• Another benefit of doing next year’s overview is preventing double, or triple, booking of events and priorities, especially between business commitments and family and friends events. A couple of years ago, going through my annual time-block calendar I discovered that a business deadline and a family reunion were on the same week in summer. With 6 months notice, it was easy to adjust the business schedule to deliver early and have a stress free family reunion.
• Peace of mind and confidence by deciding things ahead of time when you can see the whole picture. The opposite is making on-the-fly decisions because you had a disastrous event on the weekend. That’s something to avoid.
• Along with peace of mind is writing a plan out that prevents your brain from constantly looping back and forth regurgitating information and thought process to figure things out.  Once you get that plan out and it’s on paper, or in your App, now your brain can work on solving problems that can move you forward instead of spinning your wheels.

Okay, I think you’re getting the message about the importance of  scheduling time now that is much easier than reworking and band-aiding things later throughout the year.

If You Have Your Spouse on the Review 7:04

On a side note, if you’re in a position to have a goal-setting time along with your spouse, there are some additional benefits that can help make life easier.

You can get on the same page as your spouse and that prevents surprises between upcoming business commitments and family priorities. It’s done very fast and in real-time. Being proactive is better than trying to smooth things over later. During one of my podcast interviews with Jennifer Uren, she said, “It’s all about the communication.”

Here’s a short list of benefits when you are including your spouse when doing your yearly planning:

• You get on the same page.
• You work out family priorities and business conflicts ahead of time.
• You build a better relationship.
• You get another viewpoint from someone who knows you and can tell if you are setting reasonable goals or not, a topic which I’ve already mentioned before.

Okay, hopefully, by now I have convinced you to hold your own yearly review and planning time.  So how do you get started on starting to plan?

Glad you asked!

Here are 6 Steps That Helps With the Setup and Preparation for Your Yearly Planning Time.             8:24

1. Pick a time that mostly works between now and mid-January.
   • Be realistic about your schedule and season of life. So pick a doable date and time.
   • My preference is a couple of days around New Year’s Day when no one will bother you because they are either comatose from sugar goodies or they’re recovering from the holiday celebrations. Either way, it’s a good downtime to get your planning done.
   • Don’t worry if you end up later in January. I have more than once because of traveling. 😊
   • The important thing is to get it done any way possible.

2. Pick a key word or phrase for next year. Some people call it a theme.
   • For example, this present year my key word was “planting season”. After my move to Franklin, TN, last year I had a lot of planting to do. A lot of seeds put in. Next year is technically growing the seeds I planted, but farmers don’t put “Growing” on plants, instead they water and they weed. So, I’ll be watering my seeds so they grow. Hopefully that makes sense.

3. Be accountable.
   • Tell people in your inner circle that you are going to have a planning session for next year. Then you just might be a little embarrassed if you don’t do it or they’ll remind you. Either way, you can start moving forward. If you’ve invited your spouse, they might be more excited about planning for next year than you. Whatever, it takes to get you to follow through with people and being accountable, that’s what you need to do.

4. Gather a few productivity tools to help you focus.
   • Nothing fancy. In the show notes I have links to my SMART goals worksheet and Yearly time-block spreadsheet.
   • There’s many different tools and methods out there covering all sorts of styles, so very likely there’s one that will fit your schedule and style.

5. Actually, go do it.
   • Take action, be determined.
   • Don’t let the urgent things get in the way.

6. Finally, reward yourself.
   • It can be something simple, like ice cream or taking the whole family out for dinner, or watching a movie.
   • The reward can be something to look forward when you’re in the dry parts of planning.

6 Steps for Planning Time     11:19

Again, the six steps are: Pick a time that works for you, pick a key word or phrase for the year, be accountable, gather a few productivity tools, actually do it, and reward yourself.

There you go, in this episode, I covered the benefits why you and your business need to have an annual review and planning time. I also covered the 6-steps so that you can intentionally set up time so that you can have a Yearly Goal Setting meeting. It’s planning to plan. Please don’t get hung up over the how, just time block according to your style and your season of life. Three, 1 hour sessions is better than none. Still, if you are in a very complicated season of life with lots of moving parts, taking a full week away from the storm could have huge payouts.

Now I know this episode did not have the most logical reasons in it, but the point is not some theoretical discussion. It is to help you to help yourself to have a great next year.

The Annual Review and Planning action step is a powerful tool and trick for us business owners. So, get going now to set up your annual goal review.  After all, we all want you to Arise2Live.

Sponsor:    Arise2Live Coaching Packages      12:53

This week my new coaching offering for business owners went live. More details are on the Arise2Live.com website. But here’s a brief overview.

The coaching is in three packages, a step process of Vision-> Plan-> Implement.  Due to the variety of coaching clients that I have, it seems that I can better serve business owners with separate packages than just one super-sized package that I’ve had in the past.

The first coaching package, Vision, is creating a vision path to the future and this effort to figure out where you are going. It lasts about a month in duration and it covers 5 areas of life and business to create a holistic, achievable dream.

The second step is the Planning. This package is pretty intense and serious about improving your profitability using my A2L ProfitLoop System. The outcome is an actionable plan to improve operations and financial performance. It is targeted for business owners that have been in business for more than a year and have revenues at least $250K. When revenues are under that, this system is probably an overkill.

The Implementation Package is a 4-step system that has monthly coaching to execute on the plan, at the same time, you will be learning timeless business principles that you can use for the rest of your life. The duration of this coaching varies due to company size, but it usually last about a year.

Please check these new coaching packages out on the Arise2Live.com or refer a business owner friend. That would be great. I appreciate it. I look forward to helping business owners achieve their dreams.