A closer look into how to plan a successful year.
Do you want this coming year to be your most successful business year yet? Planning is said to be one of the most important techniques for becoming a successful entrepreneur.
You can plan a successful year by setting an overall theme or by implementing an impossible business bucket list.
If you want to plan for a successful year, you can:
- Set a theme for the year
- Reflect on the past year
- Rid yourself of cliche goals
- Plan your personal and professional goals separately
- Create a vision board
- Start small
- Impossible business bucket list
1. Set A Theme For The Year
If business success is the theme for the year, dissect what this means for you. What is personal success? What hurdles could you overcome to succeed this year?
Setting a theme will help to bring structure to planning and set out clear guidelines regarding what you want to achieve. This structure will later help you when breaking down the theme into smaller and more manageable goals.
Maybe you want to be more focussed this year, or perhaps you’d like to achieve a better work-life balance. Find your theme and the goals will start to form around this.
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2. Reflect On The Past Year
The best place to start before you plan the year ahead is to reflect on the business and personal year that has just ended. Self-reflection is said to be one of the most powerful tools for improvement.
Not only will this help you to identify issues where you may have lacked, but it will also help you to form the strengths that you can capitalise on next year.
Identify your business successes and failures and weave these into your future goals.
3. Rid Yourself Of Cliche Goals
Unspecific cliche goals such as losing weight, getting healthy, or having a successful business are unhelpful when planning ahead.
These goals are hard to achieve as they cannot be quantified easily. Don’t waste time with these unspecific goals and dig deeper into goals that you can monitor.
Reports have shown that the success rate of these cliche goals significantly reduces as time passes in the year, with only 46% of people sticking to their resolutions by the 6-month mark. Get specific with your goals and you will have a higher chance of completing your goals.
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4. Plan Your Personal & Professional Goals Separately
Write down all personal scheduled events and personal goals for the year ahead separately from that of your business goals. The separation will help you to prioritise a healthy work-life balance.
If you are a workaholic, you may also end up prioritising professional goals over personal goals if they are not separate.
5. Create A Vision Board
If you are a visual learner, creating a vision board is the perfect planning process for you. A vision board is a collection of images that will represent your year. Think big events, small events, and everything in between.
This will aid your manifestation journey and can lead you to complete goals quicker as you try to reach the milestones depicted on your vision board.
6. Start Small
When beginning the planning process, you do not want to overwhelm yourself with goals. These large goals may stress you - a year is a long time after all. Break the year down into manageable chunks of time, setting yourself long-term goals as well as shorter, more manageable goals.
Starting with 12 months, decide your biggest long-term business goals. Break these goals down into what you can achieve in 6 months. Still seems too far away to concentrate on? Break this down into a monthly plan, these small tasks and goals will all compile and help to complete your long- term goals.
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7. Impossible Business Bucket List
An impossible bucket list is a unique way to plan as you are directly taking action on items that you have set out in your plan. So how does this work?
You start with your main objective, and you then break this down into smaller chunks. When you have crossed off a goal, you get to add an extension onto that goal each time. For example, if you start with a goal of wanting to read more books, broken down this would look like this:
Read more books
This neverending method of planning and organisation will help you to consistently stick to goals and further your improvement.
What a successful year looks like will be different for everybody. Follow these steps to create manageable and trackable goals that will lead you to have a successful year.
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Written by Luthien for Tramshed Tech.
