Setting goals in January sounds so fun… until it’s June and you realise you haven’t actually moved any of those goals forward. So how do you actually move forward on your goals – they key is actually to think in 90 day chunks.
Why 90 Days Is The Ultimate Planning Period
If you’ve ever set yearly goals and never hit them (or even worse, never started working on them) you’ll realise that 12 month goals are not actually the best. The reason that we choose 90 days to work on our goals is that it’s a much more realistic time frame to get things done. Looking at the next 3 months you have a reasonably good idea of what you might be able to accomplish. Plus it’s enough time to work on projects without getting bored and wanting to move onto something else.
The 90 Day planning framework is broken down into 3 steps:
- Plan your Next 90 Days
- 2 Week Sprints
- Daily Planning
Plan Your Next 90 Days
STEP 1: Reflect on the last 90 days
First things first, you want to get into the right mindframe to be able to plan for the next 90 days. So it’s important to look back on what you achieved – trust me you’ll be surprised. Now of course you want to look back at what didn’t work out – but do that at another time. This is purely to put you in the right mindrame.
Ask yourself:
- What amazing things were achieved?
- What went particularly well?
- What do you want to celebrate
STEP 2: Set some wild goals
We’re all good at dreaming big and now is your opportunity. No idea is a dumb idea. This is your time to go wild on what you want to accomplish in the next 90 days. Do’nt worry about filtering. You can do that in step 3.
Ask yourself:
- What opportunities are coming up and how can you capitalise on them?
- List your areas of responsibility & what needs to happen for each?
- Brain Dump – aim for the sky – go crazy with wild ideas.
STEP 3: PRIORITISE & Breakdown
Now that you’ve got all your wild ideas in place it’s time to prioritise and breakdown your goals into realistic plans. You might need to get rid of some projects that don’t fit in. But you’ll end up with a great list of projects at the end.
Focus on:
- Be realistic of what you can get done
- Break it down into month 1, month 2, month 3
- Breakdown each project into manageable chunks and actions
THE TWO WEEK SPRINT
Now that you have planned your 90 days it’s time to TAKE ACTION. This happens in 2 week sprints and you do 6 x 2 week sprints each 90 days. 2 Weeks is enought time to get a good chunk of things done.
Here’s how to plan your 2 week sprints.
- Break each of your projects down into the actions you can perform in the next 2 weeks
- You’ll do 6 x 2 week sprints in the 90 days
- Be specific. List Who, What, When, Where?
THE DAILY PLAN
Now you’ve got a plan for the next two weeks it’s time to really MAKE IT HAPPEN. And this happens in the day to day. So, planning your days is super important if you want to make MAJOR things happen in your business. Here’s some tips on daily planning.
List the BIG 3
List 3 BIG things that you need to accomplish today. These are tasks that will take between 60-90 minutes to do. In reality you cannot do more than 3 of these (you’re not superhuman). PLUS you’ve got plenty of other day to day tasks to keep you busy, so remember these are 3 things that are going to MOVE YOUR GOALS forward.
Once you know what those 3 BIG things are – schedule the time in your calendar to get those things done.
For all your other tasks, try to ‘batch’ them together. So for instance if you have a few emails to write or calls to make – try to do them all at the same time or calls. That way your headspace doesn’t need to change from one task to the next.
And the best time to plan your day is actually the night or the afternoon before. That way you can walk into your day ready to CRUSH IT and achieve your goals.
Over to you – how do you plan for success in your goals? Maybe you’ve got a cool planning hack – let us know in the comments here.
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