085 - How to Plan Your Year

Do you ever find that it's halfway through January before you are ACTUALLY putting action into place? With the holidays and kids home from school, January seems more like a planning than a starting month for me. If you're in the same boat, I wanted to offer some resources on how to plan your year in terms of your blog and business. How to Plan Your Year Pen to Paper! What do you want to accomplish this year? This is the place to start. You need to have an idea of your goals and dreams before you can make concrete plans. I am a huge fan of brainstorming. It's a judgment-free time of ideas. You don't tell yourself what's good or bad or realistic or not realistic. You  put it ALL down. There is something so cathartic about putting everything on paper and seeing it. Yes, I DO mean literal paper. You don't have to do it this way, but writing with your actual hand on an actual piece of paper can be really helpful. Writing rather than typing activates a different part of the brain, so it's a good practice. Prioritize Once you have a list of things on paper, you can make some judgments. What is realistic? What can you REALLY get done? What goals or projects require learning or doing something else first? When you prioritize, you want to think about how much time a particular project takes. Both in terms of how big of a project AND if you already have the skills to complete that project. If you want to write an ebook, but don't know how to format so you bought a course on formatting that you first need to go through, that obviously adds on time to that particular project. It's also good to think about the ROI for a project. How much will it work for you once it's out in the world? Will it be building your email list while you work on the next projects on your list? Is it a sales funnel that will create revenue for you? Think about putting a project first that you can accomplish more quickly and that will be giving back to you once it's completed. Plan Your Calendar Finally, as you look at the goals and projects, put them in the context of your larger calendar year. What else do you have going on that you have to plan around? I'm talking about things like vacations, having a baby, big work events, or other things that will affect your productivity. You probably won't have time to complete a project if you are on a family vacation. (And that may ruin your vacation if you try.) You probably don't want to be promoting a new book if you're also signed up to promote someone else's course launch as an affiliate.