Hello everyone! Welcome to the fifth installment of this blog series. Today we’re going to focus on the third and final question you must answer to make 2018 your best year yet: How will you execute your plans? By now, you’ve come up with ideas and mapped out ways to improve yourself and your business. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s easy to brainstorm early in the year and come up with a plan. The hard part is figuring out how to make it happen. Life doesn’t always go smoothly, so how do we execute our plans regardless of what’s going on?
Let’s think about the natural rhythms of our world. One of these rhythms is the day itself. The other rhythms occur in weekly, monthly, and yearly segments. We also have seasons or quarters. I want to encourage all of us to commit to consistency with these rhythms once our plans are in place. This is the only way to ensure your efforts to make 2018 your best year are successful.
Maintaining consistency with rhythms might mean taking 10 minutes each morning to plan the upcoming day, or a daily huddle with your team where you discuss what needs to be done. Or maybe you take stock of things on a weekly basis and devote a bigger chunk of time than you do during your daily planning sessions. Perhaps you look at the plan on a deeper level and assess what you want to accomplish during the next week. You can do a similar review with your team as well.
In short, you need to hold yourself and your team accountable. That’s why so many people like having a coach, we make it easier for them to stay on track. Accountability is key so you need to focus on how best to implement it. When it comes to planning on a monthly scale, you might need a couple of hours since you’ll be covering much more than daily or weekly goals. You might even spend half a day with your company going over these things. This gives you a chance to review your goals and start thinking through the next month. Ask yourself how you did during the month that’s nearing its end. How did it go? What can be improved to make the upcoming month even better than this one?
With quarterly assessments, you may want to consider getting away for a full day. This is where you think, plan, and review what has and hasn’t worked the past quarter so you can apply it to the next one. When we move to yearly reviews, you might want to get away for more than one day. This is when you plan the major stuff. Think big, as if you’re an airplane looking down on your life. Plot out the big picture. I want to urge everyone to figure out the rhythm for the daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly execution of our plans. We can talk a big game, have great strategies, and come up with brilliant ideas, but nothing will get done if we don’t follow through on them.
There’s more to this question, but your time is precious and I don’t want to burden you guys with an overly long post. Please join me again for the sixth and final installment of this series, where we’ll discuss a few more points regarding the execution of your plans. Until then, have a better than amazing day!
