Why you need a planner that isn’t just a calendar.

Every day when you wake up you have a limited amount of time. How to manage this time to achieve productivity and success is probably one of the things people most search nowadays. The world is moving very intensely and we have more distractions than ever. It’s normal to struggle with keeping up with all tasks, appointments and “stuff” that pops up during the day.

Planners are a great way to organize your mind when you feel overwhelmed and overworked. Putting your life on paper helps you better understand what you need to do and how you are going to do it. There are many ways you can make a planner and its customizable for your specific needs. Let’s talk a little about how you can use your planner. Not as a calendar, but as a tool to make your life more enjoyable and your work more productive.

Time Management

Having a planner is all about getting work done more efficiently and achieving better time management so you can be successful. However, there’s another very important side to it, which is blocking time for personal life and your business. No one is free from personal problems, responsibilities and the need to take care of physical and mental health. It doesn’t matter how well you plan your business if you are constantly exhausted, unwell or worried about personal problems.

Planning your activities, like going to the gym, spending time with family, going out with friends, having nice meals and even time to do absolutely nothing, helps you commit to taking care of yourself. In exchange, you get more motivated and have more energy to work your best and get those awesome results you’re aiming for.

To-do lists help you visualize what needs to be done, but they are only ever good if you take action. Building a to-do list is important for clearing headspace and making sure you don’t forget tasks and responsibilities. But, by itself, it doesn’t maximize productivity the way schedule does. Instead, chances are you end up falling in Parkinson’s Law.

Parkinson’s Law states that tasks will expand to fill the minutes you give them. That translates into “The amount of time that one HAS to perform a task is the amount of time it WILL TAKE to complete the task”. Limiting the time you spend on each task and giving yourself deadlines, keeps tasks from taking longer than it should. 

That is why having a planner that clearly states what you’ll be doing, when and for how long is a great tool to help you become more productive. You’ll be cutting down procrastination and focusing on one task at a time. Multitasking is proven to be non-efficient. This will also give yourself a sense of accomplishment and relief.

Planning your business

One of the most important things you have to do when running a business is setting goals and objectives. Planning, on the other hand, is what it takes to accomplish these goals and objectives. The better you plan, the better your results are. Yearly, quarterly, and monthly planning is the foundation of your business. 

You should have yearly plans and objectives so you can see the direction your business is going, and where you want to be in a year. Nevertheless, don’t forget Parkinson’s law. You need to have shorter windows of time planned so things can stay on track. Quarterly, monthly and weekly planning are what make the day-to-day workflow of your business run smoothly towards achieving those yearly goals and objectives. 

Every business changes; it might be seasonal changes, the natural process of expanding, or just something that suddenly starts or stops working. You should consider possible changes when planning. That guarantees you both make the most out of the good changes and handle any bad ones. Planning will make it easier to notice those changes. You’ll build a feedback system that you can use to further improve your business.

Physically writing your plan helps you accomplish it. When you are writing you internalize and visualize how will thing unreveal. You become more motivated and you tend to stick to the plan, without giving up or forgetting anything. There are multiple ways you can write your plans down; on actual paper, a journal, using wall planners, online or digital planners. Sometimes you might have to try a few of those till you find the right system for you.

Business checkpoints

When you have a business, planning is necessary. However, it’s also important to understand that things don’t always go to plan. Setbacks, as well as opportunities, appear, and being flexible is very important to make sure you are not working against the current all the time.

A true business planner will have space to connect you with your business goals throughout the year.  Your business plan isn’t supposed to be set in stone and expected to be followed exactly as it was first created. On the contrary, a good plan has checkpoints that allow you to track the progress and adjust the plans accordingly. That means you are constantly monitoring your business and keeping work at its maximum efficiency. 

Another important feature is a space to evaluate your actions against your goals. You need to understand your progress, what is working and what needs to be improved. That’s how you see where your actions are taking you. Studying the effects of your actions keeps you from walking round in circles and puts you on track to achieving your goals. Have a space on your planner dedicated to doing this.

Checking in regularly allows you to pivot quicker, the sooner you notice a problem or a good solution, the sooner you can adjust. Have a great tracking system and checkpoints for the development of your business. That helps you to prevent small problems from turning into a crisis or getting stuck in routines that aren’t creating results.

Actions make things happen

Sitting down and waiting for something to happen is very unlikely to bring you any results. You only have control over the actions you take. Those actions are your tools to determine what will happen to your business. It is through your actions that your business gets shaped and if you don’t plan you’re them well you can’t expect your results to be great either.

Put your actions into your schedule, have time slots assigned to them, checkpoints and a specific order to build up to your goals. Understand not only how your actions are going to make things happen but also when. This way you can envision what your business will look like in a year or two and also correct your decisions if things start to slip off track.

You need to align your action with your goals, and the timing on track with the timeline you are trying to achieve. Planning and monitoring the effects of your actions on your business helps to keep you and your team from slipping away from your objectives.

Taking breaks is equally important, make sure to schedule those in too. That way you can recharge and ultimately become more efficient. Being overworked only makes you procrastinate more and you will be more prone to make mistakes you wouldn’t normally make. Having time for yourself, your family, physical and mental health is as important as anything else you can do for your business.

You can’t grow what you don’t measure

Writing tasks, goals, and objectives down and tracking them allows you to see where you are going and where you came from. With an established plan, you can quantify progress and adjust to produce the desired outcome. Without it, you’re stuck in a constant state of guessing and just roughly knowing where you’re at.

Informed choices are easier to make decisions upon. Being able to measure your progress based on your plans makes decisions much more efficient and increases the chances of making the right choices. You can better evaluate when it’s time to hire more people, get a new system, automate processes or scale up your business in any other way.

Having a record of your business gives you valuable information to be able to look back on and that can be used to accelerate your business growth. You can track what has worked or not worked in the past and see exactly how your business developed. That means you can learn both from your mistakes and your successes. 

Every company is unique and as a business owner, you add your own identity to yours. That’s why there is no magical formula that just works for everyone. If you measure progress you can create your own secret formula to success, which is customized to your unique needs. 

Take a look at my 2020 rockstar planner!!