Daily Planning Habits to Keep You on Track
Are you hitting your goals? Have you ever felt like you are constantly being distracted in your business? Like every time you read somebody’s newsletter, you want to try something different?
Perhaps there are people in your community who are doing other businesses, like selling supplements or essential oils. And it feels like maybe if you did that business, it would just be easier.
Another month passes, and then another quarter, and, yet again, you still haven’t reached your goals. It still feels like you’re just not doing what you should be doing.
I hear this story from entrepreneurs all the time! Just the other day, I was talking to a potential client.
She told me, “Monica, it just feels like I was asleep for the last two quarters. It’s already June, and I don’t know where I am or what I’m supposed to be doing. I feel like such a mess.”
Can you relate? If you’re like most entrepreneurs, the answer is probably Yes.
Working alone as an entrepreneur makes it really hard to stay on track. For some of us, it’s hard to even figure out which track we’re supposed to be on.
I totally get it. And it’s why I created my Breakthrough Planner.
My Breakthrough Planner is not a planner where you write down everything that you’re supposed to do each day.
See, what I’ve found is that, as entrepreneurs, we are literally information collectors. We are class junkies. We love to buy programs. And because of that, we’re ingesting information all day, every day, whether we consciously mean to or not.
That information can cause confusion. It can cause overwhelm. And most importantly, it can cause distraction. We end up working for an entire day or even a week without actually hitting our goals.
It’s like we’re shooting arrows at a target, but we’ve forgotten where the bullseye is. So we continue to shoot arrows and maybe we’re even hitting the board. We think we’re hitting the bullseye, but we’re not – because we’ve lost track of where the bullseye is.
So let’s try a new approach.
I want you to come up with three 90-day goals.
Every single quarter, the first 90-day goal should be a revenue goal – write down how much revenue you want to generate.
The second and third 90-day goals are project goals – choose two multi-step projects that you want to accomplish over the course of the quarter, like updating your website, hiring a new bookkeeper, or making and posting a new video every single week.
Creating those 90-day goals is awesome, but it’s only the first step. Most entrepreneurs completely miss the next and most crucial step: write down your goals every single day when you sit down to work.
If you don’t, then you end up creating a daily to-do list that seems good, that makes you feel like you’re accomplishing a lot of things, but is actually not helping you hit your goals.
Whether we realize it or not, when we get in the habit of checking off our to-do lists, our lizard brains ends up running the show. Our lizard brains want us to do things that are comfortable – things that are safe. Things that we know how to do.
Our 90-day goals, on the other hand, are projects that take us out of our comfort zones – maybe to the point of rejection or delayed satisfaction. By actively creating our to-do lists from these 90-day goals, we can push ourselves to do the things that are uncomfortable.
Every time you make your daily to-do list, your three most important tasks for the day must come from your 90-day goals. Get in the habit of asking yourself, Will this action item help me hit a 90-day goal? And if the answer is No, then don’t do it.
If that question is difficult to answer, then get some help – this is a great question to bring up with your business coach.
To help you stay on top of all of this, I created a daily section in the Breakthrough Planner.
Each day you can write down your 90-day goals and your three corresponding action items. Next to each action item is a checkbox that asks you to confirm that the task is related to your 90-day goals.
It’s a three-part process: writing down those 90-day goals, making your to-do list from the goals, and checking the boxes to make sure that your action items track with your goals.
That’s a big reason why I recommend that, if you’re starting off fresh with this habit of goal-setting, you use my planner, at least for your first 90 days.
If you’d like to order a planner, you can do so at BreakthroughPlanners.com. Right now, when you order the Breakthrough Planner, you also get access to a Breakthrough Planner Day with me.
On Breakthrough Planner Days, we sit down and fill in the planner together – and we’re having one on June 24, which is coming up quickly!
No matter what kind of planner you’re using, whether it’s my Breakthrough Planner or another notebook or planning system, I invite you to adopt this practice of writing down your 90-day goals every day and confirming that your to-do list comes from those goals.
