In my recent Office Organization Success ezine I talked about the importance of planning for your long-term business success.  This article generated a lot of responses from my readers, and here’s one question in particular that I thought applied to a lot of solopreneurs, and I’ve included my reply to:

Great article. Actually I did a plan for 2009 for the first time ever, thinking it’d help to get everything out of my head and onto paper. But its having the opposite effect – seeing all that I have to do is keeping me awake at night! Any suggestions?

My reply:

I’m so pleased you enjoyed the article.  About your planning… having everything down on paper in one place is very helpful in planning out what you want to do, but as you say, seeing it all together can be a little overwhelming – suddenly there seems so much to do

Here are a few suggestions which should help:

1.  Try not to plan out the whole year in advance – that in itself will cause you feelings of overwhelm.  Instead, plan by quarters.  So think ahead to what it is you’d like to get done this first quarter.  Is there a particular project you need to complete before you can move on to the next one?  This will determine your timeline.

2.  Once you know what you’d like to achieve in the first quarter, break it down into monthly activities, and from there into weekly activities.

3.  I would also take it a step further and plan everything out into daily activities so that you can work on something each day towards achieving your goal.

4.  Once you have your weekly (or daily) To Do list in place, only focus on the task that you are meant to be working on first – don’t worry about everything else you know you need to do.  For example, if one of your goals is to launch a digital product in the first quarter there are many tasks associated with this such as putting together the product, creating the sales page, adding it to your shopping cart, planning the promotion etc. etc.  The only task you need to focus on first is getting the product together – don’t worry about the other elements until you are ready to work on them.

I find putting all this information into a spreadsheet very helpful – and this is how I plan out my business activities.  Another great motivator is being able to cross off an activity as you complete it, and if you have all this planned out on a spreadsheet seeing what you’ve already achieved is a great incentive to completing your goal!

I hope this has helped, and do let me know how you get on.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Business Building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.