THINK Big 2-Minute Blog: Creating a Daily Business Plan
By: Jon Dwoskin
When it comes to business planning, it takes extreme ownership, extreme urgency, extreme discipline and resilience to come to the table every day ready to go. One invaluable tool is a daily business plan. Here are the pillars for building your own.
Pillar one: Master your calendar
When planning out your day, think of your calendar in 15-minute increments. Segmenting it that way makes you effective and tight.
Color code your entries into activities you get paid for and those you don’t. Differentiate between a follow-up, a to-do, an appointment and other tasks. This helps you easily see your money-making activities versus your cleanup activities.
Pillar two: Top priorities first
Do your cleanup work the night before so you can start your mornings with your most important tasks and meetings. That’s where your energy is the highest, so it’s the most effective time to tackle the biggest stuff.
Pillar three: Be realistic
Small wins are what keep us going day after day. Define what success means for you each day so you can celebrate that sense of achievement, rather than only setting gigantic goals that take forever to achieve.
Pillar four: Delegate
Examine your calendar to understand what your value is, your price per hour, and how much of your time is spent making less than that. Do you need a virtual or executive assistant to make your days more productive?
Pillar five: Set your metrics
Put in your calendar all of your yearly metrics, and then reverse-engineer to the quarter, the month and the day. Do this by adding in all the calls, meetings, emails, etc. you’ll need. Always insert into your calendar the top three specific and measurable leading activities that you need to do for the day.
Pillar six: Plan your meetings
Whether it’s with your team, your clients or your prospects, you should have a minimum number of meetings every day. Be it in person, over the phone or via Zoom or Microsoft Teams, daily face-time activities with clients and/or prospects is vital. Prospect every day, no matter what your pipeline looks like.
Pillar seven: Course correct
If you don’t get something done today, correct course so you’ve finished strong by the end of the week. Plan every single day the night before, and clean it up to make sure that you are focused and ready to attack the next day. This may require you to wake up 30 minutes earlier or stay in the office 30 minutes longer. But if you really want it, that’s what you’ve got to do.
Follow the monthly, weekly and daily plan and you’ll be so productive that you’ll end up working two or three years in one year. Taking ownership in everything you do makes you extremely efficient.
And extreme efficiency is a major pillar of Thinking Big!
Think BIG!
Jon
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