Quarterly Planning

Read time - 4 minutes

It’s time to go through another round of quarterly planning!

I’m particularly excited about this quarter, because I’m also hosting my first personal planning session this Friday in my office.

This is a free session, on 9/26 from 3-5pm - if you’re local in the Twin Cities you’re invited - here is the registration link.

I love quarterly planning, because a majority of my professional work is leading quarterly planning sessions for leadership teams, and I’m growing to love the personal planning portion for myself.

The point of a personal planning is similar to quarterly business planning - in business we say we want teams to step away from the day to day and “work on” their business.

In personal planning we want to step away from our day to day and “work on” our lives.

Doing this consistently with a good process allows us to move towards living life by design vs life by default:

Life by Default: Living reactively without clear goals or intentional direction, allowing circumstances and external influences to shape your path.

Life by Design: Living proactively with purpose, setting intentional goals and making deliberate choices to shape your desired future.

99% of humans live their lives by default. Most don’t have the luxury of designing their lives.

Those of us who do have that luxury, have an opportunity to design their lives exactly how we want to do that.

Planning is what allows this.

Here’s my agenda for a planning session:

Rough agenda for a personal quarterly planning session. This can take from 90 minutes to a full day depending on how you structure your day:

1. Take 15 minutes and think and write down things you’re grateful for. Just make a list and think, no distractions

2. ⁠Rate your life according to the following attributes on a score from 1-10. Don’t overthink it, it gets more relevant and easier to score after you’ve done a few:

Attributes: ⁠Career Where you Live Money Physical Fitness Mental Health Organization & Planning Friends & Family Relationship Sex Personal Growth Fun & Recreation Spirituality

1. Looking at those numbers - take 10-15 minutes to do another brain dump of challenges, problems, areas you’d like to work on or improve. Just make a list of whatever comes to mind.

2. ⁠Choose 1-7 priorities over the next 90 days. Make them SMART

3. Choose 3-10 weekly measurables to keep you on track. For example, if your goal is “lose 10lbs” then one of your measurables could be “workouts per week”, and another could be “days met macros goal”

4. Find an accountability partner - I use my practice manager and we report our scorecard in our weekly meeting.

5. Execute

The biggest hurdle most people have to this is thinking they need to do it all perfectly, so they don’t start at all. Not true. You simply need to start, and if you do it every quarter, you’ll get better at it. I promise.

For this Friday’s session we’ll do a focused version of this planning, and attendees will leave with a set of priorities and scorecard items for the quarter.