THE LIFESTYLE ENTREPRENEUR

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Personal Planning

In this issue:

-Newsletter update

-Quarterly planning

Hi all,

I’m really excited for these next few newsletters!

1. Today is my 50th weekly newsletter, so I’m approaching 1 year of weekly newsletters!

2. I’m going into quarterly planning next week, and am excited to share my process as it evolves each quarter, to help you in your planning journey

3. I’m going to be spending some time determining what goals I have for the newsletter in year 2 and leveraging it better to meet my goals

My KOLBE score is 5-5-8-2

• 5 Fact Finder

• 5 Follow Through

• 8 Quick Start

• 3 Implementer

The 8 Quick start means I follow a ready, fire, aim approach to many things in life. This newsletter is one of them.

My preparation was generally:

1. What are the content pillars I’ve narrowed down on based on my LinkedIn writing this past six months (that’s how long I’d been writing when I launched it)

2. What’s the easiest platform I should use (I chose beehiiv)

With those two decisions, I then just started writing and posting.

Since the first post, I mostly have dreamed up the topic at some point each week, and the written it in one sitting on Friday or Saturday (usually Saturday morning if I’m being honest).

There’s not much strategy to it at this point.

While I know I’m not going to make the newsletter my top priority this next quarter, I also know that putting a little strategy behind it can benefit me in many ways:

1. Creating a first draft and then a review before posting will dramatically improve my writing quality - and improving my writing is a long-term goal of mine.

2. Doing newsletter first can be a foundation for more content ideas for social media - which is important as I work to step up my LinkedIn content game and also add additional platforms in the next six months (hello video).

3. Creating a conscious process around growing my newsletter will benefit me in the long-term in numerous ways.

So this first part is a summary of where I’ve been this first year of writing a Newsletter, and a look into my thought process going forward.

I’ve loved the discipline, improvement in writing, creative expression, and feedback from friends and new readers on things they’ve liked so far.

And I’m looking forward to evolving this thing over the coming years!

Quarterly Planning

It’s time to go through another round of quarterly planning for myself. This is an exciting time, 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 next few newsletters will be devoted to my process, with the intention of documenting my journey, along with helping you in your quarterly planning - whether you’ve been doing it for years, or are trying it for the first time.

A note about timing - My quarter is one-month later than the calendar year - so the end of my quarter was 7/31 - which is why the planning comes right now.

I may start adjusting the dates of my posts at some point, but also may not because most of my writing is personal planning, and I think there’s benefit to having a lag from our quarterly business planning, which can be pretty intensive.

Here is my previous post from 6 months ago about my planning process.

This newsletter goes into great detail regarding my process, specifically the areas I update:

• Wheel of Life

• Personal VTO

• Weekly Scorecard

• Daily Journal

Today I want to lay out how I structure my day, which is coming up next Friday.

The point of a personal planning 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, next week I’ll review how my planning day went and what I want to improve:

• Complete Wheel of Life

• Review previous quarter

• Review quarterly scorecard rollup

• Review Personal Vision/Traction Organizer (VTO)

• Set new quarter

• IDS - go through my issues list and solve a few issues

For this quarter’s planning session I’m sequestering myself in my office with no meetings that day, and am going to spend a portion of the day with no phone or computer - just printouts of my planning docs.

I’m going to sprinkle in self care breaks to make the day feel good and enjoyable, and also associate planning with fun. They will include:

• Morning workout

• Lunch from Brasa - my favorite restaurant (I’ll ride my bike there and back as a break)

• An outdoor meditation on a break

• A few walks around the neighborhood

• An afternoon sauna session

I’m pumped for this day - It’s like a treat for myself, a spa for my brain.

I’m also excited to report my results and next quarter’s plan next week!

Talk to you next week,

Mike

Thanks for reading The Lifestyle Entrepreneur

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