THE LIFESTYLE ENTREPRENEUR

Read time - 4 minutes

My Personal Planning Process

In this Issue:

• Why is planning effective

• How to make planning stick

• My planning tool

Detailed planning is required in successful businesses.

There are plenty of successful businesses that don’t have a comprehensive planning process, but I’d wager there are zero great companies that don’t do planning.

It’s so engrained in corporate culture that one of the biggest complaints of public companies is they plan too much for the quarterly results, and not enough for the long-term.

Because of it’s ubiquity, I’ll assume all of you have participated in a quarterly planning process professionally.

But how many of you have a planning process for your personal, or overall life?

My unimpressive history with planning

At 44, I’ve lived 176 quarters.

And although I’ve been doing quarterly planning for businesses for over a decade, I’ve only planned my personal life for about 12 quarters.

In my first 20 years I’d never heard about planning and definitely wouldn’t have participated unless forced to.

In my 20s I wasn’t exposed to planning in the Marine Corps at all. We didn’t operate on a timeline basis, rather a mission preparedness and deployment cycle basis.

I went to business school at Georgetown - I don’t think there were any classes on business systems or planning cycles. Although I was exposed to the nuances of public companies at that point so that’s likely when I started thinking about a quarterly cycle.

In corporate america at 3M, in 2007, is when I started using it. 3M lived by the quarter, but at the individual product line level it wasn’t as emphasized as one might think.

When I started my first company in 2009 I didn’t use quarterly planning. Because it was a recurring fitness business, I did everything monthly.

And all planning was pretty loose and informal.

I was in the early wave of CrossFit’s growth, so we couldn’t really mess up our initial business growth, although we often tried.

I grew for 4 years without any detailed business planning process.

Then when my partners were prepping to launch Alchemy 365 in 2014, I read the book Traction, by Gino Wickman.

This book outlines the principles of the small business system - Entreprenurial Operating System (EOS).

That book changed everything for me. Within weeks we had hired an EOS Implementer who lead our quarterly sessions and planning.

From that point on, in every company I’ve been involved in, has participated in the EOS process, which involves a simple but comprehensive 10 year, 3 year, 1 year, and quarterly plan.

Each quarter every company spends a whole day working on the business and planning the next quarter.

It’s an exceptional process.

13 years later I’ve participated in quarterly planning for at least one, often more, businesses every quarter.

But despite seeing solid business results over this period, I didn’t start any meaningful personal planning until a few years ago.

Why would I do that? I know the benefits of planning, and why it works.

I’ve seen the results myself.

But every quarter went by without me sitting down for a few hours and planning.

The main reasons:

• I was “too busy” - I spent a lot of my early entrepreneurial days burning the candle at both ends.

• I thought I needed to spend a whole day planning - In my head I needed to go to a remote cabin for a full day to reflect and do planning. Because there was no way that was going to happen with twins at home, and then Baby Alex, there was no way I was going to do planning.

• Lack of discipline - Being strategic about my career and laying things out has always been a bit of a blind spot for me.

It’s so easy to not start it, because life can go pretty well without it.

But planning is definitely one of those things that, once you finally start it and stick with it, you say to yourself “I wish I started that long ago”.

Why is planning effective?

Planning works. There are many reasons for it based on human psychology, but I’m no academic so first I’ll just say - planning works.

And I’ll point to two main themes:

• Strategic vision and alignment

• Accountability

Strategic Vision

"If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.” - Lewis Carroll

Without having any direction or vision about what we’re working towards in life, we are just spinning the wheel hoping that great things will happen.

And while for most of us who are lucky in the world we were born in, things will likely go pretty well just by spinning and hoping.

But having some direction gives us a north star to work towards.

And that long-term direction doesn’t need to be too detailed, because a 10 year horizon is too long for detailed plans ayways.

We just need a general direction, that gets more detailed as the window gets shorter.

Accountability

“What gets measured gets managed” - Peter Drucker

Humans are extremely complex creatures with unbelievable powerful brains.

Humans are also very simple creatures that require habit, structure, and frameworks to operate in life.

And accountability is one of the most powerful forces on the human brain.

And going from a vague, undefined goal, to a well defined goal with specific measurables that are checked in on periodically, vastly improves the likelihood of staying on track and hitting that goal.

We see it in our businesses every quarter.

It works in our personal lives as well.

Benefits of Planning

Have I convinced you to make a quarterly plan yet?

If not, here are some specific benefits I’ve experienced in planning life out:

• Practice gratitude & emphasize positivity and abundance in life

• Be deliberate and strategic about life - live by design instead of by default

• Reflection - this forces reflection and allows us to course correct and identify where we need to improve

• Slow down the speed of time - reflecting on previous periods - quarter, week, day, has a slowing effect on time and makes previous periods less of a blur

• Get aligned with your partner and family - Sharing and involving your family is a powerful tool in building aligned relationships and family life

How to make planning stick

One of the primary reasons I love EOS is it’s simplicity.

Running a business is so unbelievable complex, the last thing you need is a complex tool to follow. That’s recipe for failure and frustration.

EOS is simple. When you first look at it seems too simple - that’s why it’s so elegant.

Your personal planning needs to follow similar attributes if you’re going to stick with it:

• SMART - Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely

• Simple - Keep it as simple as possible. Once it’s gone well for a few quarters, simplify it some more until it’s something you can do no matter what’s going on in life

• Sustainable - Give yourself 1 hour to do it the first time, if you end up taking longer that’s fine, but don’t build some elaborate all-day to do it. Because next year you won’t have time and you’ll quit. Make it easy to comply with.

A simple planning tool

Are you annoyed I promised my planning tool but made you wade through a complex web of text, like when you want a chicken soup recipe but have to read through the cook’s entire life story before getting to the F***ing chicken soup recipe?

If you are you also my be annoyed with how simple my tool is.

But remember, simplicity is key. For me it seriously has to be so simple I can do it quickly each day, week, quarter, and year, or I really won’t stick with it.

And you won’t either if you don’t already have a detailed planning process.

Ok here it is.

My planning horizons are done, from top to bottom:

• Annual

• Quarter

• Week

• Day

My annual and quarterly planning process involves:

• The wheel of life - Every quarter I review and score with my partner

• The EOS Personal & Family VTO

• My own personal weekly and daily journal - inspired by multiple sources, including The Five Minute Journal, and the book “Storyworthy” by Matthew Dick

The wheel of life

Tony Robbins is attributed to creating the wheel of life. I love it because it’s simple, comprehensive, and creates a running quantitative scorecard of how you feel about life each quarter:

Each quarter my partner and I sit down and rank 1-10 on each of these elements.

This tool can be customized for your specific needs, and each category can be narrowed into sub categories if you like - e.g. health could be broken into Physical and Mental.

The first time you do it you’ll find you need to normalize a bit and remind yourself to rank yourself right now, based on how life feels today.

It’s very easy to try and compare your scoring with some other point of time, that’s not the point.

The point is to get a score down on paper, discuss it with your partner, and use the information to drive your thinking into how you’re going to plan out your life going forward.

The EOS Personal & Family VTO

You can download the EOS free tools here

I love EOS’s tools and frameworks. I’ve used them for 10 years now, they are simple, comprehensive, and effective.

The way to start using this tool - spend an hour filling it out by yourself or with your partner.

Going back to the rules - SMART, Simple, Sustainable, don’t take too long or get caught up the first time around.

The power in all of these tools is the repetitive nature of it.

First time around you’re just filling it out to the best of your ability. The power really comes when you revisit and update it each quarter and year.

Most of the VTO is self-explanatory, except rocks.

Rocks are the top priorities for the quarter - e.g. Successfully complete the Chicago marathon on 10/8/23 by following my laid out training plan with 90% compliance.

Each quarter you review the plan, and update the next quarter.

You only update the rest of the plan annually - when you set the next year’s goals and measurables.

The cadence with the VTO is:

• Fill out the plan

• Review the plan each quarter and update the next quarter’s plan

• Update the plan as needed each year when you set the next year’s plan

Weekly and Daily Journal

Doing quarterly and annual planning will take you far. But the right way is to integrate weekly and daily planning.

Here’s my simple weekly and daily journal. I do it every morning, 7 days a week, before I start any other work.

Weekly:

• Did I complete last week’s priorities?

• Highlight of last week

• Score last week 1-10

• What would have made last week better?

• 3 Priorities for the week

Daily:

• 3 Things I’m grateful for

• 1 Story from yesterday

• Score yesterday 1-10

• What could have made yesterday better?

• How I’m feeling today 1-10

• 3 Things to make today great

• 1 Affirmation

That’s it, super simple and it takes less than 5 minutes each day to do this.

I keep all this in a Notion database so I can sort and score and create averages.

Wrapping it all up

This overall process can be expanded to full-day planning sessions if you want.

But to effectively complete it, it takes:

• 2 hours per quarter with your partner

• 10 minutes each weekend

• 3-5 minutes per day

The time commitment is miniscule, the impact is tremendous.

The coolest thing about this process, is you don’t need to plan anything out to start.

Just take the above, block 2 hours today or tomorrow, and do it.

Log everything and go about your life.

Tomorrow, log your daily journal in the morning or evening.

And next quarter do it again.

You probably won’t notice anything big the first quarter, but after 3-4 you’ll start noticing some really interesting things.

Good luck, and I’m excited to check in with you a few quarters from now and see how you like it.

If nothing else, try it and prove me wrong so you can tell me this process doesn’t work.

Thanks for reading, it’s 50 degrees and sunny in Minnesota with fall leaves popping, I’m going to stir up some trouble with the kids, baby Gabriel, and Erin.

Talk to you next week,

Mike