Planning Your Business and Your Life for the New Year - Part 3

We're continuing with our Practical Planning Guide for Catholic Men at Work.

You've written your important goals down and they're somewhere where you can easily refer to them now and in the future. (I have four important goals and they're stored on my laptop's hard drive in a special folder where I can easily find them.) You've established a ten-year horizon to accomplish each goal. And by now you should have taken the step of setting a five-year objective for each goal. Now we break each goal into bite-sized pieces.

(By the way, if, for some reason, you're not happy with the goals you've written down, don't fret. Sometimes when you write something down, it looks different than when you just thought of it. That's one reason why it's so important to write goals down. If you're going to really pursue your important goals, you've really got to commit to that process. Ten years is a long time. If the goal doesn't "read" right, maybe you need to change it.

For more help on this point, pray about it, which you should do when considering any important matter, of course. Then re-read Part 1 and Part 2 of this Practical Guide for Planning Designed for Catholic Men you'll see how we used the four cardinal virtues to help us. Spend a little more time and you'll come up with the right goals for you.)

One other point. We started with the idea of planning our business. We determined our important goals. As you plan your business for the coming year, remember that achieving your business plan should also be perfectly consistent with the rest of your life. Put another way, as you you plan your business, you should find that your business plan will fit more logically, more seamlessly, into your whole life.

So look carefully at how your business planning helps you accomplish your important goals, and how this intersects with your whole life.

For example, if part of one of your goals turns out to be spending more time with your family, and your business plan calls for you being on the road 90% of the time, you're going to have to address this. Either you can spend more time with your family and maintain the business travel, or you'll have to consider changing the business plan that calls for all that road travel, or maybe even changing businesses.

Here's a tip: fold your business plan into your big financial or professional goal. (Remember, I suggested you have one financial goal.) That simplifies matters. Your business plan will clearly and directly serve one of your big important goals. A special benefit of this approach is that you'll probably find that it helps you work hard on your business plan - simply because it fits into what's really important.

Back to breaking down our goals. This is really easy and fun - it just takes a little time. (Remember, the hard part was coming up with the important goals.)

You've got your ten-year goal broken down into a five-year interim goal. Now take that and break that five-year interim goal into annual goals to get you to your five-year goal. Then break down the annual goals into monthly and, finally, weekly goals.

Be realistic here, but remain bold (don't forget fortitude and prudence will work well together if you maintain a prayerful attitude). You will arrive in due time at your weekly goals.

Again, write all this down.

Why stop with weekly goals? In fact, you don't. But once you have the weekly goals in writing, you refer to them at the beginning of each week and break that week's goal into daily goals. And that's where the rubber meets the road.

Let's face it, you've already got a whole host of pressing things to do when you look at each upcoming week - things that come from your business and personal life, right? But now, you'll be looking at your important goals every week - without fail. And you'll discipline yourself to make time to work on your important goals - in fact you'll treat them as a priority - while you handle all the stuff that comes up in life.

Without this little system, you'd only be reacting to what "happens" to you - with the occasional thought to spend more time with your family, or try to improve your professional skills, or market your business, or get to daily Mass, or say a rosary, or whatever. Now, all those important things you've decided you really want to accomplish will be staring you in the face each week. You won't forget about them; you'll make sure you don't let them slide.

Now, remember that ideally you have this annual plan done every year by the first Sunday of Advent. You'll be ready to roll when the liturgical year begins - that great time of new beginnings that comes about a month before the calendar New Year.

In my next post, I'll show you just how I break things down. Maybe that will help if you get a little hung up in the process.