Planning for Growth

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I’ve always considered myself to be a pretty good planner, but as I’ve learned more I’ve realized how poor a job I often do. Over the past year, I’ve refined my processes quite a bit and I feel I have things in a much better place (though always looking to improve).

For me, planning really consists of two pieces:

  • Planning for the day/week/quarter/year ahead.
  • Keeping a rough log of what happens so I can use that knowledge going forward.

Planning Ahead

There are a lot of tools out there on goal setting, so we won’t be digging too deeply into that. A good place to start would be books such as “Your Best Year Ever” by Michael Hyatt for help in that area. In terms of goals, I see it essentially like this.

You should have roughly 100 lifetime goals, worked into 10-12 goals each year, perhaps 3 goals each quarter, and then a “big three” each week and each day that point toward those goals. Those daily and weekly big three don’t always point toward your quarterly goals, but should be set with those in mind.

My yearly planning and quarterly planning are similar, where I look at my overall goals and try to plot things out. The weekly and daily planning are where things get tactically useful for you.

Be SMART

This article isn’t about goal setting, but it’s worth touching on how goals should be developed. Ideally your goals should be “SMART”, using the framework that George Doran came up with decades ago.

  • Specific: What exactly are you trying to do? “Get more fit” is not a goal, but “lose 20 pounds” works much better.
  • Measurable: How will you measure what you are doing? Using the example above the “20 pounds” is a very easy metric to track.
  • Attainable: To lose your weight, you might set a goal to run 10 miles every day. That’s specific and measurable, but not likely attainable. Setting goals that are attainable is important. Don’t make them easy, but don’t put them too far out of reach.
  • Relevant: Make sure your goals are relevant to your bigger life plans. A goal might be to complete an Ironman triathlon, but if you don’t have the time or desire to work out that frequently, it will be a difficult goal to attain.
  • Timely: Your goals need a timeline. “Lose 20 pounds” is a good goal, but with no backstop you’re never really behind. “Lose 20 pounds by May 1” sets some guidelines and you can do the math on how to get there.

So if one of your annual goals is to lose 20 pounds, you need to work that into your quarterly goals. Those could be weight measurements, or just activities. For example, your goal for the quarter might be “Go outside and walk at least one mile three times per week”. That’s specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.

As you get into your weekly and daily goals, those walks can be part of what you need to do.

Weekly Planning

Much of what I do each week is based on concepts from Michael Hyatt’s “Full Focus Planner”. It’s an excellent paper planner, and really shaped how I handle my weekly planning.

While I no longer use the paper planner (I went back to digital), the lessons from it were invaluable.

People generally work through their weekly planning on Friday afternoon, over the weekend, or on Monday morning. I do mine on Friday afternoons for two big reasons:

  1. If you get it out of the way on Friday, your head will be a bit more clear on the weekend knowing that next week is already firmed up.
  2. If you are confirming meetings for the following week, people are likely to respond on Friday afternoons, but not on Sunday evenings.

Here is an example of how that looks in Roam Research:

No matter what tool I use, the basic content is always essentially the same:

  1. Work through the “Big Three” goals for the upcoming week.
  2. Go through each day of the week individually, which we’ll discuss in the next section.
  3. Add other tasks for the week, such as workouts, car pool, food planning, etc.
  4. Look at wins from the past week.
  5. Ask a few other questions such as:
    1. “What worked and what didn’t?”
    2. “What will you keep, improve, start or stop based on the above?”

I find this 60 minutes each Friday to be some of the most valuable time of the week, as it keeps me focused on my goals, prepared for the week ahead, and cognizant of what happened the previous week.

Daily Planning

My daily planning really consists of two areas. The main one is filling in the scheduled events, for things that I know are coming (meetings, etc). Equally important, though, is tracking the unscheduled events that pop up each day.

Scheduled Events

As part of my weekly planning I look at each individual day in the upcoming week. I manually build out pages for each day coming up, and manually populate it with my plans and goals for the day.

To answer your question, yes, it’s redundant to do it that way, but that’s intentional. Just taking a moment to review each upcoming meeting will give you a chance to jot down ideas for the meeting, confirm details with attendees, or even decide that it’s no longer necessary.

In addition, it can be a good time to add alarms to your phone if you see a situation where you might lose track of time before a meeting and need that nudge.

Here is an example of how I’ve done that in the past, with this sample from Notion:

Unscheduled Events

Perhaps of greater value is keeping a log of unscheduled events that pop up throughout the day. You don’t need to log everything you do (unless you want to), but it’s very valuable to log bigger things. If done right, it’s like magic.

For this, I’m talking about things like random phone calls, unexpected meetings, and content that you consume and find useful (articles, videos, etc).

For those, just add them to your daily log and below is an example of that. The red arrows highlight some of the things I added during the day, like an unexpected call at 2:43pm (“14:43”), various notes on other planned calls, and a new online gaming system that my daughter and I were trying out.

There are two big reasons that I do this.

First, it can be helpful to be able to look back to see when someone called you and how that call went. It takes 30 seconds to jot that down, but could be great to have on hand next week when you have a follow-up call for that.

Second, it can help tie interesting things together. For example, I took some notes at a business luncheon one day and put them in my daily log. A few months later when I was reading a book passage that sounded very familiar, I was able to find that passage in my notes from the luncheon and connect the dots. That led me to dig a bit more into the speaker from that luncheon (Kevin Paul Scott), as well as gain more context around the ideas in the book (Essentialism).

Planning and goal-setting don’t come natural to a lot of folks, but taking the time to set things up can make a huge difference in how smoothly your days go and what you can get out of them.

If you need help getting things organized your end for solid planning, my Roam Research course covers much of this very stuff and will give you a great outline for getting started.

Five stars isn’t perfect

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When looking at the rating for your business on Google or your product on Amazon, what’s the ideal score you should have? Most think that a 5.0 rating is the goal, but it probably shouldn’t be.

When consumers see a score of a perfect 5.0 on a product or business, they instantly become skeptical of it. There are cases where some business or product could be a legit 5.0, but according to a study out of Northwestern University, a score of between 4.2 – 4.5 is the most trusted.

In fact, many users (myself included) will look specifically for the bad reviews to see what people’s complaints were about and how well those issued were addressed by the business.

From the business side, bad reviews can often give you great feedback on areas where you can improve.

Go after bad reviews?

That’s not to say you should intentionally try to get bad reviews for your company, of course, but having a few 3 and 4 star reviews mixed in with your fives is likely more beneficial than you think.

Trust me, I know the feeling of getting a less-than-5.0 review, and it stinks, but at the end of the day it might make your business even more appealing to the next person that comes along.

Goals are a commitment to the process

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Setting a goal is easy enough: “Lose 20 pounds by March 1” sounds great. If you follow something like the SMART framework, that simple goal essentially checks all of the boxes.

While losing 20 pounds might be the goal, setting that goal really means that you’re committing to a process. This likely means eating less and moving more, consistently, for a period of time.

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As Imogen Roy would say:

Effective goals aren’t based on the end result; they are commitments to the process.

Wanting to lose 20 pounds is a fine goal to have, but it’s worthless if it doesn’t cause you to kick off a process to help achieve it.

Or maybe your goal is to “Read at least one book per month for the next year“. Again, that’s a great goal, but the process is key. Among other things, you now need to find appropriate books that interest you and set aside dedicated time to read on a regular basis.

In both cases, the goal is a nice thing to reach for, but the process is the magic. That’s where you learn to be healthy, develop better learning habits, or improve your life in some other way.

The process is the goal.

The two types of failure

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In Atul Gawande’s amazing book “The Checklist Manifesto“, he suggests that there are two types of failure in the world.

The first is ignorance—we may err because science has given us only a partial understanding of the world and how it works. There are skyscrapers we do not yet know how to build, snowstorms we cannot predict, heart attacks we still haven’t learned how to stop.

The second type of failure the philosophers call ineptitude—because in these instances the knowledge exists, yet we fail to apply it correctly. This is the skyscraper that is built wrong and collapses, the snowstorm whose signs the meteorologist just plain missed, the stab wound from a weapon the doctors forgot to ask about.

There are solutions for each kind of problem. Atul’s first suggestion, as you might guess based on the title of his book is to use more checklists:

Checklists seem to provide protection against such failures. They remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit. They not only offer the possibility of verification but also instill a kind of discipline of higher performance.

Checklists really only seem to solve the ineptitude issue, though. The ignorance issue can’t be fixed with a checklist, but rather by working to gain more knowledge. If there are “skyscrapers that we do not yet know how to build“, then checklists aren’t the answer. Studying and learning will give you insights on new ideas and techniques to help create that new generation of building.

Of course, while you’re doing all of that learning and coming up with great ideas, just don’t forget to use checklists to make sure it doesn’t all come crashing down because of something that was solved 20 years ago.

It’s just not a priority for me

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There’s another side to being so “busy”, and that’s when it comes to excuses. There are very few situations where you’re ever “too busy” for something. The only two I can think of are:

  • If you’re in jail.
  • If you’re in the hospital.

The rest of the time, your rejection of a request isn’t because you’re too busy, but because something else is a higher priority. You could do whatever someone asked, but you may choose not to because something else is more important.

That might be perfectly fine. If your boss is asking you to work on an important project, but your friend wants to go catch a movie, you’d be wise to turn down your friend and do your work. You’re not too busy for the movie, but your priorities lie elsewhere.

It’s like this clip from Seinfeld, where Seth skips a meeting (and later gets fired) to grab lunch with Jerry. Not a great move.

Priorities Matter

Where this can be be helpful is when you view all requests through this lens. If you keep your priorities in mind, you’ll tend to make better decisions.

For example, if your wife reminds you that your daughter has a ballet recital tonight but you have a lot of work to do:

  1. It’s easy to say “I’m too busy”.
  2. It feels a lot different to say “That recital isn’t a priority for me”. Ouch!

You face dozens of choices every day in your life, but in almost every case you can base your decision on what really matters to you, not just on what has your attention and makes you feel busy in the moment.

If you don’t say no, your yes is meaningless

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I was at a networking event once where a gentleman stood up to introduce himself. He said something like:

“I’m Bob from Insurance Company. We can help with your auto insurance, homeowners insurance, health insurance, life insurance, renter’s insurance, travel insurance, pet insurance, motorcycle insurance…” and on and on.

I’m not saying that a wide breadth of services is a bad thing, but it made me feel like he was an expert in nothing. If I need the person to help me feel great about my new auto policy, he’s not the guy. In fact, being able to turn down a particular area of work will make the rest of your offerings feel more solid.

The title of this post was stolen from a quote that I heard from Blair Enns (likely from an episode of his 2Bobs podcast), where he simply said:

“If you don’t say no, your yes is meaningless.”

I’ve discovered that to be true in our business, sort of by mistake.

We recently had a client that said “We really need a company that can build our new website and also do X for us“.

We said we’d love to help with the new site, but X is something we just don’t do and he’d be better off finding a company that can do a great job with both. We hated to lose the business, but wanted what was right for him.

He later found a company that could do X for him, and came back excited to build his new site with us because he knew that we were (likely) not bluffing about our skills there. Our “no” made it easier for him to trust us.

It goes both ways

I’ve seen Bobby Kircher at Papaya Search turn down work, because their target is on Google Ads. They’re awesome at it, and they stay focused.

I’ve seen Jay Brimberry at EY Studios turn down work, because they focus exclusively on eCommerce websites.

Both companies are thriving, because people can see the “no” and therefore give much more trust when they hear a “yes”. They’ve both sent clients to GreenMellen in the past (because it was a better fit for us), and I know for sure who to trust when it comes to complex Google Ads or eCommerce work.

Easier said than done

Of course, it’s hard to say no to potential work, particularly when times are tough. In the past, I’ve certainly said yes to clients that I should have sent to someone else that would have been a better fit.

There are three benefits to sending those kinds of referrals to people that you trust:

  1. The client will get a better result from it.
  2. You won’t find yourself in a project that isn’t a good fit.
  3. People will see your “no” and have a better understanding of what you do.

In Jay’s case in particular, when he’s called me with leads in the past, he’s always said something like “These are great folks and they need a new site, but we just focus on eCommerce and that’s not their need for now.“

He’s taking care of his clients, doing a kind thing for us, and offering both parties a quick reminder about what they do best. That’s a great way to do it.

Hate your customers, hate your business

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We all want to love what we do, but it’s almost impossible to do that if we don’t love who we serve.

As Seth Godin has said, “if you hate your customers, you’re going to hate your business.“

While you may have a bad experience with a restaurant or hair salon, they’re generally working hard to earn your trust and typically don’t make it a habit of hating their customers. That said, there are certainly companies out there that go into it knowing that they won’t be friends with their customers, such as cold callers, but that’s what they signed up for.

Clients can be frustrating at times in any line of work, but we try to remember two things:

  • They’re paying for our expertise.
  • We have the same goals, to move their business forward.

Seth has another great quote that helps show why this matters:

“Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.”

We all need vacations from time to time, but you shouldn’t end one vacation and immediately be anxious for the next one.

This type of work isn’t feasible for everyone, but if you love the clients you serve you’ll enjoy everyday life that much more.

Make More Mistakes

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This is kind of a riff on my recent post failures faced by Michael Jordan and others, but it has more to do with making mistakes.

Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, is quoted as having said:

“Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him.”

I had a similar experience with an employee back in the 90’s when I worked at a video game store — he made a big mistake (clearly on accident), but we kept him around because he was now the least likely to make that mistake again.

Physicist (and Nobel Prize winner) Niels Bohr says that mistakes lead to excellence:

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”

Mistakes are how you learn. As with failure though, mistakes aren’t the goal. It’s pretty easy to go around screwing things up on purpose, and you’ll never learn anything from that. Rather, the point is to not be afraid of trying new things and learning when things don’t go your way.

That’s kind of the point of this blog. I’ll hit on some winners, but I’ll undoubtedly come to some poor conclusions as well. When I do, I hope you’ll call me out on it so I can learn from that mistake.

Being overly cautious can help keep you in a job, but that might not always be a good thing. As Henry Ford has said, “Those who never make mistakes work for those of us who do.“

Be fearless, make mistakes, learn from them, repeat.

More about clarity breaks

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I mentioned the idea of a “clarity break” yesterday and thought I’d unpack it a bit more. It’s a concept that I’ve struggled with over the years, but find great value from when I do it regularly.

The EOS Worldwide blog defines it as:

A clarity break is a regularly scheduled appointment on your calendar with yourself. You define what regular is – a half hour daily, two hours weekly, a half day monthly. It’s up to you. The doing of it is what matters.

Next find a place to meet with yourself… I like Panera Bread personally.

Just take a blank pad with you. Using technology tends to become a distraction. We are tempted to just do one email or just surf the web for that one project back at work. Don’t do it.

Back to you and that blank pad. Stare at it and your mind will help you. The important things will surface. Ideas will pop up. Try it. You’ll be amazed.

It really can be quite amazing, though it’s also rather intimidating. You’re sitting there with a blank piece of paper and nothing worth writing. If you can break past those first few minutes, though, things will start to roll. For me, the content varies a lot: sometimes it’s mostly work-related, sometimes more personal tasks, and sometimes just random. Not every session is perfect, but collectively they add up nicely.

The idea is not unlike your time in the shower, when you let your mind wander and you often come up with new ideas or remember something you were supposed to do. This is just an intentional version of that.

Getting Ready

I’ve done a few things to help make my sessions more useful, and one is better prep. First, I take another look at my calendar for the coming days so I can have that fresh in my mind.

Next, I do a short meditation session with Headspace. I’ve never been much on meditation, but taking three minutes to clear my head before I start is key.

I kind of relate it to this ridiculous scene from “The Waterboy“. Coach Klein leaves his head for a few minutes, but when he’s done he’s ready to dig right in. That’s how I am with Headspace; I try to relax for a few minutes, and when it’s over I snap back and dig in.

Ideas to use

From there, I have a few prompts that I give myself each time.

  • Highlights: What are some things that have gone well recently?
  • Gut Feelings: What am I feeling? What am I nervous about?
  • People: I think about the other three people in my house, and the other six people at our company, one at a time, to see if anything pops up. I’ll often have random thoughts like “Oh yeah, I need to check in with Brooke about project X”.
  • Goals and Priorities: Looking ahead, does anything show up there?
  • Random: I leave a section on the side for any other random things that come to mind.

I don’t do them in order, and I rarely have something in every category. They’re just good prompts to get things rolling and then I follow wherever my thoughts take me.

In my case, I use my reMarkable tablet for these breaks. It has no apps or features, and is essentially just digital paper. No distractions, but can save and sync my notes. Perfect for something like this.

Do you ever intentionally take these kinds of breaks?

Busy isn’t the goal

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When asked “what’s going on?”, I think we’ve all said it: “Super busy.”

That response is usually seen as being a good thing, so we keep going back to it. Is that really the goal, though?

In Greg McKeown’s book Essentialism, he has a variety of things to say about busyness. His main point:

What if we stopped celebrating being busy as a measurement of importance? What if instead we celebrated how much time we had spent listening, pondering, meditating, and enjoying time with the most important people in our lives?

And it’s not that being busy is necessarily a bad thing. He extends the thought by saying:

Being proud of being “busy” is stupid. Granted having a busy agency is much better than a slow one, but working all hours.

That’s where it gets tricky. If we’re just bored all of the time, that’s no good, but some time to let the mind wander can be beneficial. Did you ever come up with a great thought in the shower? A lack of other “stuff” can bring out great things. Another great line from Greg relates to employees, saying that “if his people are too busy to think, then they’re too busy, period“.

I’ve been working to intentionally develop thinking time into my day. Some days I can, some days I can’t, but it’s a goal each day. I roughly follow the idea of the EOS Clarity Break, but anything will work. Just disappear for a little while, remove notifications and distractions, and see what comes up.

Be Like Leo

Leonardo da Vinci followed this idea as well, saying:

Every now and then go away and have a little relaxation. To remain constantly at work will diminish your judgment. Go some distance away, because work will be in perspective and a lack of harmony is more readily seen.

He wasn’t a slacker. In fact, while da Vinci is known for his vast collection of artwork, he also made an incredible number of scientific discoveries. He attributed his ability to do that to keeping a clear mind.

86,400

We all have the same time allotted to us: 86,400 seconds a day, 168 hours a week, and 365 days a year. Because of that, Rory Vaden says we really shouldn’t complain about our busyness:

It’s not even right to complain or whine to others about how busy you are. You and I have the same amount of time in a day as Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Mother Teresa, Michael Jordan or anyone else who has achieved greatness.

Stay active and moving, for sure, but just make sure that being busy isn’t your goal.