091: Quarterly Planning with Charlie Gilkey

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We want to build, you know, workflows and processes that are stable and we're not always having to build them. But the reality is your systems and process and your team habits have to change when there's enough significant change in your business such that it powers those. And so that's just one of the questions to come back to Is is my business context different enough that I need to reconsider what I've labeled problems to be solved?

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Hello. Hello everybody. Welcome back. I am so excited to be here today in conversation with one of my dearest friends, Charlie Gilke. Charlie is quoted right in the intro of Free Time that the goal is not just to teach ourselves how to fish, but to create a system so that nobody has to think about catching the fish, the proverbial fish in our businesses. He's the founder of Productive Flourishing, an OG blogger. He's the author of a great book called Start Finishing that we're actually going to dive into a bit today. He wrote another one called the Small Business Life Cycle. He hosts the Productive Flourishing podcast and he just released his Momentum app. Without further ado, Charlie, welcome to the show.

Denny, thanks so much for having me back. I love all of our jams and some excited to see what we get into today.

Me too. In fact, Charlie and I will often just talk so much before we hit record that we start eating up the time. Really, we should have just hit record right from the beginning. He was last on the show back on the Pivot podcast episode 136. We'll put it in the show notes on this book Start Finishing on pricing projects and specifically momentum planning. So now that I've pivoted over to Free Time that I have two shows rolling. I specifically wanted to get into, Charlie, if you would take us through quarterly planning. And when I suggested this as the topic to you, you said yes. I'm always stumping the quarter horizon. For business owners, it's the Goldilocks for strategy execution, project scoping, and team alignment. So I'm just curious. Like, I think as business owners, there's so much we could do at any given time. Why is the quarter the holy grail of time unit strategizing?

Well, the quarter is that because it represents this chunk of time that most of us, when we think about it, can get our arms around. But it's not so tactical and nitty gritty that we lose coherence of what's happening. And so when I start finishing, one of the things I wrote about time horizons was that when you're looking for clarity of purpose and meaning, you zoom up. When you're looking for clarity of action and next steps, you zoom down. So let me unpack that a little bit. A lot of times, what happens when we look at our individual task list or our team task list, we're looking at a horizon that's typically the day or the week. And at that level, it's hard to really weave in. Like, why is this important? Why is this driving strategic imperatives forward? Is, is this a priority? Is this not? Because everything at this sort of daily and weekly level becomes flat. In a way, they all seem equally important unless it's super clear how that project ties to, like, the three things I talk about a lot in business, which is cash flow, opportunity, and visibility. Like, when those projects go to, say, cash flow and you're already needing revenue and things like that, you know why that project's important. But there are a lot of projects at the daily and weekly level that don't directly point to that.

And so we lose that context and coherence. So it's often useful for us as business owners to zoom up to that next higher scale and say, hey, what are my month size priorities and projects? And what do those tie into? Because that starts to give us a little bit more grip. And so you move from, say, respond to Jenny about the sales opportunity, which you may or may not be coherent to you, to being able to say, oh, I'm actually doing proactive sales for this offer that I want to get out into the market. And that's what that task ties to. Okay, so usually a month is a good view, but when you really click up to that next horizon of the quarter, that's where you start to see the strategic projects or those really important significant projects that are going to shift your business. You normally don't get those at the monthly level. And so so much of the trick and the journey for founders and small teams is to be able to tie finishing meaty quarter size projects that you finish into the next one into the next one. So Denny, you know this because you've written several books. Like a book launch is a series of, you know, six to eight quarter size campaigns. And I'm an outlier when we talk about book publishing because people a lot of times just think about the first month or the first quarter and I'm like, no, it's like once you publish it's like a year and then it's like the year before that. So there's these series of campaigns that if you don't tie together well, you don't get the momentum but you also lose some coherence in there. So I've said a lot Jenny, but what's poppin for you?

Well, one of the things that has stood out ever since I read start finishing was also this idea that our general capacity is about five projects at a time and that can include personal and it does. And that we often forget to account for personal projects. So for example, if you're moving a house and you're getting married, okay, that's eaten up two project spots or you're dealing with an illness or an ailment. And so I'm wondering, for business owners, inevitably one or two projects at any given time are often on the personal front. Say let's imagine we have three potential project slots. Are you looking at those on a year horizon and saying this year here are three big things I would love to accomplish. And then you're zooming to the quarterly level like because a book project spans many years. So I'm wondering where you find the entry point or if you just pick first resonant projects and then you say, okay, well how long is this project going to take? What's now the quarterly workback plan? Does that make sense?

It does make sense. The general and potentially unhelpful answer to that question is it depends on the maturity of the business. Because there are some businesses that their now and I get this from Peter Drucker actually right there now is like a year where there are some businesses that are just in Kuwait or still emerging where there now might be this month. What I'm speaking to there is there's a certain view of understanding your business and the timescales and things involved that will actually set and determine some of those things. And so when I'm brought in to do a lot of strategic facilitation and strategy execution work, one of the first things that I'll try to establish is actually how long is there now? And I've learned, Jenny, this is just a side note that 18 months is actually for businesses that have been around for, let's just say, you know, five to 10 years is actually a really good horizon because a year can go by really quick. You know that, Jenny. Right. And three years can be mysterious. 18 months gives us enough planning sort of grip that we can actually plan those quarters for the next.

18 months and have reasonable confidence that, you know, yes, by the time we get six quarters in, it's going to be kind of murky. But four quarters doesn't take you that far most of the time.

I love how you said three years can be mysterious. That's so true. It's so true. And even if it is a big project, it is still mysterious how the project will progress over three years even if you know it's going to take more than, let's say that magical 18 months.

Yeah, well, and that's what I'd say is there's a difference between your visioning horizon and your planning horizon. So we may be able to vision out three years and be like, I know I'm going to be wrestling with this project for the next three years. I know that for a fact. What I don't know is 18 months into it, how I'm going to be wrestling with this project. Because how we end up in this sort of tug of war or I hate to use so many fighting ones, but how we end up in this co creation with, you know, this project over the next two three quarters will determine the shape of not necessarily the two to three quarters that follow it, but what happens, you know, six months after that. And so we have to be real that yes, we are committing to this project. We think it's going to be in a three year horizon. I think from a planning perspective, I can see out six quarters. All righty. Now that we're, you know, I'm so thankful that you mentioned the five projects rule because it gives me an anchor here. Now that we're thinking of chunking down, it's like, okay, instead of thinking about all the work that we need to do and what all that might evolve to, like, let's just think what are the next six quarter size projects that will help us go towards this goal? That we committed to. Usually we can see two or three at a time. Sometimes we get up to four or five and then we start getting like head scratchy. But it's really useful to think of that scale and not the sort of flatter scale of what are all the things we might do and then get overwhelmed and not be able to see the sequentiality of things like what's the sequence that makes sense, the criticality, what things we must be successful for on all those different types of things in which we would choose. And so it gives us this, I think, ambitious but clear way of seeing what those chunks are and how we might push em forward.

You get a hundred points for sequentiality. Vocab word.

Nice.

This is how geeky can the systems thinking get? Here's a question for you. I'm gonna actually request some systems therapy. Okay, I don't have a good metaphor in my mind, but it seems like we were talking before we hit record about the intensity of brain building, maintaining and managing a team, even if nobody's full time, which I know you do have full timers in your business. I see it as like a base of a pyramid. It's happening. It is a project. It does require time, energy, effort, troubleshooting, et cetera. There's three, so that's one type of project in my mind. Two is something clear and obvious, like a book, like a big, hairy, meaty creative effort, that it's almost a mountain. You climb it and then you know when you've reached the top, the book is out. Of course, that starts the next mountain. That is marketing, which is hopefully happening in parallel. And then I'm currently experiencing one. This is where my systems therapist, AKA Charlie Koki, comes in. Let's talk about podcast growth. My comfort zone is a clear project with a start and end, like a book. Even if it's complex and challenging, it's comfortable because I can see myself making progress and I kind of know the steps I need to take. Podcast growth. I could have a goal for where I'd want my podcast to be in 18 months or three years, a vision for three years and a goal for 18 months. But it still can feel so ambiguous on a quarterly level of how to get traction, how to move forward, how to just this amorphous task of growing the audience. And I'm just so curious. You can pick any one of these three paths, choose your own adventure, but they all seem to require a little something different of us on a quarterly basis. And yet they all still take project slots.

They do. They Do. I don't think this ended up in start finishing, Denny. You know, like, sometimes stuff comes up after and you can't remember if it was in the book and you just forgot or if it's added to that. But really what we're talking about here is the strategic, urgent, and recurring logjam that happens in business. So three different types of projects. So the strategic one is actually the first one that you mentioned, right? Well, actually, you mentioned a couple, but strategic projects are exactly that. Those are the instrumental projects that have a significant impact in driving your business forward. You have your recurring, which are just the routines, the stuff that pops up over and over and over again. And then you have your urgent. And this is stuff that, you know, either something breaks or an opportunity pops up, so on and so forth. What I would say I'm going to take the harder of the options because that's what we do together, right, Jenny? We do the hard things, and that's that ambiguous, like, murky podcast growth thing. Right. And so not without knowing what you've done thus far, I would still be thinking, okay, she wants to grow the podcast. I'm going to use super nerdy goal setting language of from X to Y, which is a really great way to always contextualize what you're doing. So you want to go from X number of downloads.

Let me even give you specifics. Let's say I want to go from a thousand downloads to 10,000. But my true goal in my wildest dreams is 100,000.

Okay? Per month, per episode, per, let's say, per month.

A hundred thousand is, I have arrived. I'm going to die happy and stop podcasting. No, I'm kidding. 100,000 is a truly sustainable living where that's probably the only thing I need to do in my business, or at least getting close. 10,000 at least makes it not a lost leader of the pure podcast production expenses.

Okay? So what I'd be looking at at that is like, I see your dream and I want to start building that. So let's build that pathway. And I think sometimes what we do when we do goal setting, it's kind of like the dream goal or nothing. And then we get in a place where we're overwhelmed, we don't take action. So I'm going to choose sort of that 10,000 in the next window that we're talking about, you know, in the next, say, 18 months, depending upon what you do. That might be low, but that's our next significant milestone. Right. And so if we were to split this up into quarter projects. One approach that I might do is like, okay, so quarter one, the first quarter is just going to be establishing baselines and, you know, choosing what methods you're going to use to go. Right? Because I know you, Jenny, you're going to, like, think about 17 different ways this might work. And then you're going to talk to some folks, and then you're going to see what's worked for them, and you're going to arrive at one to three core strategies, strategies that you're going to use to grow the podcast. And that might take you a quarter to do. And that's great, right? I say that's great because we creative entrepreneurs are like, shouldn't that take like a week? Nope. Like you think it should. But really to do that to a degree that Jenny Blake will commit to, you're going to do your homework. That's cool. That's first quarter. Notice that that doesn't really make as the goal anything about in quarter one, increasing your podcast listens, because that's not what we're really trying to do. Once you choose those three, those are sort of become experiments that you're going to invoke over the next few quarters. And so what I would be saying is that second quarter in this plan would be implementing, you know, one or two of those strategies with the goal of going from 1,000 to 2,000. You're like, Whoa, bro, we're trying to get to 10,000. Why did we just up it? Why did we just double it? Well, we focus on doubling it because it gives us time to see which of those experiments are working and which one's getting lift. And we understand with most of these types of things that the first time you jump out of it, unless you roll in with major advertising dollars, unless you activate all of your partners to blow up your podcast all at once, it's going to be that slow sort of growth. Quarter two is where I might say, all right, we're going to go from X. We're going to go from that 2000. We're going to try to stretch and double that again to 4,000. And you might see where this is going. Right. If we apply that enough, we'll actually be able to say, okay, what quarter am I in? Okay, I'm in this first quarter. My main thing is just figuring out what my baselines are and what my experimental strategies are going to be. Great. Second quarter, what am I doing? Oh, I'm going from 1000 to 2000 using one of the three strategies that I Can develop in the first one.

Cool.

Third quarter. What am I doing? Oh, going from 2,000 to 4,000. Now, in the case that, you know, Danny is awesome and the world understands it, you see that in that first quarter, you're like, wait a second, we went from one to three. You can always revise. You can say, you know what? We had a faster growth. So I'm going to do that. And I would strongly encourage those of us overachievers out there to not revise and recalibrate upward. Here's why. When we recalibrate upward, it's easy for us to forget that in that first quarter, we actually beat our goals and targets. And then the story becomes, I'm behind. I'm not reaching my goals. I'm not doing all those things, which is actually not true. When you look at what your plan was, which is really a set of assumptions and hypotheses, you're actually ahead of the curve. So why don't you give yourself credit for that? Okay, I've talked a lot, but, Jenny, what's sitting with you?

Ooh. So many things coming up. First of all, I love this. Thank you for sharing how you think about this. I'm also picturing an inevitable dip, because I'm already. As you're talking, I'm going, oh, my gosh, the Q3, Jenny is going more. We have to focus on more. More experiments. Like, can't I just start a shiny new project? So I wonder. I know Scott Belsky has written about this in Making Ideas Happen. I wonder, especially when that growth, or in a more ambiguous goal, it's not happening linearly. Let's imagine a team, hopefully not in this scenario, but where there's actually no visible growth for two quarters. But there might be a pop. It might be like the iceberg. Or as I think James Clear said it, like an ice cube is solid until it melts, but up until that point, you don't necessarily see it melting.

We'll be right back just after this.

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So I'm curious how you keep people motivated or, you know, not you. We all have to do that from within. But through that 18 months, knowing there's going to be so many dips and that we might have even two quarters in a row where it looks like nothing is happening at all, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the process is broken. The process might actually be working, but at least to show us what doesn't work.

Yeah. So this rolls back to why I said we commit to the longer term project and we commit to the longer term goal. I'll be more specific here and not necessarily the projects that power and that push us towards that goal. We know that there are some types of projects that we plant in one season, which is a lot of plowing, a lot of hard work, and we harvest in another. I'll give an example for this. Last year for Momentum, we were a part of some groups that were helping us. So Momentum is our new app that's based upon the Momentum Planner methodology that I think we've talked about before, Jenny. But anyways, last year we did a bunch of things, you know, did well, met some folks, decided that funding was not the way we wanted to go and then went and sort of bootstrapped and crowdstrapped Momentum. Well, some of the people we met last year are the people who are now, you know, talking about getting us in front of people for other pitches and other speaking opportunities and other things like that. Now, if we would have just really thought about that series of events that we did for a quarter last year, we may have had a view of like, ah, well, we didn't get what we wanted. But I knew going in that was actually more of an ecosystem building opportunity than a direct results opportunity. And so I knew that it was going to take quarters and years to play out. And so I told the team when some of the opportunities that we're currently doing, but you know, the pitch that I did last week, the accelerator that we're about to join, a demo that we're doing next month, I reminded the team, I was like, hey, y', all, we sowed this last year, we planted this last year and did that hard work and we're harvesting this year that's how our business works. Even to the degree that Jenny, we're in a conversation, we've been in unfolding conversations since like 2011. Right?

Absolutely.

And that's how much it works. So that's one way of thinking about it is really shifting your team to think about the longer scale horizon that you're working in. But the other is just to be honest, from the beginning of like, these are assumptions and hypotheses. Like we think this project and this strategy is going to be the one that works. When we establish those baselines, what baselines were we and what did we expect would happen? And always be thinking like, okay, how are our hypotheses and assumptions matching reality? And if they're matching great, if they're exceeding great, if they're not, then go back and say, oh, what might we had not considered? Or what are some different ways that we might do that? So I think it's one of those things of when you get over attached to the goal, you forget that the goal was just an anchor that helped you figure out what projects and experiments you wanted to run to get, you know, along a certain path that was important to you.

That makes a lot of sense. And then I could also see you or anybody saying even a number of, let's say podcast downloads is somewhat arbitrary. And it's usually a means to an end. Like in and of itself, 10,000 listens doesn't mean anything, especially if people aren't paying attention or they're not engaging with other parts of the business or advertisers don't want to fund the show. I mean, there's just so much that the number itself I would be asking myself as, well, well, what's important about that? Well, what would that enable me to do? And for me, a lot of times these success metrics actually come back to freeing me from other projects. Like, I find that as a business owner and I wonder if you see this in your community. If anything, I take on too many projects and I have too many streams of revenue in the business and that a lot of these goals are to drive toward simplicity. I also think there's a chicken in the egg problem. So I'd love to come back to this log jam you described between strategic, urgent and recurring that we know the power of focus. But sometimes it's scary to kind of drop good projects or good enough revenue generators. I think of it like pruning a rose bush. You know, you have to cut the ones that aren't really growing aren't the most beautiful but it's hard to know when to do that. And so this logjam you're describing, it's like, when to hire versus when to be frugal, when to cut good projects versus when to diversify. I know you've said, like, the quarter is kind of the Goldilocks, the holy grail. So how would you help a business owner who was feeling really overwhelmed look at a quarter with all of these different complex factors going on?

Yeah, I'll backtrack a little bit. I'm glad you went to questioning the why of the goal. Right. Because sometimes I come in after the fact and people are like, we're not hitting our targets. I'm like, okay, well, what were your targets meant to do? And they're like, it meant to do all these other things. I was like, okay, well, let's look at your balance sheet and pdl. Oh, it looks like you're getting those other things with or without the target you thought you had to hit. And so, Denny, that's where I'd say in your project, I'd be like, oh, if you thought your project was, say, getting you more free time gigs, like, if you got 10x to free time gigs at a tenth of the listens, is that a win?

Right? Or even more free time period.

More free time period, Is that a win?

No one knows where the free time's gonna come from. Is it more gigs? Is it fewer gigs, higher price that clients would pay? You know, like, maybe the end goal is free time.

Maybe that is. And I know plenty of say in this case podcasters who. It's their business, and they don't necessarily have more free time. They have more discretionary time. But discretionary time is not free time. There's difference. There's a difference there that we need. Entrepreneurs need to talk about. So you might still be on the hook for the same 40 hours. This is how you get to do those 40 hours. That may change. How do we make projects coherent at the current level? Well, one of the things I mentioned earlier is cash flow, opportunity visibility. Jenny, I'll see you link to that. We have a post. Use it oftentimes, because those three things help a lot of business owners really orient to what matters for the business. Now, are you needing more cash flow? More real cash flow? Notice I'm not saying sales, because sales can be tricky. You sell thing today, and you might get money six months from now, and it turns out you actually need to cash today. Which is why I say cash flow is it opportunity, opportunity visibility, like that side of things or is it more opportunities to do what your business does best or what it wants to do next year? Visit it being more on the marketing side of things that helps you determine, okay, on those vectors what projects do I think are most going to move those forward. And you might see, wait a second, I've got this snake pit of a project that it doesn't really seem to be helping me with cash flow in any real way. It doesn't really seem to be building any opportunities in any real way and is not getting me visibility. So why am I so attached to this project? Is it time to let it go? Is it something that Jenny of last year said I needed to do? That Jenny of this year is like, actually, I got that another way or that wasn't a problem. So much of the work of some of us who are business coaches and consultants is actually helping people determine what their real problems are and what they're not. And so I think that's where that cash flow opportunity visit framework helps people sort of sort the quarter size project that helps push those forward. And again, usually to make a real difference in your business, it's going to be a quarter size project. Unless you've just been sleeping on sales and proactive outreach. Sometimes those move super, super quickly and people are sitting on opportunities that they're just not pursuing for different reasons.

There's a great book on the subject of solving the right problem. It's called the Road Less Stupid. I don't know if you've heard of it.

I haven't, but I'm going to get it now.

Yeah, it's worth it. It's kind of a mean title but oh, it's so thought provoking and at the end of every chapter. And by the way, he says the Road Less Stupid because he doesn't want you to make the stupid mistakes he, he already made. So he's not saying we're stupid. He's like, I was so stupid in the early years of my business and he sets aside thinking time every day, every week. But part of the importance of that thinking time is to identify the right problems. And so often we have problems in our business because we're recreating them because we're not answering the right questions and we haven't identified the root problem, otherwise it would be solved. So highly recommend. I'll put that in the show notes.

Yeah, there's another great book that will help you do that and it's this great book called Free Time which really helps you think. And I'm not just pandering here, but I mean, by the time you get to asking a good series of five whys that are honest, by the time you start looking at, as a leader or a founder, how you're participating in creating the very scenarios you don't want, by the time you look at understanding that maybe your business has grown and evolved and the way that it worked three years ago is not the way that it works in this current context. Like, we live in a VUCA environment, volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous environment. And most of our businesses are going to face an internal disruption every 18 months and an external disruption every 18 months. So take Covid. We got both at the same time. But when you think about that level of disruption and change and things like that, that means sometimes the problems that we're facing are ones that we're trying to solve the way we did it last year and in conditions that were last year, and they're not the conditions of this year. And I know that's really frustrating for some of us who are systems thinkers. And we want to build, you know, workflows and processes that are stable, and we're not always having to build them. But the reality is your systems and process and your team habits have to change when there's enough significant change in your business such that it powers those. And so that's just one of the questions to come back to. Is, is my business context different enough that I need to reconsider what I've labeled problems to be solved?

Yes. And then the way I wrote that in free time that I read in another book, I didn't make it up, but are you ordering off of yesterday's menu?

I love it.

And that sometimes, like, some problems don't need to be solved at all. I remember I spent months debating what software to use for something until I realized maybe I shouldn't be doing this business area at all. And I ended up resurfacing it and pivoting it many months down the road. But I actually needed to shut it down. At the end of the day, it wasn't about the software. I realized that there was so much friction around the indecision. That was my decision. I shouldn't be doing it at all. It's like, what problems can you just put down that not everything has to be solved? I have another question for you, Charlie. This is a confession. This is a confessionary question. And it might disqualify me from being a valid business owner at all. My question is, and I kind of know what you're going to say for your business. But the quarter time horizon, does it always come with metrics? Here's why I ask. I have had my team track metrics in the past, whether monthly, weekly, quarterly. And I realized that deep down, at the end of the day, I don't care. And that sometimes, in fact, for 11 years now, good things have happened and less good things, but that business is joyful and business progresses and so do my creative projects, whether I obsess over the metrics or not. And I'm just wondering how vital you think metrics are to be attached to this quarterly planning process.

I think the larger a team gets, the more you need metrics. But not for the reason that you might think. Right? It's not metrics so that we focus on the metrics. We focus on the metrics so that we build alignment when we use qualitative things, which are really important for us founders and small business owners. That's great, except when we have six people who then have to figure out what winning looks like. So let's say your goal is to have a great podcast that has, you know, questions from people and like, that you're getting feedback on. Okay, that could be qualitative. And we don't need to go to the metrics level. Three months from now, though, it's likely that one of your teammates may be like, but, like, what counts as quality feedback?

Right? Like, Jenny, your personal feeling. I'm not psychic. I don't know.

Yeah, your personal feeling. Or like, hey, Jenny, like, you seem stressed and anxious about this because, Jenny, you may or may not be a practicing and recovering overachiever, but from our perspective, it seems like we hit the goal. So if you're feeling stressed and emotional contagion is a real thing and you're injecting that into the team, the team might be like, but what's the real problem here? And you're like, we're not where we could be. Well, what does that mean? And so that's where this comes up a lot. It's not so much for the, like, we're putting it out there and we hit it and we fail or don't. We're putting it out there so that we can align about what we're trying to do. And it turns out that metrics are a really useful way of doing that. And the other thing that I've seen happen when we use more qualitative goals is it makes it difficult for teammates to prioritize what's going to move the needle. Because what does moving the needle actually mean. And so we end up back in that place to where we have to be both the question answerer, but also the chief prioritizer. Because basically winning equals what I think winning is, and that's what it is. But people, teams, larger teams, can't operate around that very well.

That is so well said and so clearly explained. A way to use some free time lingo in there too. Yes, yes, I love what you're saying. And you know, there are, as you were talking, there are so many quantitative ways. Number of reviews, number of downloads, number of invitations to other podcasts. So there are easy enough metrics to track. And while you were saying that, it also struck me that it's the difference between. Well, it's the 80, 20. It's like if one method through the metrics we can see works 10 times better than the others, we'd want to double down on that. But you might not totally know that from the qualitative sense. Like you said, Charlie, it makes it all have to stay in the business owner. Like they're almost hoarding the responsibility of what success looks like versus the metrics that can help distribute and empower other people to help get there.

Yeah, I love it. And so one of the things we look at for our podcast and our social media is like, my team knows not to talk to me about followers and things like that because I frankly don't care. Right. They know to share with me, like, great qualitative feedback questions. People are asking things like the good thing that you can see, like, oh, that's a mind blowing thing that changed me. They know to show me that. Not that we got another 50 followers. I mean, I care about the people, but the number itself doesn't mean anything to me. I'd rather have five people who we actually delivered an insight to or catalyzed in some way than 45 passives that just clicked like, because they were bored on social media.

Yes, well said. So well said. So, Charlie, as we wrap up, I'm wondering if you can just give us the. It's gonna be tough, but like one or two minute summary of the momentum planning process. Cause I know that a huge part of your business are the momentum planners. It's now the Momentum app. And so if we could just give people the tldr. But it's really the too long didn't listen. Although they're now at the end of the podcast, so clearly they have listened. But if someone's gonna sit down and they're like, all right, I want a fresh start, I Wanna be like Charlia and have this logistics, strategic, high level approach, give us just the high level cadence. What do we do?

What do we do? So the momentum planning method is it's a dynamic method that has you continually review your goals, your schedules and your projects to keep them in sync. The trick about it is, is that it lets you lean into the changing time cycles so that you have daily level views, you have weekly level views, you have monthly level views, and quarterly views and processes. And so as a normal human, since we're already sort of tied to the calendar in a certain way, you know it's time to do your monthly planning. And there's a process for monthly planning when the month is ending or beginning. Right. And it's okay if you didn't do it, then you can do it because you need to do that for you. When the week changes, there's a certain process for doing it at the week, daily, so on, so forth. Now that sounds like it can be a lot of work and the setup can be a little bit because it's having you think in different ways and really get clear about where you're trying to go. But once you get going, it actually doesn't take nearly as long. And as I've said in so many other places, Jenny, if you don't have time to plan, you don't have time not to. Because most of us, especially those of us who are creative types, spend more time running around trying to figure out what we're going to do or remembering things that we forgot than if we just took a few minutes, we'd be on point. And so we have planners. As you mentioned, we have some free tools at productiveflourishing.com forward/free planners. But we also have our new app that you can use on both your phone and your computer. People are loving doing the more heavy lifting, planning on the computer, but then using their phone as their daily driver of just logging into momentum real quick, looking at what they need to do, clicking a few buttons and then going about their day.

We're going to have to do another podcast on building an app as part of a business portfolio, because that's a lot of work.

It's a lot of work.

That's a really interesting choice in and of itself.

Yeah, and I'm a reluctant app developer too. I did not want to be on this one. But at a certain point, you have to look at what your audience and customers are really wanting and needing and partnering with them to create that thing.

And I love how you described it too that yes, the big meaty stuff happens at the computer, but then how cool to just take it on the go with you on your phone and be able to check in and as you said, have it be this really dynamic process.

Yeah, that's what makes it work. It's a practice. It's a habit. So when you make it a habit and we think about things as just like light habits for keeping ourselves present but also helping today self create a better set of possibilities for tomorrow self, then life changes and it can change in just a half a percent today. Right. And that's what the momentum planning system or method helps you do and the app does as well.

That is we are so aligned on that. Like so much of systems thinking for me is about just being kind to my future self. Like, and I don't always succeed at it. Yeah, when I fall off my exercising bandwagon or eating healthy. But so much of systems is just how can I make this easier for the me that's going to encounter this the next time around?

Exactly.

Okay, if you could give fellow business owners permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

Drop a project that's not clearly related to something that creates cash flow for you, creates opportunity, or creates visibility. It might just be something that you're hanging onto that you thought you needed to do last year that you don't need to do this year.

Hear, hear. That should be our homework. All of us. Go find a project you can drop when you're done listening. Amazing, Charlie. I love all of our conversations. Thank you for being such a brilliant thinker in front or in this space over a decade now. I'm so grateful for you.

Likewise. And look forward to our next one.

Me too. Thanks for listening everybody.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

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