Episode 85: A Planning Breakthrough

Welcome to the Create youe Laptop Life podcast, where entrepreneurs all around the world come to learn how to market and grow their online business right from their laptops, wherever they are. We don't have traditional nine to five jobs and we don't want them because financial and lifestyle security and freedom is too important to us. We know the world is changing for the better and that the freelance and entrepreneur economy is the cleaner, greener, smarter way to work for both families and businesses. My name is Julie and this podcast will teach you everything you need to know about creating and growing your laptop life.

Hey everyone, this is Julie. What's up? Hope you're doing amazing today. I want to talk to you about this new. It's not really a new way, but it's sort of like I have these ideas and then I like iterate them and reiterate them until they start to really work in my business. So today I want to talk about a planning modality that has been working really well for me. Now, quick, quick backstory. A lot of people think because of the level of productivity that I have that I am like super organized. And I am organized, but I'm very organized at a macro level, not a micro level. In fact, if you saw my desk right now, you would see just how non micro level organized I am. I should take a picture. But I organize at the macro level because this is what allows to do incredible amounts of work in a short period of time because I'm willing to ignore extraneous unnecessary details. And I think this is where a lot of people get messed up. I see all kinds of organization products on the market and they are so detailed and comprehensive and that's awesome and entirely unsustainable. So I'm constantly an advocate for macro organization, which allows you to still have some disorganization. So I'm trying new things all the time to try to see what works for me. So I just did a Q4 planning meeting with my digital insiders. Of course I made this cool spreadsheet and one of the insiders was like, every time you do a planning meeting, you give us a different process. I said, I know, because I'm trying different ones because not everything works for everyone all the time. And anybody who says they have one system that fits all people is lying. So I. But I love this one and I actually think I might stick to this one. So I introduced this idea back at the end of 2000. Oh my gosh, what year is it? 2019, when we did sort of an end of year workshop. In Funnel Gorgeous, it's this idea of promotion, process and production. So in a business you have three different types of activities. You have promotional activities which are related to outward selling of your services and products, right? So put that in promotion. You have process based activities which are things that you just do every day, whether it's fulfillment, customer support, operations, just things that happen day in and day out to keep the business running. And then you have production. And production is the word I use that are project based, right? You get, you're building a funnel, you're not going to have to build that funnel every day. So it's a project, it has a start and an end. You're building a new course, you're building a new customer support system. Whatever it happens to be, they're production, project based. And so I like to think about my business and my life in these three modalities. So I made this spreadsheet where I have three. So let's say, okay, we're coming into November here. So there's a November calendar for promotion, a November calendar for process, and a November calendar for production. Production. Three calendars, three tabs. What I do is get in my brain, okay, what am I promoting for November? What is the focus? Well, I know it's Black Friday, so the focus for us is going to be to open Funnel Gorgeous Society. We opened it in May and now finally it's almost finished, it's actually finished. And now we're ready to sell it to the masses. So my promotional focus for November is, is FG Society. So then I think about, okay, well, you know, where am I going to promote? How's the pre launch, the launch, all that kind of stuff. I just make little notations in my calendar, then I move to tab 2. Tab 2 is process. What are the things that are happening in November that I just am on the books for? So I put things like all my milestone calls for Launch Gorgeous and Funnel Gorgeous. All of my audits for Digital Insiders, all my voxers for Digital Insiders, the fact that I have to create YouTube videos and I have to record podcast episodes, I have group calls for Digital Insiders. I have hot seats, I have blog posts to write, I have content to create. So all of this stuff that I'm doing on an ongoing basis I put there. Now you could do it for your entire business if you wanted to. All the ongoing things, you know, customer support, you know, social media, ads, et cetera, et cetera. I don't actually do any of that part of the business. So I didn't put it in my calendar just because I don't want to clog it up. Okay, so that's tab two. Then I go into tab three and I think simply about what projects, what things do I have to get done. Now the production calendar is oftentimes related to the promotion because I know, for example, that I'm going to be promoting Funnel Gorgeous Society in November. So that means I need to make sure I have my funnel ready. So project wise, production wise, I know I have to write sales copy for, for Funnel Gorgeous Society. I know have to, I have to create webinar slides, I have to write launch copy for that promotion. But there's other production stuff happening because I'm in the middle of creating a brand new, you know, Launch Gorgeous curriculum while I'm teaching it. So I know I have a couple of phases that I have to prep for and I have a few other projects that are not related to promotion or Mike. You know, they're just operational. So we're working on, you know, some software stuff that those things are project related. So what I'm doing in each of those three tabs is I'm not trying to think of everything. I'm just trying to think of what do I need to promote, what are my everyday responsibilities and what are my projects. The cool part about it is that Tab 4 curates all of them now. It curates all of them so that I can quickly see. Oh, wow. So on November 18th, I've got a promotional thing to do, I've got a process thing to do, and I also slated a production. Well, that doesn't make any sense because I've already got a promotion and a process and so I go and rearrange it. Now some of you might be saying, well, why wouldn't you just do that all on one calendar? You can, but I think that the ability for the brain to really just stay focused on one type of activity is going to make it better. So if you don't want to use spreadsheets, you could go into Google Calendar, create three Google Calendars. One is promotion, one is process, one is production. Turn all the calendars off except for one, and start writing in what you want to do for, you know, your promotional periods. Then turn that one off, go to process, turn that one off, go to production, then turn them all back on and see what you have and what it looks like. The reason I love this method is because a lot of people, when they're doing their quarterly planning, they're always planning promotional things and project things. And then forgetting the process, they're forgetting the things that they're already on the hook for and so then they inadvertently over commit and can't meet the their goals. So that was something that I just taught in Digital Insiders that has been really powerful and I've modified it actually now so that in the weekly meetings with Funnel Gorgeous, I have, yes, you guessed it, a spreadsheet. And in that spreadsheet I'm asking questions. Excuse me. Our agenda is promotion, production, process. You can do it in any order. So what we do is we say, okay, what are the things that we're promoting this week? And we go through, you know, look through our coaching or courses or templates, then we go to production, we say, okay, what's currently in production? Or what do we have to produce this week for coaching courses and templates? And then we look at process, how are process based things going in customer service coaching courses and templates? And so in this way you can see at any given moment what's happening, let's say for Funnel Gorgeous Society, from a promotional aspect, from a process aspect, and from a production aspect. So this is a very macro way to look at a business. Obviously it doesn't account for everything, but it allows you to get a quick handle on what you're doing and it also makes sure that you're not overly focused on promotion and then everything is falling apart on process or overly focused on process, forgetting to market or overly focused on projects and then promotion and process fall by the wayside. So I hope that's helpful. Appreciate you all. Talk soon.

If you're ready to create, grow, scale your online business, you can go to createyourlaptoplife.com podcast and get a free plan on how you can get started today.

Sam.