Focus your planning on the next three months, not the whole year. Rapid change and uncertainty make yearly forecasts unreliable for small teams and early-stage companies. Set clear quarterly objectives with measurable results instead, and stay agile as conditions shift.
Plan for the quarter, not the year. I am recording this right now in December and talking to a lot of people who are talking about their next year's plans. It's 2024, they're planning their 2025. And I would propose that they should not be planning a year, they should be planning nothing more than a quarter, because most businesses are small enough and they are dynamic enough that you have no idea what you're going to want for the end of the year. And there are a lot of things you can do that if you really put yourself, you know, to it, you could make happen in the course of the quarter. That would be just looking at January or February or March for this coming first quarter. So I would encourage you to ask, what can you do for this quarter? What are the objectives that you have? What are the results that will indicate you're making progress on those objectives? And then just lean into those. I think that makes as much sense for a company as it does for a team as it does for an individual. And I think you only start looking at longer term when you have a more stable, larger organization. Entrepreneurs, look to the quarter.
