How To 10x Your Productivity: Quarterly Planning Routine

My quarterly planning routine is the sole reason why I'm so productive in my business. And also the reason why when life inevitably happens and we have a kid home from school with the flu or multiple snow days in a month, my entire week does not get thrown off track. I'm going to show you how to use my quarterly planning routine in the next 20 minutes. Grab a notebook and a pen because I'm giving you all the steps right now. I will say in addition to pen and paper, which is the best way I like to get started. I will then take this digital at the end of the video and show you how I take all of these ideas and planning, put it into my asana at a glance board so I can always check that 90 day at a glance board to make sure I'm working on what I need to work on to accomplish my goals for the next 90 days. Your first step is to get a three month calendar. Now I have drawn these out before. I've also created scratch calendars like this, but I like to get nitty gritty on paper first. Now the first thing you're going to do when you get your paper calendar, or if you've already marked it off now, like literally just lines and boxes, is you need to block off days where you already have something going on in your life. Your life is always the priority. So do you have an a hair appointment? Do you have a dentist appointment? Do you want to take Fridays off? Let's check the kids schedule. Do they have a random Wednesday off or do they have a holiday break coming up? Go to that scratch calendar now and instantly check those days off or cross them out. The next thing you need to do is go through that calendar again and see if there's something different coming up than what you normally have. Like, is there travel, is there a conference? Go ahead and mark those days off. This could be also special occasions, maybe your birthday, maybe a husband's birthday. But think about all the time that you need in the next three months that you don't want to be focused on in your business. And I don't normally count Saturdays and Sundays. Those are given that they're off once you've done this for the next three months. So I'm doing this in quarter two as an example. So that's April, May and June. I've not got a lot of days because we have vacation vacation in June. The kids are home. There is also Easter break and there is also Memorial Day. I also have two trips, so my days have gotten pretty limited for quarter Two, I want you to now look at your calendar and see how many actual work days you have available in the next 90 days because you may be shocked when you plan with your life as the first priority. Now that you know how many days you have available to work, I want you to pause and celebrate any wins from the last quarter. At the end of a quarter, at the end of the month, at the end of the week, at the end of the day even we can think about all the things we didn't get done today and how our to do list is still massively long. I want you to think about the things you did do. All right, so what did you get done this quarter? Hey, if you just survived, kept your business running this quarter, that is absolutely a win. Maybe you set up a landing page, maybe you booked a new client, but take a minute, hit pause and celebrate yourself because if you are still going with your business, you are winning and I want you to just take that moment to reward yourself. Let's not harp on the things we didn't get done. Going to let that go for now and look at what we were able to get done over the last quarter. For me, in the last quarter, I've been able to run my profit purview workshop multiple times and get better and better at pitching my coaching program. I also considered this a win because within the first six weeks of 2024, not only did we have three snow days, but we had a random day off. We had a school holiday and three days in our house with the flu. So there was very minimal time in my first six weeks of 2024 and I'm celebrating as much as I get done. Now the next step, now that we are celebrating our wins and seeing how awesome we actually are, let's go ahead and brain dump all the things on your list that you think you need to get done between now and 90 days from now. No holds bar. We are going to analyze and examine this later. But for right now, if you want to hit pause and just brain dump all the ideas, all the thoughts, all the to do lists you think you have in your business for the next 90 days. For example, on my idealist is hosting a launch, maybe doing a new webinar, getting consistent on Instagram again, going up to two YouTube videos a week. Those are just some of my ideas. Now I've gone through this process so many times. My idealist is pretty small because I've got a grasp on what I can actually get done in the next 90 days, but I'm going To help you figure that out next, the next main step, once we've got our ideas down, is we're going to walk into my 3S system for planning your 90 days. This is sell, support and set in motion. This is basically how I decide exactly what I'm going to do in the next 90 days and how I'm going to do it. First S is sell. You need to figure out what are you selling in the next 90 days. Selling is how you make money. Selling is what keeps the lights on in your business. So if you aren't planning to sell something, that's going to be a problem. Now I would encourage you to have something you're going to sell every single month. I don't like putting all my eggs in one basket for one selling event a quarter because what happens if it goes wrong? What happens if there's a worldly event? There's just a lot of variables when we put all of our selling efforts into one quarterly event. So I would think about what something that you want to sell each month. Now this doesn't have to be something completely new, something completely fresh, not a new offer stuff that you already have, Digital products that you already have, services that you already offer. You want to put what these are going to be each month so we can then start to plan out what our to do list is going to be to make that happen, to make us money. If you know what you're going to sell in the next 90 days, please share with us your offer so we can check it out and learn more about you down in the comments. For me, my main selling feature, the main thing that I'm selling for the next probably six to nine months is my profit per view workshop and also my YouTube coaching experience. I'm going to be doing an entire video here on my YouTube channel about why I stripped my business to just one offer. But because I'm just doing one offer, that is all I'm selling for the next. Like I said, 9 to 12 months. Other ways you can think about this is what product do you want to spotlight each month? Maybe it's just bringing an awareness to that product that you have featuring a testimonial, featuring a win that somebody that took that course or had that service with you just to spotlight it. We aren't building out an entire launch here. We're just thinking of ways of how we can get more attention, more eyeballs to the things we are selling to get us sales throughout the month. The second S in this system is support. These are the day to day things that are supporting your business. So those daily activities you're doing, those behind the scenes type tasks that you have to do over the course of the next 90 days. Now this could be creating the course content that you launched earlier this year. This could be delivering coaching services to your coaching clients. For me, that means every Tuesday we have a continuing education workshop. Every Wednesday we have a Q and A call. I also spend about two hours a day in my slack group for my coaching clients to answer their questions as well. So I've got to bake that time into basically my to do list because that is my job. That is what I'm delivering on. Maybe for you it's delivering client work like building that custom sales page or writing, writing that copy for that sales page or maybe developing a social media strategy. Whatever you need to do to provide on the services that you have offered or sold, in addition to actually delivering on what you sold, you need to think about the administrative tasks that you have too. I'm talking email, I'm talking to team members, or a virtual assistant if you have one. I'm talking about invoicing, making sure that the invoices you sent to clients are getting paid, making sure those payment plans are actually being paid and not able to charge. Right. We need to be able to take time every single week, probably month to check on this and if possible, each week. For me, the other thing you need to be doing is weekly tracking of your marketing metrics. Now we just wrapped an entire series here on my YouTube channel about all of the metrics that I track to help me hit the goals in my business. Everything from top marketing metrics to YouTube metrics. So I check out that series here. This is something that I set into my weekly schedule, name checking these marketing metrics, these YouTube metrics to ensure I'm continuing to move forward, forward with the plan that I had in place to hit the goals that I want. Because if I'm not tracking, if what I'm doing is working, how am I going to know it's working? So you need to be sure you're incorporating time into your schedule now to track and look at these marketing metrics or YouTube metrics. And then the other thing that is a requirement every single week or every other week is creating content. Content pays the bills. Me showing up on YouTube creating these videos, me showing up on reels, I have to block out time to do this. Otherwise I'm not going to get it done. I have to treat my batch day today like a dentist appoint like Something I cannot miss. The same thing with reels. I have to put it in my calendar and I have to make it a priority or it will not happen. So these are all some of the support tasks that you need to be doing that are basically behind the scenes that keep the business going. The next S is the set in motion phase. Now, I did have this S as scale if you've watched my past 90 day planning videos. But I've decided to change this because scale is kind of a trigger word for me. I don't like the way scaling a business is really being talked about or marketed and it just has a negative connotation for me and has affect me in a way that I don't like the word scale. So we are going to say this is tasks to set things in motion. So these are going to be the projects to help you generate that revenue. So if you are going to create a new funnel, that is going to be the set in motion project. Because you've got to create the landing page, create the thank you page, create the lead magnet, create the emails that go out after that. That's a big project. So we're going to put that project in the set in mot phase of this planning. Maybe like I mentioned, you're going to do a webinar or a launch that is probably going to be one of the only projects that you are going to put in the set in motion. Because that is a huge project from launching to a webinar. Right? We've got sales page, we've got webinar content, we've got promotional emails, promotional social content, we've got sales emails. That is a lot of things in one project. So we also need to think about when we are putting projects in the set in motion phase. What are all the things that need to get done? Because I'm going to tell you we do not want to put in our set in motion. Launch a YouTube channel, launch a course and get consistent on Instagram. I'm going to tell you right now that is impossible. Especially if you are a team of one or you just have an assistant. There are a lot of moving pieces and we already looked at our calendar and you already have an idea of how many actual work days you do have. So when we are looking at our set in motion projects, please for over 90 days, keep it to about two to three projects. Other projects that may go into the set in motion phase could be hiring somebody. Maybe you're realizing you need help and you actually have some income now to hire a Virtual assistant. Well, another project you're going to need as well, if you're thinking about hiring, is creating standard operating procedures. This one I hate. But it is the only way you're going to be able to bring somebody on board to help you and to have them set up for success, to be able to get the things done the way you like them to get done. I'm going to tell you we are going to want to jam a lot of projects in here because we are excited about a new quarter and think we can get more done than we actually can. So even for myself, I have three full time employees at the moment. I can probably only put two to three projects in this set in motion phase because remember, I am also doing my support tasks, creating content, delivering to my clients. Right. I only realistically have about six hours a week to focus on these set in motion tasks. I'm going to show you how I use my calendar to figure this out. Looking at this calendar you could think, holy crap Trina, you got a lot going on. It's actually just blocks of time. So my morning routine basically is from the time I get up until I get the kids on the bus and what I've been doing to kind of transition from being a mom to CEO hats. So I'm going to talk more about that coming up. You see, I have me time blocked here. Now I block 90 minutes to do some admin tasks when I come sit down at my desk. So that means just double checking email, see if I need to send them to anybody to cover and checking slack client slacks and also my employee slack. From there I talk about that focus time, the two hours a day that I realistically have to work on projects and that is this time between 9:30 and 11:30. Ideally there is nothing scheduled here. It's just my space to think to work on those tasks. I also schedule in lunch because let's be real, if we don't schedule lunch we can skip it. And then I do have some white space here for calls. My clients can book hot seats with me. I also do discovery calls with people. I also do podcast episodes as well. And so this is the base of my calendar. And I also have reoccurring calls in my coaching program like work workshops and Q&As. And you can see I also block in my massage but I always start to add in other tasks here when I look at calendars that I'm a part of. So part of my mastermind you can see is now a call every Wednesday at 12 o' clock. If I want to add the call so I can participate in another program that I'm part of, I can add that here in the green and see where they fit for me. One of the calls that I want to participate more in this program is email marketing and also content strategy, maybe a little bit of systems and measurements, but I know my marketing director is taking this over. And so again, this just gives me an idea idea of what I realistically have to work with every single day, every single week. So what I'm basically telling you in this example of my calendar is I have two hours of morning to work on my set in Motion projects and I have two hours in the afternoon to focus on all those support tasks as well. Once I kind of have the idea of the projects that I'm going to be focusing on and most importantly, what I'm going to be selling, I start to plan out roughly what each week is going to look like for the next 90 days. Because I don't want to have to sit down every single week and start from scratch. I want to have a good outline going into a new quarter. So I do have kind of weekly routines or weekly themes. And within the week I do have daily themes that I want to share with you. Mondays for me are client audits every Monday morning and also metrics, marketing metrics, YouTube metrics reviews like I think my friend Ashlyn Carter used to call it Marketing Mondays. But I'm calling it Metrics Monday because in addition to those audits, I get on a team call with my marketing director and also my YouTube assistant and we talk about how did last week's video do? How did the sales page do for last week to profit per view, what was our traffic? Were we able to increase it? What our Facebook ads looking like? And we take that time each Monday to reflect on the past week to figure out what we need to do this week to make the metrics better or to improve. It also allows us, if we are slow on sales, to start to figure out do we need to pump out different content on Instagram? Do we need to create new ad content this week to help get that traffic number up to what we need it to be? Now this is something maybe you can do do once a month as you start to get into the cycle and figure out your calendar and what that's going to look like. But I highly encourage you to basically block off time at the minimum once a month to track your marketing metrics. Then on Tuesday. I like to use Tuesdays as my writing day. It's not Monday. Like the first day back. You're kind of getting over that weekend hangover. By Tuesday, you're in your groove. And I like to spend time writing my content on Tuesday. Now, this could be email newsletters that I'm sending out. This could be YouTube scripts that I'm going to film. This could be ads that I'm going to shoot or reels that I'm going to shoot. But Tuesdays just tend to be writing days for me. And then Wednesdays are camera days. Anything that I'm going to need to do hair and makeup for, YouTube videos, reels, batching stories, even filming content for my clients, I like to put that on a Wednesday because, again, I want to get as much filming as I need to with hair and makeup in one particular day. And then Thursdays, I leave basically open to catch any of the other projects that I didn't get to work on. So if I'm working on a new webinar or I'm working on a new launch strategy, I have my two hours each Thursday during that quarter to work on that. And remember, that's just two hours a week. That is just two, four, six, eight hours a month to work on a launch. So it's going to probably take me longer than, say, a couple of weeks to plan this. That's why I've got to plan accordingly when I want that launch to happen. And then Fridays, I like to take off. In fact, I like to take off so much, and it's hard for me to do because there's always something to do. I've started making plans each Friday. So not only do I schedule a massage at least once a month on a Friday, but I've also been booking walking dates with one of my friends. So I say, let's go walking on Friday at this time. So I have plans and I can't show up at work. And then my husband has off every other Friday. So we start to think about, what are we going to do that Friday? Is it going to be a movie day where we're going to try to catch up on all the movies that we haven't seen that are up for Oscar awards, or what are we going to do that day so that I'm not sitting here thinking about, oh, I could be doing this, or I should be reviewing that, or I'm going to just sneak up to my office, I'm physically out of my house, or I'm physically doing something so I don't work. With that said, there's one thing that I do every Friday morning, though, and it's part of my finance Friday again. My friend Ashlyn Carter taught me this is, I will go through all the spends that I had in my business that week and the revenue that we made just to keep track of where we are at profitability so I can make quicker decisions. I don't want to get to the end of the month and be like, we just lost, like, $10,000. We're in the whole $10,000. I want to see what's actively going on in real time to see if I need to do a flash sale, to see if I need to do a product spotlight that I didn't plan to do. And then I also do this in our personal life with our personal budget as well. All right, now remember that brain dump of ideas that you had? Take a look at it. Are you going to be able to fit them all in the time you now have allotted over the next 90 days? Because you have to be creating content. You have to be growing your audience. These are two things you must be doing, because that is the lifeblood of your business. So now when we're looking at that to do list, what are the things on that list that are going to help you do that? Do you have a new lead magnet there? Do you have launching a YouTube channel there? Launching a podcast, Getting consistent on Instagram? What on that list is helping you get more traffic to your offers? Because that will become top priority. Now, if you are a service provider and you're like, I spend all of my time delivering to my clients. I don't even have time to create content. I want you to think like this to get time back. We've got to take a risk. Now, I know you need the money. So what if you were planning to do a course? Instead of going through the whole course process, you reach out to the list that you currently have and say you are testing a beta program. Now, I 100% you charge for this beta program. I did this with 10k on replay back in 2022 when I released my first ever coaching program. I reached out to my list. I told them, this is what I'm planning to do. You're going to get in at beta founders pricing, and here's what I need from you. This is what you can expect over this time period. So in that example, I said, these are the lessons I'm going to be teaching. These are the dates these lessons are going to drop, and here's how I'm going to support you. So they had an idea of what I was going to be doing and I told them they were going to get it at a smaller price point than when I launched this out to the world. This saves you time because you don't need to do a full on sales page, you don't need to do a full on launch and you can make money on this offer before you even launch it. For service providers, what this is going to do for you, it's going to allow you to possibly get rid of one or two clients because you just made up that money with your beta launch and you can start using that time to deliver on that beta launch and start setting up a new program or a new course that doesn't involve so much of your time. Now, if you're a course creator, I think it's pretty clear what you should be focused on this quarter is getting traffic. If you don't have the sales that you want or you want to make more sales this quarter, you got to focus on the projects or the to dos that you wrote down that are going to generate you traffic. Launching is probably going to be one of the best things to do. A webinar launch is probably the easiest of all virtual summits. A heck of a lot of work. So if you have looked at your list and you are knowing you need to make more money next quarter, this is what needs to be your priority. Now there's one more thing that you need to add to your calendar. I know it's already swamped, but you've got to add time for you investing in your education and your personal development. So one thing that I do before I start my mornings is for 45 minutes I sit down and I do sound therapy and I read. Sound therapy is about 10 minutes and then I will read for about 30 minutes. And it allows me to get in the head space where I've left mom hat behind and now I'm in CEO headspace space. Also, if you have courses or you're a part of a program, you want to dedicate time to that and get through those. So you need to figure out where you're going to put those in. I tend to weave those in on Thursdays, like I said, where my extra projects are. But you do need that continuing education to continue to improve yourself and become a better you. Let me show you my At A Glance board. Now, after I take all of this stuff and put it into asana, I'm going to walk you through first the columns and then what I put in the cards here. So the first column are my Monthly focus. So January, February, March, I like to have a main focus. Then we have a list of our goals. Then we have a big picture wish list, which I'm going to talk about future goals, things that have been completed, sales goals, training resources, and then a breakdown of all my tasks, which are the main things here. When it comes to monthly focuses, I like to break down what I'm working on each month. So in January of this month, what I was setting in motion was going video in 10K on replay automation. So those were the things that were happening behind scenes that people didn't see, but they were a project that was happening. Then in February, we were promoting 10k on replay. And again, behind scenes, setting into motion was documenting sops and processes, plus creating a VSA downsell and basically doing a funnel cleanup. Again allows me to have a main place to come to to remind myself, this is what you're working on is your to do list today not covering these. Okay, we need to reevaluate. Now, when it comes to quarterly goals, I like to set themes. Sometimes this can take too long. They may just skip it. But since this was the beginning of a new year, I of course needed a Ryan Gosling meme. Hey, girl, you got this. Working hard. We were really making a pivot in my business last year at this time. And so I thought that was fun. And then we have our goals listed here. Now, as we complete the goals, we will check them and then we will move them. So we'll check them, move them over to complete. And again, showing you the real side of business, we didn't get all of our goals done for quarter one. We had three goals done. That big picture wish list is when things come up that we're like, ooh, I would like to get that done. So if you happen to have extra time, you do have a running list to come to. And again, you can see right now, this particular quarter, we did dip into our big picture wish list, even though we didn't get some of our goals done because some of these were a lot easier or quicker to do, like creating a better concierge service for our 10 count replay clients and creating a clear plan or funnel strategy for our acceptant agency proposals. Now, future goals, again, are just things that we think of anytime. And I say we, as my team, we think of that can be future goals. We always like to keep a tab or a pulse on our numbers and what we need to hit. So these are our sales goals. Now, I talked about continuing education. So not only myself, but My team needs to be working on something as as well. And so we list in our quarterly at a glance board what each team member is working on training wise. And then again this is just what I'm working on. You can see I like to create a full Q1 task list right here and it's broken down by month. A lot of this is reoccurring meetings, so like fill in team meeting slides, but it just allows me to have my to do list right here in asana generated for me every morning. This is something I help my clients build every single quarter. We have a live quarterly planning call and they can tell me what projects that they're thinking about, what they're working on and I can help them determine what is the top priority. Where do you need to focus so they aren't so overwhelmed and they can get laser focused on the things that are going to make the biggest difference in their business. They can also book 20 minute hot seats with me where we can go over their quarterly plan and figure out how it's going to fit and what are the best goals for them to set to know what's a priority for them. And they also get access to all of my business spreadsheets. So everything from my marketing metrics to my YouTube metrics to my sales funnel metrics, all of my clients get to access access to these so I can look over it with them and give them informed decisions, thoughts, feedback on what I think they need to focus on next. The goal of my coaching program is to help my clients achieve two major things in their business. How to grow their audience and get more traffic to their offers using YouTube strategically and how to figure out what to actually work on, meaning how to track the traffic, what's coming to their funnels, what's working, what's not. So that if they are getting traffic from YouTube, are we ensuring they are actually converting and making making them money in their funnel. If you're interested in working with me for the entire life cycle of gaining a new audience and making sure that new audience converts, working with somebody that's hands on, like I'm not ghosting you and I don't work with a massive amount of people. I know what each of my clients pain points are. So as soon as they ask me a question I can instantly give them feedback to help them move forward. I in fact limit the amount of people that I do work with so again I can have that high touch, close relationship with them. And that's exactly why anybody that wants to work with me does need to apply. So if you're thinking this is really what you need here as we move into the next quarter or to the second half of the year, you can go to trina little.com forward/apply. This doesn't commit you to anything. Once you apply, if I think you're a good fit, I will give you the opportunity to jump on a call with me. I'll send you my scheduling link and we can talk about would this be a great fit for you? What questions do you have? How can I help you achieve what you want to do in your business in the next six months? Honestly, my goal for this program is not to scale it. Remember I said earlier, scale. The word scale gives me a little bit of ptsd. I just want to help more business owners feel relief, remove the overwhelm of thinking they need to do everything, starting from scratch every time something doesn't work and getting stuck in that constant hustle, hustle, hustle. Do do do in actually take Fridays off. Actually take an afternoon off and not feel stressed anymore about getting everything done in their business. If you do have any questions about my coaching program again, I help with YouTube strategy and funnel optimization. We marry those two together. Send me a messagerenalittle.com Drop your question down in the comments if you want me to answer it down there. But if you're looking for someone to help you grow your audience in a sustainable way, like YouTube and get more consistent sales into your business by helping you build and optimize a really great funnel, submit that application and let's talk.