Inside My Planning Routine! How I Plan 90 Days at a Time

Truth is, I am still trying to figure out this vlogging thing. For me, I'm good on YouTube as long as I have my script and my game plan. Whereas vlogging is a little more free flowing. It forces me to be a little more vulnerable, a little less planned out. Now I still have a plan of what I want to share for this video, but I'm not writing out the things that I want to say. And that's really hard for me because I want things to be perfect. If you know anything about Enneagram threes, I want myself to look professional. And I feel like blogs don't do that for me. So we're gonna try this. I decided to just turn the camera on and share with you what I'm doing to plan for a quarter. So a quarter is 90 days. As I'm shooting this, I don't know when this video will come out or if it will even come out because again, experimenting. But as I'm planning this on June 30th, I'm starting to plan for my next 90 days. Start July 1st. July 1st through September 30th is quarter three. And the way I'm doing that is I had a list of all these projects that I will show you that I threw up there, threw up, I put up there, and I broke them down into categories of things I want to work on. The problem for me has been taking too many projects under my belt at once and quickly burning out and working way too much. So what I did over there is I broke down all my products that I currently have, like digital products and anything that needs updated with them and then projects that I want to work on. Like I have a launch coming up, we want to update the website. I have SOPs that I need to spend time on. I want to update my agency process and like all the little tasks that go in there so that I can easily see. Wait a minute, Trina, this is way, way, way too much to do. Do you need to hire somebody? Do you need to outsource? Or should we push that to the next 90 days or to the next year? So, so now what I'm doing is literally writing down every single task and where I can fit it on the calendar. So I started using this full focus planner this week. So starting, you know, on Monday, just two days ago. And what I want to do when I'm done writing out all of these things is come into the three month calendar in here, let me find it and figure out where I can put certain tasks. Now I Will tell you. Recently my calendar has changed. Okay, let me flip my phone around so you can see what I mean by my calendar has changed. I've decided to do a lot, a lot of time blocking so that I can get more organized. I have people that are helping me and so they know when I'm available. You can see my mornings are all the same up until about 9:00'. Clock. That's generally when I start other than my workday startup ritual, which I learned inside of Full Focus Planner. Then you can see every Monday, I check in on all my clients and then I plan and write my content for the week. Then I just have this chunk of time and this chunk of time open for project work. So maybe email writing, sales page writing. And here it's content creation. Every Wednesday from 9 to 3 is content creation. Filming YouTube videos, filming reels, filming updates to course content, those types of things. And then here the little green guys are open to phone calls. So strategy calls, discovery calls, podcast interviews, anything that involves somebody booking a call with me. These are the only two times that I have available. And then I did block 3 Thursdays. From 1 to 2 is like catch up time. So it's blocked. Anything didn't get done this particular week. I have an hour here and then I do my weekly review that I also learned in Full Focus Planner. And again, my shutdown routine starts from three to four. Now I could do a totally different vlog and kind of what my daily process looks like, if that's something you want to see. Like, what is my morning ritual? What is my workday startup process? What is my end of week process? What is my end of work day process? Just say daily video please in the comments and I can walk you through, you know, what I learned in the Full Focus Planner and how I created those. Because I literally have my rituals all written out right here, planned out to the minute. But I don't follow by the minute because let's be real, I'm a mom of two kids and that just doesn't happen on schedule. But again, that's how I set my calendar up. So now I'm taking that entire list of everything I want to get done this quarter. Where can I put it? Into the open project area because I only have a limited amount of time and which pieces need to be put in the content creation chunk. So Wednesdays, when there's no kids here and it's quiet. So things like podcast recording, like I said, video recording, that all goes in there. So I'm going to take highlighter and figure out, you know, which is going to be a Tuesday job, what is going to be a Wednesday job, what's going to be a Thursday job. Yeah, it's a new day because buses life. I didn't get to finish up what I was sharing with you from yesterday. So like I said, I was writing down all the tasks that I want to get done this particular quarter, this next 90 days. And this is really how I know what I'm supposed to be working on each day of the week, how much time it's going to take, do I need help? Do I need to outsource? Do I need to need to stop taking on new clients? Because our agency has doubled in capacity in the last 30 days. Being able to get a clear idea what is on my priority list for the next 90 days definitely helps me figure that out. Because my goal the second half of the year is to focus on my health and making sure all my goals tie into that so that I'm making time for myself to exercise. I'm making time for myself to get the groceries and meal prep and making time for myself to not overwork and be working all the time. I'm making all the decisions in my business to come back to that main goal into basically health for myself for the next half of the year. I have a six and a four year old, so my priorities and my health obviously haven't been at the top of the list for about seven years. And so that's really the direction I'm going for. That's why all of these goals and all of these tasks are focused around just the things that I have to do. I am not going to finish this up today either because with the new planner that I have, this full focus planner, what they have you do at the end of every week is a weekly recap. And so I'm going to actually do that before I wrap up. It is a Thursday. I don't work on Fridays, although I am tomorrow because I won't be working next Wednesday. But that's the great point about working for yourself and knowing what you need to be working on each day. So if you know, swimming lessons are next week and the kids are going to be home, can make sure you're prioritizing what needs to get done and what you can outsource. So like I said with the weekly recap, what it does is it gets me to go through, let me find it here. So it wants me to reflect this past week on my wins after action review. So refer to my last weekly Big three and figure out how far did I get, what worked, what didn't, what will I keep, what will I improve? And then I'm going to do a list sweep of all the lists that I've created. And that's what I'm really loving about this planner is that I can keep all of my lists in one place. So I keep anything that pops into my head throughout the week and I'm writing it down, I'm keeping it inside of here so I can do this list sweep and I can get through here and then I can start to plan out what next week looks like. And I always like to have my week planned before I come to work on Monday because I don't want to take time Monday morning to figure it all out. I want it to be done. So if I don't have time on Thursdays, I'll maybe do it for Friday or Sunday to make sure it is done. So I'm just realizing it's a little bit hard for me to figure out what I'm going to do next week when I don't know when I'm getting these done. So I am going to go ahead and start mapping out kind of where all these fit into place. Cuz I am going out of town twice, no three times in Q3 and we have two big projects happening in Q3 so I think I got to map this out. So how I do this, like I said, I'm going to go through here and highlight things that fit for certain days. So any type of video content or content creation that I need to do, I'm going to put that on Wednesday so I need to highlight like that. Then I am going to use the calendar in this to pencil in when I think I can do certain things. This is how I'm planning for my next 90 days with a pencil. One little caveat that I did is I made like little asterisks beside things I believe I've outsourced. So this week I talked with an email marketing specialist and we're going to bring her on board as a contractor to help me get welcome sequences written to help me get some launch email sequences kind of improved and perfected and also do weekly email content as well. I believe we aren't using our email list to the best of its ability. We have tens of thousands of people on my email list and I just send like a weekly email talking about my YouTube video. So I really want to be able to use that list to make sense sales from that list. So that's Something that I think I can get off my plate at least. So now I'm going to take all of these tasks and see where I can fit them in a calendar. Also keeping in mind different things that are going on this month, like swimming lessons, meaning the kids will be here at home that whole week. Being out of town for certain things, I'm going to a retreat. So that's why I like to write things in pencil. And that's what's really great. With Asana as my project management tool, I can move them around. Like I can sit down at the end of the day and think, okay, I'm not gonna be able to get that done tomorrow, I'm not gonna get that done that week. What can I move around? What can I piece together to make my schedule ideal? Because I'm not working past 4 o' clock and I'm not working on Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays and I'm not getting started in my work days until 8 o' clock because I have kids, I have to take them to a babysitter, I have to wait for the babysitter to come, I have to feed them. Being able to know exactly what's going on this three month time frame gives me more wiggle room to move things around so I can have that ideal work schedule that I want. So I'm going to take my handy dandy pencil, take this calendar breakdown and then look at my Google Calendar. Everything that scheduled clients, strategy, sessions, appointments, coffee, date calls, doctor's appointment, orthodontist appointment is all on Google Calendar. So I can make sure I'm not double booking myself because I've 100% done that before. And as I showed you earlier, how I kind of block everything so I can know when I can work on certain things. So I kind of block this day off a bit. This is why I feel like I'm not really good at vlogging. I feel like I'm just like updating you. Like now I'm doing this, Now I did that, now I'm doing this. So let me know what you like in vlogs if you like this style. I would love to be, you know, a little more real and share kind of these behind the scenes videos. But I need your help. I need to know what you like and what you do not like. I just got done taking all of those tasks, so I don't know how many I had actually written here, but it's this whole page and pop them in here on my calendar. So I'll probably throw some B roll over right now. But what I did is basically just put one to maybe two tasks a day throughout the three months ahead. I also tend to leave Thursdays open. Life happens. I've got to be flexible. And so by leaving Thursdays open, if one of these tasks don't get done or one of these tasks took a little bit longer, I have Thursday to catch up on it. And if I got everything done, Thursday is kind of my day to then jump ahead or get ahead. So since I have the 90 days planned and I get the Thursday and I have all my work done, I can look at next week and start working on next week's projects. So that's basically how I map this all out. Everything has just about one particular task each day. And that really filled up my 90 days. So I went from like having all of these projects right here in my head, narrowing them down to what I can really accomplish in the next 90 days and determine what's going to get done now and what's going to get done maybe after September. Then I got it all written down. This project's all broken down into tasks that I need to do. Then I got all of those tasks assigned to a certain day. And that's even including three separate trips that I have coming up as well. So it's how I'm going to start to break down my quarterly plan. Now I'm thinking, since I did talk a lot about the full focus planner, why don't I just give you a tour of it here and walk you through all the things that are included and then I'll link to it down below if you're interested in it, you'll see I'll talk to you about it. How it breaks down quarters. It is this planner is just for 90 days. And so they do have a subscription where every 90 days you automatically get sent a new one. It's an interesting concept. Like I said, brand new to me this particular quarter. But I really so far one weekend and enjoying it. So let me show you what that looks like. So this is what it looks like. I believe I got the gray one. They have a couple different colors, but I really like the gray. And then when you open it up, you know, you can add your information here. It also has like the table of contents of all the different things. I thought my information would be right here so you can get an idea of all the things it's going through. When I was read, when I was watching the training videos it had, it told me to skip the annual goals for right now if I didn't know what my goals were and I didn't. I'm taking a minute to figure out, you know, how I want my rest of the year to go. And it does give you, like a standard setup right here. So then you move into here again. That's where you write your annual goals. I do have goals set that I had set at the beginning of the year. I still think they're valid. And so I decided to just skip this for right now. But you can see how it goes into detail. You know, it says to write your smarter goal, achievement goal, all these different things. It just makes it a lot helpful if you don't know what any of these are. Seriously, the training videos are so good and they really teach you how to use this to the best that you can. So after that, after your goals, it does have these monthly calendars and it's just a blank one. So you have to write them in. And this is where I added all of my tasks. So I took all my tasks and I wrote them in here with this handy dandy pencil so I could move them around. You can see I wrote something here that that wasn't going to work. But I really like that. You can write any major projects down here too, that you're working on each month to make sure you're not doing too much. This is really key. We tend to put too many projects on our list to do. It's just impossible to get done. So if you write any major projects here, keep it to three max after this. It then goes into these rolling quarters, which I didn't do then. This is kind of my routines that I've talked about. If you follow me on Instagram stories. I am trying to incorporate more routines, more rituals, and these are what I wrote down for right now. I don't have an evening ritual. I'm still trying to figure out what that's going to look like. But so far this week, the first week, obviously the best week, right? I've done these every single day. And so I start my workday at 8 o' clock to do this workday startup and then I end my workdays every day at three knowing this is going to take me about an hour. It's not going to take me an hour every day. I may not have 20 minutes worth of email else to go through. I may not have 15 minutes of Slack messages and IG messages, but it's just a good place to start. The same with my morning routine. Like, yeah, it says 90 minutes, but I may not shower that morning. And also I am incorporating breakfast. So a lot of the time that breakfast is with my kids. So again it seems like a lot very flexible. It's not like this is live or die by I'm a mom to a four and a six year old. I really enjoyed this, this ideal week thinking about how I wanted it, my week to go. Once I mapped it out on here, this is when I put it into Google Drive. So you saw that earlier in my video where I was on Google Drive. I blocked these all out so that I had time for content creation. I had my calendar open for calls here, but blocked here. I have my calendar open here for calls with blocked here so I can work on projects. And so I really enjoy this ideal week. Then on here are projects, key projects that I'm working on for the next 90 days. So you want to remember this is only 90 days ahead. So I wrote those down and again I got those from figuring out what I want to do the next six months. And then this is what a layout looks like. So this is Monday, the very first day of this quarter. And you'll see it'll count down how many weeks you have in the quarter left. See we have 13 weeks left in the quarter. The date it will have a little check mark. Did you get your morning ritual done? Did you get your work day startup done? And then you can put your big three in here. This is the time so any appointments that you may have, other tasks that come up. And I really use this as like a note, note taking thing. So I saw we needed a refund request, an email. I put that on there to get done because somebody double purchased. There was a sound issue on my webinar. I had some speaking inquiries to get back to. And then another thing that I'm working on is coming up with a reflection every single day or a story about the day to help me write social media captions to help me write emails. And so I'm trying to take time every day to come up with kind of an antidote or a story or a reflection. And so that's kind of how the week goes. When you get to the end of the week, that's when you have your weekly, weekly preview. You can see, you can list your biggest wins so we can accomplish the things we got done, not the things we didn't get done and get sad about it. How far did you get in your weekly big three? What worked, what didn't? How will we keep improve or stop doing? Then you can start to plan your next Coming week. And I love this. Like I said, I love to plan on Thursdays before I wrap up my day or on Sundays then you can get this kind of weekly map. I'm just learning this but I like maybe just scribbling in all those tasks, planning out my weekly big three coming up. Even a self care planner. So important to think about these things like how are you going to take care of your sleeve? How are you going to do all this? So I am so excited to dig into this and this is how I'm currently planning basically every day in my schedule. So I know this is a different style video than what you normally show up here for. I usually talk about YouTube, but the thing is with YouTube you have to be consistent creating content. If you don't have a plan in place to get done all the other things, you're not going to do YouTube because you don't have time. And I never want YouTube to feel like another thing on your to do list or something you're stressing over. And the reason why I can get a video out every single week is I'm following a very specific schedule and making time for it. And so I hope this video showed you how I really plan things out to make time for YouTube videos. I would love to know is this style of video something that you like from me? Is it something you want to see more of from me? More behind the scenes, less formal type videos? I literally am shooting this entirely on my phone. Don't even have any mascara on today. But I just want to try something different. I just want to be more real with you. I want to show you that I am not in makeup all day, every day. My schedule is not perfect, my life is not perfect. And start to share more of who I am as a person and how I can manage what I do. If you got any requests or any ideas of things that you would like to see if you're liking these types of videos, please let me know down in the comments. I respond to all of you within the first 24 hours. I'm checking it every couple minutes to respond to you, so please leave a comment below. And if you are ready to get started on YouTube and you're ready to get started from scratch, make sure you watch the video that's on your screen right now because it's going to tell you exactly, step by step what to do if you're getting started on YouTube from scratch.