Hey possums!

Welcome to a brand new series on ze blog!

I thought what would be super fun would be to grab an audience question from you magical lot, and answer it TWICE.

Me + the Grantacular have been doing a bit of teaching lately, and discovered a fun thing:

My mode of explanation is: swear, talk about unicorns + share deeply personal stories.
I’m the self-taught successful 7 figure entrepreneur CEO.
Grant’s mode is: coming up with some corkers of analogies + drawing more from research.
Grant is the slightly more left brained Chief Operations Officer of my company, with a history in tech + banking.

Using our different modes + experiences, we could answer one question with two answers that were more holistic + made more sense to more people.

So I thought it would be fun to try it out blog style.

If ya like it, let us know, and we’ll do more!

QUESTION: How do you NOT mix up planning with doing?

 

There’s a great story about a man arriving late on a train and rushing to a carriage and demanding to the driver:

‘Drive!’

And drive he did. The man fell fast asleep.

An hour later, the man woke up and said:

“Where are we?”

The driver responded:

“I don’t know, I’ve just been driving, like you asked.”

Planning in your business is a bit like giving the driver directions. If you channel all of your energy into working in your business and none of it to the important work of planning and working on your business, you’ll be challenged to make sure you’re headed in the right direction.

You can also plan too much – planning too many stages out.

Sometimes, people become planners to avoid doing – that’s not helpful.

As a small business, you need some solid next steps that you can take to move down the path, and then you stop and assess your direction again.

A couple things to think about:

 

• Maybe you don’t need the whole plan yet.
• Maybe you just need the broken down steps for the next month!
• And then at the start of next month, circle back around, and plan out the details for the next month.

 

My answer is simple:

Have designated time for planning.

The rest is for doing.

Spend one week doing your yearly plan.

Check in with that plan for one hour each month.

Anything else, you’re probably overplanning.

A simple way to work out if you’re overplanning:

Are your plans actually getting done?

Are your goals happening?

If not, do more.

And some productivity tips here to help you get there.

HIGH FIVES!

Group hugs,