Why not start a new year today?
You can plan September through August of next year, or look at it as a school year and wrap up at the end of May.
I say this because that’s what we’re doing as a company … thanks to this email from our Director of Client Services:
From: Lynn PeiskerSubject: This yearDate: September 1, 2012 7:50:51 PM CDTTo: Tim Miles (Home)So say the year begins September 1. As far as the business, what is this year about? (18 Minutes. Bregman.) What is our primary focus? List two or three things. These will become our filter for everything. I will ask you about them next week.I might suggest:1. Leverage the book for speaking, growing income and exposure. 2. Keep existing clients delighted by implementing systematic efficiencies. 3. Build capacity and margin to add [top secret number] new clients.Happy Weekend. Hope your football draft goes well!
18 Minutes is a magnificent book by Peter Bregman that suggests creating five (or three or seven) primary areas of focus for the next year?
Why five? Because that number seemed right to him.
Why a year? Because it’s an actionable length of time that seems neither impossibly long nor too short.
Bregman’s five consisted of three professional and two personal and rather than niggle and waste time figuring out the exact right number and the exact right balance, why don’t you do what I’m doing and stick with that? You can always refine later.
My two personal:
1. Be locked in, committed, and present when I’m with family.
2. Get back to a single-digit golf handicap.
But that’s just setting the areas, isn’t it? And that’s important, but … well, as Bregman writes:
It’s one thing—one huge thing—to decide where you want to focus your year. Most people never really think about it as they work furiously toward… well, they’re not really sure. Still, it’s another thing entirely to actually spend your time focusing—day in and day out—on where you’ve decided to focus.
Now, to make sure goals turn into actions that support those goals, make sure everything on your to-do list fits into one of those five boxes of focus.
If it doesn’t? It’s time to start saying a bit of “no.”
Thanks, Lynn!
How about you? What are your areas of focus this year?
(And yes, my football draft went well. Very well. Haggis Envy could run the table.)
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