Th3 Core

My big goals are months or even years out there, but the step-by-step actions that will get me there tend to have mental timelines of days or weeks.

When it comes to planning, I'm pretty good about deciding WHAT needs to be done and in what order. Alas, I'm not always so good about achieving the WHEN.

My biggest challenges are

• estimating how long things will take,
• getting back on track after interruptions and distractions,
• getting back on track after interruptions and distractions, and
• getting back on track after interruptions and distractions,

At my day job we definitely plan for the next year and have big picture plans 4-5 years down the road. The 4-5 years are super big picture stuff I don't have to worry about or think about. But we started in October projecting what the affiliate channel could do next year.

Every year we have our projections, or big projects, our goals, etc. but a month or two into the year those quickly start changing as new opportunities present themselves, affiliates we thought would grow just drop out of sight, internal changes affect our strategy and so on.

For my personal stuff I just throw a big overarching goal out there. This year it was to triple my affiliate income and I am on pace for that. One problem with that though is if I am hitting that goal I slack off and don't push for more. I had a plan on how I would get there (X blog posts a week, some social interaction plans, etc.) but those went out the window pretty early on. Whenever I get too specific with plans and goals I fail. I like to keep the planning fairly broad and vague to allow for modifications and changes.

In my personal life and business, I'm not much good at planning. My approach for most of my life as a researcher was to focus on a project and stick to it until it was done. It was simple and resulted in something like 7 books in 17 years and preliminary work for several more.

For those projects with a research team of three, we would collaboratively divide up work and plan the order of action and then regroup every few months to see where everyone was. We worked to a quality standard rather than a deadline.

I find few other things are so simple, so it is only with mixed success that I have applied a similar approach - pick a few things to focus on and work away at them. What I have found though is outside of the linear research world, I tend to do a lot of circle spinning. That is, I move onto something before finishing the thing I was doing.

I had set a goal of finishing another book this year (yes Bucky... I still plan on sending an ms to you and Marcel), but when I said I was going to block out a day a week, Theresa encouraged me to clear other projects off my plate first, and defer the book to 2019.

That was sensible and something I would have seen myself if I were more of a planner.

This has me thinking about spending some time picking my brother's brain about that this winter, since he is a bona fide expert in scheduling, estimate, planning and change management. We've talked about it a lot, but I've never asked him how he planned as an independent consultant (he's gone back and forth between corp and independent). I know he often says that something can't be planned on a calendar (R&D for example).

In my part-time day job, we spend a huge amount of time and energy on annual and long-range plans. It takes a huge amount of time, but as there's a couple of million dollars in marketing budget and some media buys have to be done way in advance, it's probably necessary. Sometimes it seems excessive and that we should spend less time planning and more time executing. And possibly more time thinking beyond our typical 18 month planning horizon (we sometimes do if we know there's a big change on the horizon, but typically not).

Basically, the process starts with a Year in Review.
 - what worked, what didn't from each person for their area
 - top successes culled from the above list
 - things that failed culled from the above list
 - which parts of plan from last year executed successfully, which didn't
 - general market trends that will affect the business
 - SWOT - strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats

That ends with a YIR document.

Then the actual planning starts. That's where the numbers people get into forecasting revenue and setting what the revenue plan is for each month and then backing out from there to see what the marketing plan is. Some periods of the year are long lead, some are short lead, so it's quite possible that the marketing materials for July will be needed in Jan, but the ones for April will be needed in March, for example. Or perhaps paid search will be high in a low-revenue month and low in a high-revenue month.

Then, finally, this spills into personal goal setting - a mini YIR look back on last year's goals and setting some focus areas for the coming year.

I try to avoid absolute number goals (e.g. revenue), since they are so subject to external factors. I try to set goals that are based on rate - conversion rate, click through rate, etc.

Lots of people get pressured to set revenue goals, which I think is absurd. I think it makes more sense to identify the contributors to revenue that you can actually control and focus on optimizing those. If, as happened this year, a fire closes you down for July and August, then obviously you are going to miss your revenue goals even if you did a great job on reaching customers. And we have something like that every year.

But if I focus on optimizing CTR in the SERPS, then it's more comparable YOY and so I try to look for goals like that which are less subject to the vagaries of the market.

I would say that we (meaning the company, not my personal stuff) do a decent job of following the plan, though events throw some things out of whack. For the overall year, though, we are usually fairly close on revenue and spend (at least by my reckoning, though it's really the next level up where people are on the chopping block for missing numbers).

When I mentioned that my brother is good at this... the short version - he took a job at a large, publicly traded medical software company and spent the first months learning the company, working on their business strategy and then drafting a quarterly plan. Three months later, everyone was telling him how great he was because they met their plan goals. He was confused. He thought that was the point of a plan. Then they explained that it was the first time in the 25-year history of the company that had happened. But he had come out of the construction industry and HP during the glory days, so he had mostly known tight ships.