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.