How To Design a Quarterly Plan That Leaves Room for Creativity
A copy coaching client said this to me mid-coaching session the other day…
“You’re like the perfect blend of masculine and feminine. You’re strategic and creative.”
It got me thinking.
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard things like this. In the corporate world, colleagues would say I was able to balance the left and right-brained people and make their writing sound cohesive. I’d practice this when writing multi-million dollar proposals where a dozen or so people would contribute their subject matter expertise. I’d streamline it into something that sounded like one person wrote it. Not always easy to do, but I love a good challenge.
In my corporate career, I was fully in my masculine energy — no time for emotions, checking shit off lists, getting things done, and getting ahead. Years later, still in a corporate setting, but after having kids, I innately started to embrace more feminine ways of feeling, allowing, and emoting.
Masculine and feminine energy aside, I’ve never loved strategic planning for myself. I could whip up a project plan for others to execute like nobody’s business, but my own — well, I didn’t want to be accountable.
It was easier to avoid failure if I didn’t have a plan in the first place.
I used to hate planning. I hated planning goals, meal planning, and especially planning my writing.
Aren’t creatives supposed to be wild, free, and in the moment? A plan felt rigid, masculine, and like it had too many boundaries.
Back in 2012 — during my plant-based food blogging days, when I first started creating meal plans for myself and my clients, I realized that the approach I took to food could be applied to business, too. My system was to loosely plan based on what foods were in season and then plan only four dinners a week. Lunches and extra dinners would work themselves out from there.
Today I take a balanced approach to planning all my writing projects.
If you’re a creative person and can’t stand feeling like you’re being shoved in a box and forced to stick to a plan, you’ll love the intuitive approach.
The INTUITIVE approach is fluid and changes with me as I grow.
I make business and writing plans every year and quarter and then manage them each month, week, and day.
First, I start with my big writing goals for the year. For 2022, mine looked like this:
Edit and publish the next book.
Blog at least every other week.
Update old blog posts regularly.
Launch a copywriting course.
Just four simple writing goals for the year. I suggest having 1 to 5 big goals for the year. Then, I break it down into quarters. Most of my planning happens in 12-week stints.
In September 2021, I was approaching the upcoming NaNoWriMo and wanted to draft my next book. I also decided to launch a course. I planned to continue with my regular blogging and serving clients too. There were a lot of things I wanted to accomplish.
I needed a plan.
That month, I created my first 12-week plan. It totally saved my ass when the busyness of the fall season took over.
Here’s what I accomplished from September to December 2021,
Wrote 60,000 words for my next book
Welcomed more people into the Unfussy Writing Community than any other month that year
Led daily writing sessions for 30 days
Had my best quarter in copywriting and coaching revenue
Created a copywriting course, wrote the sales copy, and launched it.
It’s important to note that I looked after myself. I sleep well, eat mostly whole, plant-based foods, move regularly, eat dinner with my family most nights, and drive the kids around while they live their best lives.
In Q4, I’m often filled to the brim with copywriting and coaching clients. So many people turn the calendar page to September and then do an “oh shit — I forgot to do what I said I’d do this year.”
It’s incredible what people can accomplish from September to December.
But what if, instead of a final sprint, we focused like a MOFO all year long? Think of what we could accomplish in 6 months, a year, or 5 years. We’d hit our goals — and then some.
Several months after rocking my first 12-week plan, I discovered the book, The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months. The book discusses the science behind planning 12 weeks at a time. Essentially, a year is too long to have a detailed plan, and a month is too short. So, enter the 12-week plan. The book goes into much more detail on avoiding common traps, time-blocking, and scoring your progress each week and quarter.
Before creating my 12-week plan, I first design my content plan for the coming quarter. Here’s a blog post on how I approach content planning — The Intuitive Approach to Content Planning. It’s a big one. Every quarter inside The Intuitive Writing School Community, we do this plan in about 2 hours (plus another small chunk of time to refine later on). I suggest blocking 2 hours during a waxing moon or during your follicular phase if you have a menstrual cycle.
First, here’s how I structure my quarter:
Break it into weeks — there might be 13 weeks if you plan with the calendar.
List my personal and business values at the top of the page. These are my north star for everything I do.
List 1-3 business goals for the coming quarter
Create a specific list of things I’ll do each week for the 3 main areas of my life. Now, there are a lot of things I can do to accomplish each goal. Before deciding what goes on the plan, I’ll brainstorm a list and choose the tasks that are either proven or new ones that I want to experiment with.
Here’s my actual plan for the first week of January 2023 as a sample ...
The orange represents my luteal phase, similar to a waning moon. If you don’t have a menstrual cycle, follow the moon.
Hint: click the image to download my free 12-week planning template. This is my time to focus and get lots of stuff done.
Then, I go into each week, breaking down the tasks I’ll need to complete to help me reach my goals.
Health & Healing: Without this, nothing else matters. This comes first. I plan the movement I’ll do based on where I’m at in my cycle and what’s going on that week. There’s lots of flexibility in this column.
Personal / Family: Also, without this, a growing business loses its meaning.
Business: Writing and business activities that will help me reach my goals.
The color coding aligns with my cycle. The orange you see here is for luteal, which also aligns with the energy of fall or a waning moon (and in the sample above means I’m doing yoga and lifting weights. I’m also tackling a lot this week). I use green for follicular/spring/waxing moon, yellow for ovulation/summer/full moon, and orange for luteal/waning moon/fall.
You can color-code your weeks with the moon to align your energy.
Block the time on your calendar to get your strategic tasks done.
Once you have your tasks, make the time on your calendar and protect it. You might block 60 minutes a day for lunch and an hour each day to make progress on your strategic business tasks. I like to take a two-pronged approach to block time:
Blocking Mondays and Fridays for only the meetings that I choose.
Blocking an hour a day at least 3 days a week for focused work on my business, not in my business.
Working your 12-week plan.
I print out this plan and move the weekly to-dos to my daily tasks before diving into work on Monday mornings. I might add some new things that pop up and move some items around or remove them. I always keep it intuitive and flexible.
I revisit the plan at the end of each week and each day. I see what needs to move around and what tasks might keep slipping.
If a writing task keeps slipping off the plan, I’ll investigate why. Is that this task isn’t aligned for me right now? Am I avoiding it for some reason that I can address?
For any tasks I remove from my plan, I put them in a “parking lot” section at the bottom of my 12-week plan and then review whether or not I’ll include them in my next quarterly writing plan.
Now that I’m coming up on a year of planning this way, I’ve had some important insights that I’ll continue to refine.
Sometimes, I’ll spend more time than I should serving others instead of making sure my tasks happen first. This causes them to slide off my weekly plan, only to end up moving them to the following week. Having this plan in the first place has given me a strong awareness of where I can focus better.
Does your 12-week plan excite you?
Your plan should feel exciting and make you a little nervous. After all, you’re stretching yourself here to hit new goals and do things in a new way. If your plan is filled with all the things you’re already doing all the time, give it another look. When you’re excited about your plan and start seeing the evidence that the actions you’re taking are aligning with the goals you’re going after, it feels good — which begets more good feelings about your plan.
Planning my life, business, and writing in this way feels authentic and aligned, and gets me fired up to create. I hope you find the plan does this for you too. Maybe you’ve already changed your idea of planning.
Watch the free workshop and get the template I use for my 12-week planning:
Updated for 2024!
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