Episode 168: My Planning Process Overview
Let's talk planning! Today I'll be breaking down the overview of how I use big picture planning, weekly planning, and daily capturing to stay on top of tasks, goals, and mental energy!
Links & Resources Mentioned:
Transcript:
Hello. Welcome back. You're listening to episode 168 of The Mindful Productivity Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Steckler, and this week I wanted to talk a little bit about my planning process overview and what I do, but also to share with you some of the ways that you can think about planning in terms of breaking things down with big picture, weekly planning and daily capturing. So I'm going to walk through some of the steps that I take and what I consider, and hopefully this will be helpful to you in terms of planning out your life and business.
And maybe you'll get a few other ideas. If you've ever watched a Plan with me video on YouTube, that's kind of going to be the vibe of this. So we'll just go ahead and dive right into this and you can always give me feedback if this is an episode style that you enjoy.
Welcome to the Mindful Productivity Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Steckler, and this is the place to be to live a more mindful and productive life. If you're ready to turn daily chaos into com and start your days with intentions, then get ready to join me as we dive deep into mindful living and personal productivity. It's time to connect with your true self so you can live the life you want to live. And it all starts now.
One of the ways lately that I've been cultivating more gratitude and bringing more joy and happiness to my days is over. On my personal Instagram account, I have been using Reels in a completely self serving way. So here's what I mean. I am not a big fan of the feeling to constantly push out content on social media. I've talked about this before on my business account, over at Mindful Productivity blog. I recently posted a real about it a real about how we shouldn't feel so much pressure to use real sum it up.
But on my personal account, I've really been enjoying using Reels just for myself. So I've been creating them for myself as kind of a personal diary into what were the most joyful moments from my day. So what I actually do is throughout the day. If I'm out at a park with Bella, which is my favorite thing to do is go explore new parks with her and it's just beautiful out. Or there's some animals that I can capture on my phone. Any kind of little moment. I just take these quick little video snippets and I actually take them in Instagram, like in the story as if I'm going to create a story.
But then instead of posting it, I just save it to my phone and I create all these little moments. So at the end of any given day or the end of any given week, I have, you know, 15 or 25 to 22nd little clips of my days. And then I go through and I find music that I'm really into lately or music that I just feel like my vibe, and I create these little reels, and I share them to my personal Instagram account, which I also go back and forth between keeping private or making it public.
Just kind of depends. Kind of reminds me of, like, feels cute by Deli later. But that's just been fun. And I started doing this last fall. So now I have quite a few wheels on there, and I tend to do more of them in the fall, in the winter and spring. Those are, like, my favorite seasons. But I've just found that it's a really fun way to practice gratitude. And now I have all these little micro moment videos that I can come back to, and I found it to be really, really fun, and it's just kind of a cute reminder of what I did that week or what I did that day.
So I wanted to share that with you in case it's something you might want to do. The other thing I wanted to share out was that we had such a beautiful day today. I'm recording this on a Sunday, and my bold dog was pretty restless. So my husband and I decided to take her out to a park and go for a drive. And it was a beautiful crisp all day. The sun was shining, and there was definitely all these dark green clouds when we went out to the beach, and I was like, oh, I definitely think it's going to rain.
And I got to take my husband to this park. He'd never been to before that I found a couple couple weeks ago. Bella had a great time. My Bulldog loves to roll around in the grass and do her thing, and it was really nice to get out of the house. It was also nice because both of us were kind of in a mood and we didn't feel like leaving the house. But my Bulldog definitely needed to go. And once we got in the car and once we started driving, and once we got to these parks, we immediately felt so much better.
And it was really fun, too, because on our way back home, it started raining. So it just kind of felt like the perfect time for everything. And it worked out great. I was also really happy because I got back home and we both decided to have a pumpkin beer. I honestly don't really drink that much anymore. Hardly ever. Like, maybe I'll have a glass or two of wine a week or a beer a week, something like that. But during fall, I really love to get back into some of the pumpkin beers.
And so I had one of those. And then it started randomly, like, pouring. It poured so much. And I live currently in the Pacific Northwest, and we have desperately needed rain. So it was pouring. I had my pumpkin beer, and it was a beautiful moment. So I just wanted to share that because I think it can be hard to remember all these lovely moments that we have, and it can be really, really great to share them out with more people, because typically we hold on to negative experiences a lot easier than positive ones.
So really, the rule is to try to repeat in your mind or by physically telling someone else something good that happened to you every day. If you can bring it up at least five times, whether that means talking about it to your partner or a friend or writing it down on your Journal, it's going to actually stay with you, and it's gonna make you feel a lot more positive and a lot more grateful. So today, what are we talking about? Well, today we're getting into my planning process, and I'm actually bringing up a Notion Doc here.
I love to use Notion for all of my podcasting, and I'm going to have to do some kind of episode in the future at some point talking about why I love Notion and how I use it. But I'm bringing up my notes here, and I just wanted to go and use this episode today to do a little bit of an overview in terms of how I plan. I think. And I mentioned this recently. There are endless ways to plan, and I don't plan one specific way constantly every single week.
In fact, I go back and forth between using Notion and other project management tools and a physical Journal or planner. And again, it really just depends on what project I'm working on and how I'm doing it. So there's three main things I want to share today, and that is big picture planning, weekly planning and daily capturing. So I really think it's important every year, every quarter and every month to think about what your big picture plans, objectives and goals are. Now, when I talk about big picture planning, one thing I want to mention is that I think it's really common and really fun towards the end of the year when we're getting through the holiday season and January is coming up to get really excited about bout what the big goal is for the new year, right?
Or maybe like, oh, what's my word of the year gonna be for the next year? I do this all the time, and I will spend hours and hours over many weeks thinking about what's the perfect word for the next year. Maybe I'll even create a graphic about it and write it down in my Journal and then, of course, share about it on Instagram and have people be like, yes, Sarah, that's a great way good for you. But then I'll never think about it again. So it kind of defeats the purpose.
Like what happens if you never check back in, right? If you never check back in with your word of the year or your big picture goals or your big picture plan. So just like, it's important not to get caught up in, like the myopic kind of planning, or they really like tiny, teeny, tiny things and get stuck in the weeds. It's also important to not just think that you can do some kind of big picture umbrella plan and expect to get results if you're never going to check back in with what those goals are.
So planning has a couple different parts to it and that you're planning out what you want to do, what you accomplish, what you want to accomplish, thinking about those objectives, identifying your KPIs or any of that stuff. If you do that, but then it also entails breaking things down into I use focus projects and target tasks. So you're breaking things down into those micro tasks that you can do. But then if you don't also have a check in point where you're reminding yourself to check in, right?
You're having a task with yourself to check in on stuff. Then you're going to lose sight of your goals and you're going to just kind of float away more and more from your actual goal. It reminds me of those teenagers over the summer. I can't remember where it was. They were on this giant Flamingo raft and they managed to float away. It's funny, but it's also scary float away from the Harbor. And they were like in the middle of I don't know, it was like an ocean or a Lake, but they were totally away and they had to have the Coast Guard come in and drag them back to safety.
Right. But just again, if you're not aware of how quickly or how far you've drifted away from your overall goal, then you can find yourself desperately where you don't want to be. So when it comes to big picture planning, I just want to really hit home that it's also important to establish touch points in where are you going to check in on your goals? When are you going to say, hey, you have this goal. Are you doing the things for it? Are you doing the things that you need to do every day, every week, every month?
Right. Are you staying consistent with those things in a way that feels good, all of that stuff for me personally, one of the ways that I definitely stay on top of some of my bigger picture projects that need to get done, like taxes in my business, which the first few years of my business. I hated the thought of doing that, and I would wait till the very end of the year to do all of those expense reports and all of that, and I would always get so stressed.
So now one of the ways I do those check ins is I have a weekly PulsePoint check in in my business square. Every Friday. I set a two hour time block in my Google calendar, and I go through things that are not always fun, and they're very repetitive, but they take very little mental energy, and I make it fun. So I usually have a snack I want and I'll get a salt or water or some fruit. That sounds really good. And I'll sit down on my desk and I'll play a bunch of music that I really am into, and I try to make it fun.
And that is when I check in on my expenses and my income and I do those reports and I generate those things for myself. And I see, am I on track? I am I behind on any of my goals. I ask myself questions about what's working, what's not all those kind of things. So that again, is a part. It's connected to the big picture planning. If you were to think of your big picture plan as the outside parts of a ladder, then your check in points are like, all those steps, right?
You can't get to the top of the ladder without those check ins. I also think it's important to mention that when you're doing bigger picture planning, like forecasting for your goals or your income or launch any of those things, I think we can get caught up in rules. Right? Well, I said I wanted to reach this goal or I said I wanted this many people enrolled in my programmer, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I just want to mention that it's also totally normal and totally okay to pivot and shift your goals as they happen.
So while I do big picture planning in my business, one thing I'm not doing in quarter one is saying exactly what I'm going to do in quarter four. So, for example, I know that I run my program published with purpose two times a year. I do two live rounds, and those typically happen in quarter one, and then again in quarter three or beginning of quarter four. I'm not sitting down January 1 and telling myself the exact dates of those necessarily because I know a lot of things can change.
And my students also know this. I usually give them a couple of months notice about when we're going to do the thing, and I may change this in the future. And this is just one example. But with big picture planning, you're allowed to keep flexible. So don't over plan where you're scheduling in every single task you're going to do every single day for the first six months of the year because things are going to change. And another thing to consider, too, is that you can also plan around your energy level.
Right. So you may do a bunch of planning for bigger things in your business or your life and then break all those things down into the target tasks that you need to do. But when you do them or how you do them can totally change. So one thing and I'll be talking about this next week on the podcast. But one thing I do is I map out the amount of energy that my tasks will take. And then if I'm having an off day or a day where I just I don't have the mental capacity, then I can see, like, okay, what are my lower level energy tasks that I can do today?
And then I know I'm still moving the needle towards that bigger goal that I have. One of the ways I do break down some of my bigger picture things like this is how much money I want to make in my business, right? Or this is the upcoming updates I want to make to a quarter programmer when I want to launch this or when I want to batch a bunch of podcast episodes. One thing I will do that's been really helpful is inside my mindful Productivity Guide Planner.
There is a section in the front that helps you map out your annual goals and then your quarterly goals. And this is where I use these pages to basically make a work back plan. So what that means is I will kind of map out because what this quarterly section is is it has, like, your quarterly goal, the three different months of that quarter, and then it breaks down the 13 ish weeks that you have within that given quarter. So I'll break down. Okay, let's say January, I'm going to do this February.
I'm going to do this and March, I'm going to do this. And then sometimes there can be overlap. But I will take those weeks beneath there and I will highlight them. So I will have, like, if I'm working on updates for published with purpose, for example, I will say, okay, this week, the focus project is going to be the focus sprint of this project or whatever is going to be this. The second week of this quarter is going to be this. And I will kind of write down what my overall focus is going to be, like, what section of the project I'm going to be working on, and I will map that out and then highlight those weeks in pink or whatever highlighter I have for that specific project.
And that kind of helps my brain see. Okay, here's the sprint of how you're going to be working on things. And that can be really helpful, because then if I'm doing stuff like my husband and I like to go to national parks, state parks and cabins and stuff and do trips. And so then I can see, like, okay, well, we have a cabin trip plan for that week or blah, blah, blah, blah. So even though I know that that's my focus for the week, that lets me know that when I go in and start looking at the target target tasks that I want to do, I want to front load those in the beginning of that week, right.
Because we're going to be gone Friday through Sunday or something like that. So that's one way that helps me break it down. So you're not necessarily going, what's the big picture thing I want to do? And then going straight to tasks. You can go straight from bigger project to what are the sections and pillars of my project? And then how do I break those down into which week I'm doing them, which is something I talk about in a focus project training I have, and that really helps me map all of those things out in a way where I can kind of get a feel for what my weeks are going to look like.
And then later I can get into the specific days. So we've talked a little bit about bigger picture planning, and now I want to get a little bit deeper into weekly planning and kind of what I do. So I mentioned that every week on Fridays, I do a pulse point check in inside of my business, and I have a complete standard operating procedure for what this looks like, so I can go through quickly and be like, okay, you're looking at your budget sheet. You're doing this, you're doing that.
You're answering specific Journal prompts. Cool. Cool. Here's a little bit more about what's included in that. So during this time, I'm reviewing important metrics for social media, my website through Google Analytics. I'm looking at some of my other standard operating procedures. I'm also looking at my income and my sales expenses and some of the conversion rates on my lead pages. This is also a time when I'm checking back end admin stuff, so I'm making sure things are running smoothly. I'm making sure that students have proper access to resources and that nothing is like not working.
I check in with students in my groups. I'm doing that pretty much every day during the week. But Fridays, especially I'm going back and seeing is there something I was tagged in that I missed or something that I said I would get to that I hadn't yet. So those kind of things just kind of like reminding myself here's kind of anything that you might have missed or something you want to kind of circle back to. And then during this time after I've done all of those kind of in the weeds type of tasks that are not always so fun, but I definitely important.
Then I switch over to Journaling a little bit, and this can entail what went well this week Where's my mindset at how is my mental energy? And did I overdo it? Because one thing about me, my mental energy burnout that and it comes in highs and lows, and I think burnout can happen on a spectrum, too. But specifically, what I'm talking about here is if I go too hard in my business, if I try to create too much, or if I try to do too many live videos or record too many podcasts things that take a lot of real deep work and mental energy.
That's the big part of my brain, right? If I do too many of those things, then by Friday, I just feel like a total dumb dumb, like my brain stops working and I can't really do much of anything. And then I'll feel pretty good over the weekend, but it'll catch up with me later. I'll find myself Tuesday or Wednesday of next week not having access to what I consider the smart, intelligent part of my brain. So it's really important that every week I'm checking in with myself, and it would be even better if I did this more regularly on a daily basis.
But checking in and being like, Where might you have overextended yourself? How can you do better? Next week is next week, a more heavy week in terms of support that you're going to be giving to students. If so, how can you lessen things in other areas, right. Or maybe it's a week where you don't want to be on social media so much because you're over it, right? These are all things that I check in with myself on a weekly basis, and it's so interesting because I mentioned that a lot of these weekly pulse point check in tasks are tedious and not always my favorite.
But I actually really enjoy this chunk of time on Fridays now because I know that these are things that keep me feeling organized and keep my business running smoothly, and they also help and prevent me from feeling overwhelmed later. So this keeps me from ignoring things I need to do, like looking at estimated tax payments, right? I'm no longer pushing those things off. And just like cleaning your bathroom, right? It's way easier to clean it for 15 minutes a week than to wait for months and months until, like, you've got some nasty ring on something and you're like, okay, I have people coming over.
This is embarrassing, right? It's so much easier to do similar stuff in your business where it doesn't take quite as long. And now I really, really enjoy that time quite a bit. It's also just another great example of how there can be things that you don't love doing in your life in business. But once you see what the outcome is, once you see what you gain from doing those things, you actually start to appreciate them more and slightly enjoy doing them. So we've touched a little bit on overview planning, like big picture planning and weekly planning, and now we'll get into a little bit of daily capturing.
So what do I mean by daily capturing? Well, I think it's really important when it comes to creating a system sustainable workflow is being able to declutter your mind. So this is why I really aim to do a daily brain dump every single morning. Sometimes I do more than one brain dump a day, or I kind of come back to it, and I use the Daily Productivity and Brain Dump book for this. And what it really allows me to do is there's either a blank page or prompts in there that helped me figure out what are the questions I need to ask myself?
And what are the things that I can just dump out on paper? This is also really great because it's not getting shared out somewhere. I'm not sharing this out on social media or even telling someone else. So it's going into a place that no one else has to see. So that really allows me to be that much more raw and honest about my feelings. And there's usually quite a bit of stuff that comes out from the beginning about kind of emotional stuff that's on my mind or things I really want to let go of or things that are frustrating me.
And I often find that because I know there's no one else judging me on the other side of that page. I'm a lot more willing to just share that stuff right up front and get it out of the way, and then I'm able to access more clarity. Right? Because even the best of people in your lives and the people that care about you the most. I think we still feel like when people are like, really doing, I think we still feel hesitant about just dumping everything right, because we also don't want to burden them, and we also want to respect their energy capacity.
So really, really, really love the Brain Dump book for this reason. So I do that usually every morning. My goal is every single day. There's definitely days during the week when I don't, but that has really, really helped me. When I do a brain dump. My whole day is way better for so many reasons. I feel like I've really given myself permission to show up in the ways I need, and it also really helps me understand not only what I need to do but what I want to do and what I need on a personal basis as well.
So then I also check in on my tasks each day, and I sometimes will often read Rite them. So if I have a bunch of stuff in notion that I know I need to do and I'm working from a specific focus project or a standard operating procedure, sometimes depending on the stuff, I will actually sit down and rewrite those tasks in my planner. Now this isn't necessary step for everyone, and a lot of people may say, well, that's really redundant in a waste of time. But I know for me personally in the way of my brain works, it's really helpful for me to actually rewrite or copy things down in terms of my day into a different place.
So the act of tangibly writing those things down helps me a lot, and I actually think about it as a form of studying. So this action of knowing what my tasks are and then rewriting them somewhere else is actually a form of spaced repetition. And when we're studying, for example, when you increase your intervals of time between reviewing materials and then checking back in with them, you can actually help yourself to better compromise and retain that information. And while nobody's going to be quizzing me on what all my tasks were for Tuesday last week, what it helps me do is keep those tasks and those ideas front of mind.
I am someone that gets very easily distracted. If I don't see it, it's usually totally out of sight, out of mind. So looking at my tasks simply a notion sometimes is not enough. Sometimes I need to rewrite them down inside of one of my planners. And then that way, it's like, okay, you're really doing this thing. And then I usually have a planner out in front of me at any given time, or I'm taking it with me to the living room or taking it with me to the park when I do, like a planning picnic.
And that way it's right in front of me. Top of mind. It's really easy for me to get distracted and unfocused whenever my creative brain, which is constantly like, oh, a fun new idea. A new podcast episode idea, right? So repetition with in planning helps me remember my big goals, the why behind them. And it also keeps me going in the one direction that I want to go. So writing that down, it kind of creates those bumpers for me. So I hope that this episode was helpful in giving you a very broad overview with some more details about how I do my planning and some things that you can consider when you're thinking about your big picture, where you want to to do PulsePoint, check in and touch points to make sure you're on the right track and how important it can be to create a daily capturing practice where you're not only capturing ideas and things that you learn online or from other people, but you're also creating a space where you can let things go and get them out of your mind.
Because when you do that, there's so much more clarity and it's a lot easier to take action from that place. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. If you want to find journals, planners, and more resources from me, make sure to go over to Mindful Productivity blog. Com and check out my resources there. Thank you so much for listening. I will see you back here next week. I've got a cool episode that you're going to love. If you're into project planning, I'll see you then.
