Create areas of focus
Do you want to create a plan that will stick but also evolve with your changing needs? Well, in this video, I'm going to show you how to use an online whiteboard to create a plan that you can come back to again and again.
So, let's dive in. Now, in this example, we're using a tool called Miro. And one of the reasons why I love using an online whiteboarding tool such as Miro is because of its flexibility.
As you can see here, I've broken out my yearly plan into five different categories just using a very simple diagram structure. I've got work, finances, health, personal, and relationships.
Now of course, you can add many more categories than this or change these all together depending on your needs. But one of the great things about using a online whiteboarding tool is that I can group these activities together.
So for example, maybe I want work and finances on the left-hand side of my screen and then I can just move these ones up over here on the right-hand side. Any way that you'd like to order or perhaps reorder these areas, you can quickly and easily do so.
But before we start planning for the coming year, let's do a super quick year in review.
Take a look back
In order to do so, what I'm going to do is actually copy this first diagram and paste it down below. The reason being is that I want to come back to this in just a few minutes time, but we're going to come back up to this top one and I'm going to rename this.
I'm going to call this now Year in Review because if you want to plan your best year ever, I think you need to take just a few minutes to take a look back at the previous year.
So here, what I like to do is go through each category and just highlight some of the wins and losses or pros and cons. So when it comes to work, maybe, I'm going to highlight that yes, we hired an editor, that was certainly a win.
I can just hit enter on my keyboard. Maybe another win is that we hit 300,000 subscribers on the channel. That was another big win, but I also like to highlight the cons as well. And so maybe we missed our revenue target, for example.
So, that was something that was a bit of a disappointment. Now, in order to separate out the winds from the losses, what I'm going to do here is highlight these first two and I'm going to give them a slightly different color.
I'm going to give them this greenish color here. But for the loss or for the con, I'm going to choose this reddish color so I can highlight both the things that went well and then the things that didn't go so well.
Now remember, the key reason for spending time on this year in review is so that you can set relevant goals for the coming year based on things that have been either successful or maybe not as successful in the past. In fact, I've found that some
of my most important goals have come from this review process.
Identify important goals
Next, we can scroll down and start to plan for the coming year.
And one of the nice things here when it comes to focusing is that we can zoom in and out quite easily. So if we just want to focus on our work goals, we can do so. But if I quickly have an idea
about a goal for my relationships or my personal life, I can add that here quickly and easily.
So when it comes to planning for the future, all I need to do is hit this little plus button, and this time around, I'm going to start my goals with a G and A colon to signify that this is going to be a goal for that area. I'm using this G at the beginning
because I'm going to separate this out from the actions which are actually going to be the tasks or specific projects that I'm going to engage with. So maybe one of my goals is to increase revenue by 10% in the coming year. I'm going to hit Enter here.
I'm going to again select G and A colon and I'm going to say I'm going to hire a virtual assistant. That's another one of my goals in the coming year. But remember, goals are really hard to achieve in the short-term, so we want to be able to break this out even further.
Decide actionable steps
So the next level down, I'm going to use the letter A for action. And so maybe the action here, how am I going to increase my revenue? Maybe I'm going to launch a new course is one way that I'm going to do so.
I'm going to use that A and A colon again. And maybe another thing is I'm going to deliver more workshops or more live workshops in the coming year as well. So here, we have the high level goal under my Work category but these are some of the ways, these are some of the actionable steps I'm going to take in order to increase my revenue by 10%.
Now, you may be asking yourself as you start to add more and more things to your plan, you're going to have quite the spider web of details. And although you can drag things around
to make it look a bit neater, don't forget you can always minimize any of these areas.
So if I want to minimize that goal here, for example or if I want to minimize all of my goals and actions, I can do so under the Work category and then maybe I can come down here and focus on finances. But if I want to expand that, if I want to see what those actionable steps are,
Connect the past to the future
I can do that here as well. The other nice thing I love about using an online whiteboarding tool such as Miro is that we can make connections between different parts of our plan.
So, maybe I want to remind myself, why are we increasing the revenue by 10%? Well, the big reason is because we missed our target last year. So, what I'm going to do is come over here and choose this line tool And I'm going to make a connection between these two. So now, if I need to go back or realize, "Oh,
why are we doing this? Or how are we going to overcome this particular missed target? I can see that connection here. Last but not least, as you keep coming back to your plan throughout the year, there is that satisfaction of crossing things off.
Complete your tasks
So in this case, I'm going to come up here and I'm going use the strike through feature so I can say, "Yes, I've launched that new course, that action has been taken." Now, if you'd like to start planning with Miro for free, just go to Miro.com and if you'd like to learn other ways on how you can make use of an online whiteboard, be sure to watch this video next.
Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.
In fact, it's very simple.
