- Hey there Dan Martell here serial entrepreneur,
investor and creator of SaaS Academy.
And in this episode I'm gonna share with you
how to plan your year and get it all in
the business, the professional,
and put it on one single page.
It's a huge promise but trust me
if you're a driven entrepreneur
and you're always forgetting key moments
you're not gonna want to miss this.
And at the end I'm gonna share with you
how to get access to the template I use
to put it all in one spot.
Let's get into it.
(upbeat music)
First off I wanna talk about the V-neck
I know you've probably never seen me wear a V
I do, from time to time.
I'm just gonna put a plug in here
if you haven't checked out it's
on Vimeo SNL V-neck, search that,
you're welcome it's hilarious.
And anytime I wear would V-neck,
this is what I think about.
So now that I've distracted you
I wanna talk about,
for me the challenges around planning my year.
You know, it was about five years ago after we had kids,
I was building my company Clarity,
my wife had an agency and we're just really trying
to get the most out of it.
But you gotta understand we're
two entrepreneurs in the family
you know, I've been building companies now for 20 years,
have had a lot of success.
I feel super grateful to you know financially
become extremely wealthy building
and scaling software companies
and now coaching some
of the best entrepreneurs in the world.
But through that, there's a lot of demand on my time,
my wife's time, and we want to be present family.
So I actually learned this strategy
that we teach with you today from my friend Toakhi Mo.
So Toakhi is one of the top coaches
in helping coaches coach very meta.
I know but anyways,
what's funny is Toakhi taught it to me
and I wanted to share it with my coaching clients.
And then I found out
that actually one of my current coaching clients,
Dale Beaumont, who's huge in Australia
is actually the guy that taught Toakhi a decade prior.
Sounds crazy but I just want to give attribution,
you know, give credit where credit is due.
And Dale was actually at one of my live events
as an attendee.
And I was like, Hey man, I'm gonna teach this framework
cause I think it's world-class.
Would you mind sharing your process.
And he got up and he shared 10 years worth
of this planning process and strategy
that's allowed him to, I mean if you follow Dale
on Facebook, social media, et cetera,
he lives at a highly integrated,
high quality of life and he's an incredibly high performer.
And that to me is the benefit
of being able to assess in a 12 month period
all the key elements that you wanna get in there
to make sure that you're really squeezing
the most out of life on both a personal
and professional level and ensuring
that you're doing that in a way
that you're not wasting time having to replant.
So these are the five key strategies
that you need to build a solid one year plan for your life.
Number one, big rocks first.
Now, if you've never heard the analogy of the big rocks,
essentially glass jar, you've got sand, pebbles and rocks.
If you put the sand in first,
then the pebbles and the rocks,
you can't fit everything in the jar.
You put the big rocks in first,
then the pebbles, then the sand,
then the cool part is you can pour
in water on top of that.
That is the spice of life.
You can make it all work.
So the key is you've gotta put the big stuff in.
So when I think of my year, came number one,
critical business commitments,
speaking engagements, my live events, et cetera,
all the things that are critical
to the business goes in
because the family stuff,
we're gonna make sure we get the quality time.
But when those things happen,
other than we have two week vacation,
separate weeks, one with my family,
one with my wife's family,
those are kind of locked and loaded.
Everything else fits around that.
The key is just to make sure that you put
the birthdays in there,
you put the you know,
if you have any friends that are doing
weddings, et cetera, just make sure
that you source all of that
before you go into your planning strategy
so you've got the big rocks
because the last thing you wanna do,
and I've experienced this is you know, double book.
Find out after the fact,
not ask for, got to write a date down.
Realise that you've over committed
that you're in a different part of the world
than you wanna be at something that's important, et cetera
or have to cancel on somebody
if you're, you made a commitment
and then now you got to go back on it
because you had a personal thing
that you wanted to take precedence,
but all you had to do is just be aware.
The key is, is to source and get all that information.
So you put the big rocks in first.
Number two, revenue milestones.
Regardless of what business you're in.
The way I think about it is
there are certain projects, key outcomes,
key moments throughout your year
that if you think about the next 12 months,
especially if you're the founder and CEO
that you need to understand and lock in,
in regards to the cadence in the rhythm
of your year to be successful.
So understanding if that's you know,
a marketing launch, a product release,
a live event, workshops, key hiring, fundraising,
put those big revenue growth oriented milestones
in your calendar and made me block out
the week or week prior cause that'll give you confidence
to know like, Hey, those two weeks,
I can't go on vacation here
because I've got this primary outcome
that needs to happen and it needs to be locked and loaded.
So for me, the way I think about it is
there's only a handful of things on an annual basis,
maybe three to five
that are critical to drive my goals and dreams forward.
And those go in the planning
so that I don't accidentally over commit myself
prior to one of those big outcomes and get in a bad spot.
Number three think once.
One of the benefits of planning this way,
is that you think once so much of time, energy is wasted
on having to rethink situations.
I have one of my best friends,
I love him, but here's a scenario
and he's gotten crazy better, like four times better,
but there was a point where
the way he lived his life was very ad hoc.
And what that meant was he wouldn't plan
he'd show up here and he forget this
or he would commit to this and forget that.
And then, and like literally his life was chaotic
because it was always a rush to fix
these other commitments to people.
Waking up early, going to the office,
coming back, meeting with this person on a Sunday,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
The way I think about it
is I save all of that mental overload or overhead
because I think once
I look at my year,
I'm like K, I look at, I think once
and then I don't have to think about it again.
This is the plan.
So the benefit of doing that,
I mean, I don't know if you've ever gone
back and forth on something.
Most founders, especially I'm talking to the CEOs,
they're the ones that I coached.
This is the critical,
is our ability to make decisions fast
is what allows us to unlock growth.
Anytime I see a company struggling to grow,
it's cause they haven't made a decision.
Literally just making a decision.
And using this strategy to think once
will allow you to build it
and then not have to think about it again
and it'll give you clarity to communicate to other people
in your life that might be demanding your time
if you can or can't do it quickly versus maybe
let me get back to you, et cetera.
So it just allows your team,
you yourself to just think once, get it done
and make it easier on your life.
Number four, stress test.
Once you've designed this,
and I'm gonna give you the template in a second,
once you've designed this one page preloaded year,
you'll be able to stress it you'll be able to look at it.
You know, the way I think about it
is I'm adding typically I work
on the professional stuff first.
Obviously the personal birthdays, all that's there.
It's presence almost now part of our template.
And then we add the professional
and then I synchronise on the personal,
so essentially my wife does her professional stuff.
I do mine, we merged the calendars together.
Then we do our personal stuff.
What kind of vacations that we wanna do,
what kind of hobby trips we wanna take on,
who do we wanna spend time within the year
and we look at it we try to get
our year kind of 75% committed,
like at the beginning of the year
so that we know what we're doing.
We're asking yourselves if we execute,
will we end up at the end of the year going,
man, that was an incredible 12 months, right?
So it looks a little daunting.
It feel overwhelming you're like,
wow, that's a lot of stuff.
But honestly, when you get into the motion
and you do this a few years in a row,
you know, we've been doing this now for about four years.
I think it's just a really great cadence to get into.
And for me it's all about sequencing.
So I learned a long time ago
in scaling companies that sequencing equals success.
It's not about the list of things you do,
just like, you know, if you're baking a cake,
it's not about the ingredients,
it's about the order that you put those ingredients in
to get the outcome in that case, a cake in your life,
growth in your business,
growth in your marriage,
presence with your family, et cetera,
world-class relationships,
all that fun stuff.
So make sure that you stress test it
by looking at the completed plan
to know that it's going to deliver
on the outcomes you're trying
to achieve for your life.
And number five, work the plan.
So there's no point
in doing all this prep work
and you know, designing it
and prepping et cetera
if you're not going to focus
and commit to what you've committed to.
So my whole thing is blinders on
will 10% of what we plan change.
Yeah, it's about 10% but
for the most part it's there.
And the way we do it is we have
an F yeah decision making process.
Okay change the F for more explicit word.
But we have a process where my wife and I ask ourselves,
is that an F yeah thing.
So if something new comes in throughout the year
and it's like conflicting
with something we've already committed to,
we'll just ask ourselves,
is that an F yeah for you?
And if both of us,
both of her and I are in agreement.
Then boom, we change it, we swap it out.
But for the most part
we wanna work the plan
We don't wanna have to go back on decisions.
We don't wanna add
that cognitive overhead.
We literally just want to say this,
if we execute is gonna be amazing,
let's make it happen.
Let's get it to come to life.
Let's get everybody on board.
So they understand how to
communicate and work with us.
And that to me is how we do a fully preloaded year
that's gonna get your business growing
your relationship in check your health on point
you know, present with your family
and really try to squeeze as much as you can
out of your year.
So quick recap how to plan your year
to fit everything in on one page,
what I call the preloaded year number one, big rocks first.
Number two, revenue milestones for growth.
Number three, think once,
reduce that mental overhead.
Four stress test, sequencing equals success
and work the plan put the blinders on.
So as I mentioned at the beginning of the episode
I wanna share with you the preloaded year template.
This was created from my buddy Toakhi.
I've revised it a little bit for my clients.
It was taught to him by Dale Beaumont.
You can click the link below to get your copy.
The way to use it, the way I instruct my clients
is create a coloured legend at the bottom.
So you might do personal, family stuff,
work, hobbies, nonprofit, whatever you want,
maybe five or six categories in different colours.
And then when you're adding stuff to the calendar
cause it's a one page
and you're adding like your colour coding,
like vacation, that's family
so that might be green,
you know, work stuff is blue,
you know, nonprofit stuff is yellow
and you're just kind of like fill in the colour code.
Cause here's what I've discovered is a little tip
is life is about energy flows.
So for example, one thing I look for
is I make sure that after
a heads down compress time business focus,
those revenue milestones for me live events
right after I'm trying to do something with my family
cause I know the week prior I'm probably
not gonna be as present as I like to be
as I prep, as I focus, as I get ready.
So the week after is a great opportunity
for me to decompress and just be 100% present
because my clients,
I'd filled up they're tanks,
they're jive in their pumped
and then I can be a lot present.
So for me, when I look at it,
I use the colours to provide energy flows,
to assess the year, to make sure that it's not,
you know, start, stop, start, stop with different things.
And I'm always looking for just even in travel stuff,
if there's like this trips here
and this trips there, if I change this,
I can do it in the same location,
saves me travel days, et cetera.
So coloured legend do one for your business
and then do one for the personal
and integrate those and click the link to download
your copy of the pre loaded year to work on for yourself.
If you liked this video,
be sure to smash that like button.
Subscribe to my channel.
And if there's somebody that you feel
like my best friend was a little chaotic and out of control,
you wanna suggest this video to it,
feel free to send it to them
if you're that friend, hello great to have you here.
And as per usual, I wanna challenge you
to live a bigger life and a bigger business.
And I'll see you next Monday.
You never seen this?
Oh dude, I can't even do this video until you watch this.