See Your Month Before It Begins

How Cleaning Out My Garage Taught Me How To Be a Better Planner?

Measuring Your Length of Time – Part 8

Have you ever felt like your life was more reactive than anything else?  You can never get a head? Sure you do, it’s natural, which means it’s normal.  Most people feel this way. Well, I hate reacting to everything. What’s funny (not) is that we will react to things that we have control of.  Why find yourself in a reactive state regarding the activities and decisions you have control over?

The Thought or Concept:
You have control of what gets scheduled, thusly what gets done.
The activities and decisions you have control over are the best candidates to be proactive.  These are the candidates that work best on your calendar. Let me explain what I mean by giving you this new practice I’ve started as inspired by John Maxwell.

John says that he plans his calendar a month in advance.  Before the next month begins he’s already planned his upcoming month in his calendar.  In other words, he’s already budgeted his time for each day of the upcoming month.  He’s already spent his time on paper.  Jim Rohn took it even further. He said, “how can you begin a year [month, week, or day] without planning your year.”  It’s not good enough to simply have goals, but an execution plan that’s down to what you will do today in planning out your year.  Myles Munroe taught, you must have it (your year, month, week, day, and project) completed before you begin it. You do the work of completing it in your head and the results will follow suite.

The plan is critical to you becoming the success you wish to become.  Doing the prep work will insure a better outcome every time.

The Practice:
Your month can be like your garage.
I use a strategy most of us can relate to.  How does one clean-out their garage? The key to the process after getting every item out of the garage is to place the largest items back in first.  If you don’t take this appropriate step, it’s pretty much guaranteed that not all items will fit back in. In the same way, you must plan out your calendar, your month.

• Start with your big (calendar) items first.  Start with the items that are non-negotiable like vacations, birthdays, and holidays.
• Next (for me) schedule your church services.  We plug in our weekly Sunday services, 1st Wednesday services, and 1st Saturday prayer services because we plan to make them our priority.
• Once you have the big items in, then everything else must fit around these “big” items.  Plug all other items into the remaining spaces on your calendar.

Planning at this point then becomes easy.  You no longer have to worry about missing the important stuff.  Because you’ve done your calendar prep work, what’s leftover will/must fit within the other days and times you have available.  Like in the example of cleaning out the garage, all that’s left is to squeeze in the small things which may even be okay to leave off or let slide to later dates.

My friend, Brian, and I were chatting about this recently.  It was the day following a holiday and we talked about all the things he wanted to do on his off-day.  I mentioned this strategy of how I scheduled around the holiday so that I had zero action items to complete.  Holidays are big items and should be respected as such. Or you can go on living life in a reactive state, that’s without planning.  At first it felt funny, not thinking of any tasks I needed to get done, but when you plan your month, spend your month on paper, before it begins, then you can plan ahead for your down-time, special events, and moments in your life, your business.

Today is Friday!
I never knew how planning in advance could give me more time back on my life than when I planned or scheduled on the fly.  You should definitely give this a try, only if you want to stop looking at your calendar like the majority do. Take a moment to start where you are and set the big items you need to accomplish into the best slots possible on you next month’s schedule.  Schedule around these “big” events, fit everything else in, and (as a result) enjoy your month in ways you never thought possible.

Until next Friday, why don’t you do me a small favor, share this content with the amazing people in your circle.  Thanks always for reading.

[su_note note_color="#FFFFFF" text_color="#000000"]The Family Plan Binder is available now!

Our team has worked very hard putting it together. We designed it to help you and your family move the needle forward in making your life your business. Find out more about the Family plan here.[/su_note]