"If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else."
​–Lawrence J. Peter

Welcome back to an accountability check in. These are built in to provide you with an opportunity to stop, pause and reflect on what you wanted to get done, and how it’s gone.

Pull out your latest quarterly plans and take a look at what your goals were, then work through these quarterly reflection questions. You may also want to check out this 30 minute video and work alongside it with your own copy of PlanDoTrack, or the Coaching Business Builder.

Grab a pen and your planner or journal and reflect on these questions to consider: 

• What were your major achievements this quarter?
• As you consider the goals (and resolutions) you made at the start of the quarter, how are you doing with these on a scale of 1-10?
• Which goals are becoming new habits, or something you can check off?
• Which goals need to be adjusted or let go of?
• What do you notice about your metrics?
• What do you notice about your team?
• The thing that helped me be most successful this quarter has been __________
• The thing that has helped me be happiest this quarter has been __________
• What has helped me be most healthy has been __________
• What I have noticed about my work/productivity/results and/or relationships is __________
• Looking ahead to the next quarter:
• Success at the end of the quarter includes:
• I also need to think about __________

Enjoy the reflections!
Jennifer

​Do you suffer from post-it note syndrome – have put lots of ideas down but can’t locate it as they are all scattered?

Today’s post gets you thinking about how you organize your ideas all in one place so you can quickly find them.

This may involve a change in systems or habits for many, including:

• Moving from a physical system to one where things go straight onto the computer/phone in a To Do List or a Trello board.
• Getting in the habit of putting everything in one location – i.e. a book
• Getting in the habit of doing it and deleting it
• Making a list of all the tasks, plus information on annual To Do's and quarterly To Do's

While the development of a new habit can take time, it may also involve starting to focus on getting into the practice of the new habit. What are you doing to become more streamlined with your goals and tasks?

Best wishes,
​Jennifer

​Jennifer Britton - Potentials Realized
Author of PlanDoTrack (2019), Coaching Business Builder (2018), Effective Virtual Conversations (2017) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (2013). Pick up a copy of any of her books at Amazon.

Book Jennifer for a coaching session to explore productivity, teamwork and business issues.
​Contact her by phone at (416)996-8326

Check out these Instagram accounts @coachingbizbuilder & @remotepathways!
Check out upcoming programs on our calendar!

Are you a remote professional? Listen into the Remote Pathways Podcast on your favorite podcast player!

Ten minutes of planning can save upwards of 60 minutes of unfocused efforts, according to an old project management adage.

It’s alluring to write something down or put it in the system without taking a few minutes each day to look ahead and think about how our planning works, or to look to the wider picture and to think about what’s important.
​
At what levels are you planning? Planning doesn’t always have to be undertaken in a daily focus. Many times, the traction comes from looking to the wider landscape. In fact, PlanDoTrack isn’t a daily planner. It’s about focusing on monthly, quarterly and annual planning.

When we shift our attention to the higher level of planning, it can serve as an anchor for us, through the ups and downs.

Don’t forget to explore planning at these levels:
​
Annual planning – While we spend a lot of time focusing on these at the start and end of the year, when was the last time you reviewed your annual plan? When you achieve these items, what are you doing to celebrate?

Quarterly planning – What are the things you are aspiring to on a tri-monthly basis? For many of us there is seasonality in our work. What are the core goals you want to engage in throughout the year?

Weekly planning – What are the key goals you have this week? What are the things which are getting carried over week to week? This may be a signal that they need to be dropped, delegated or deleted. What do you want to do about those tasks?

Enjoy your planning!
Jennifer

One of the three tenets of PlanDoTrack is Track. As we move into the last week of the month, what are you noticing about the activities you have undertaken this month?

Are they giving you the results that you want?

As you consider your annual, or quarterly goals, what are the major milestones? Milestones are things we can measure or use as markers of our achievement.

So if one of my projects is creating a new course, milestones might be drafting and producing a certain # of modules.

If I want to increase sales and enrollment into a program we offer, what are the major milestones? It might include a certain number of registrations OR a number of marketing messages.

Activity:
Take a look at your top 3 goals this year, or quarter, and identify and write out what the milestones are.

Get granular with what milestone success will look like.

Mark the items and the milestone checklist in your calendar.

Note the trackers that you want to follow around these milestones (it could be calls etc).

A reminder that there are several tracking tools available to you in the PlanDoTrack planner including, Weekly Daily Trackers – with space to track more than 10 areas, consider some of the habits and consistent actions you want to get into this year, or the results you want to track.
​
Some of the areas readers have been tracking range from:

• Personal items – Reading time, time spent with loved ones, journaling
• Fitness goals – Time spent walking, at gym, swimming, heart rate, sleep achieved
• Business goals  - Calls made, revenue in, program design time, product design time
• Special project focus – include any part of the design, implementation or delivery

Trackers can be a great way to get habits ingrained. What are the habits you explored in last week’s post?
 
Thanks!
Jenn

We are now at week 51 of the Weekly Planning Hacks which brings us to modelling it. Part of productivity success today is about getting things into action, not just planning. There’s an old saying “Fake it ‘til you make it”. While we don’t want to pretend, getting into action helps us develop the habits needed for success. Until things are installed as a habit, it’s unlikely that they will feel good or natural. Think about the habit of waking early to focus on an important project OR going walking every evening after dinner rain or shine.

Modelling things for yourself and others helps to move the needle. Earlier in this series, I wrote about creating 15-minute timed blocks for tasks you were putting off. Whether it’s writing, cleaning or getting paperwork done, simply setting the timer, and getting it into practice helps. Often “what we are thinking about” is greater than getting it done.

My hope is that in the last year of these posts, you have tried them on and are able to now start modeling it for others.

What do you notice? What can you model and set the bar around with others?

Best wishes,
Jennifer

Week 50 Focus — Experimentation
Focus Question: Where might experiments in your work or business support you?

Description
In the three books I have published since 2017, I make reference to the need for experimentation in today’s VUCA – Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous – world.

Given that things are changing so quickly, trying things out to see how, and if, they work can be an important part of the business process.
It may be the things we are not sure of, that give us the greatest impact. Part of experimentation means that are we willing to try something out, and another part of experimentation is tracking our results.

In my business, one of the longest experiments I have undertaking is my writing at the Teams365 blog. Born on January 1st, 2014, the blog was an experiment to initially see how I could enhance the readership and visibility of my work and brand. What initially was going to be a one-year experiment in posting blog posts has grown into a six-year experiment (2014-2019) and an important part of my creative process. My regular writing under the Teams365 banner has become an important part of content creation for my client programs, and an important vehicle for me to find and magnify my voice in the areas of leadership, teamwork, remote work and virtual conversations. It’s become a really important repository as well for my work and intellectual property.

After six years of blogging, I would say that this has been a success. Website visits have moved from 80 page reads a week to more than 10, 000 a week.
What experiments have you undertaking? What ones do you want to plan for the new year?

Activity
Think about your key goals right now. What are the things which could benefit from more experimentation?

What is your hypothesis, or what do you think is going to happen?
​
What do you want to track so that you know your experiments are working? What are the short-term metrics? Long-term?

Connection to the Workbook and Planner
Consider using one of the Monthly Daily Trackers to track the results of your experiments.

Download a one-page copy of this week's 52 Weeks of Plan, Do and Track here.

Best wishes, 
Jennifer

Read and download the initial weeks of the 52 weeks of Plan, Do and Track

Jennifer Britton - Potentials Realized
Author of PlanDoTrack (2019),  Coaching Business Builder (2018), Effective Virtual Conversations (2017) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (2013). Pick up a copy of any of her books at Amazon
Book Jennifer for a coaching session to explore productivity, teamwork and business issues.
Contact her by phone at (416)996-8326
Check out the new 19 Productivity Tips on-demand program. Explore this video based program at  your own pace, and join Jennifer for bi-weekly calls as part of your course.
Follow the #90DaysPlanDoTrack series on Instagram
​

This week’s Weekly Planning Hack gets you to consider the question “What’s the season?”.

Just like weather seasons, there may be different seasons for us throughout the year, and throughout our life span. As I share in this week's Facebook Live, every November I enjoy carving some time out for writing. My November focus has led to the creation of new bodies of work including my 2017 book, Effective Virtual Conversations, and this year, it's supported me in creating time for the Remote Pathways 90 Day Guide for New Remote Professionals. I plan to make this available in 2020. With the support of the virtual community, it's an added push I need to get creative work out.
As you think about your annual rhythms:

What season are you in right now?

What season are you yearning for?

Like the weather seasons there may be different rhythms you may want to follow. For example, longer work days, and shorter work days.

What is the pace of work you are looking forward to?

Enjoy your reflection!
Jennifer

PS - As I mention in this week's Facebook Live the Remote Pathways Podcast is now live. I'd love for you to subscribe and follow. It's a bi-weekly podcast around the people, places and pathways for remote work, which I co-host with Michelle Mullins. Join us on our remote adventures! 
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​Week 41 Focus – Chunk It Down to Gain Momentum
​Focus Question: As you consider your big tasks right now, what are the chunks, or discrete packets, at the core?

Description
There are many different models of time management and one of them is about chunking. Chunking invites us to break tasks down. In chunking we may put tasks of a similar nature together. Chunking can create momentum so we may be able to quickly get those items off our list.
 
One of the other areas that I've touched on in this book already is the notion of finding the times of day that work best for you. What does momentum mean for you? What are the top 6 you can get off your list quickly? What are the things that will help you gain some momentum and get things done on a consistent basis?
 
Businesses are often built in spurts.
 
Parkinson’s Rule asserts that tasks expand to the amount of time we give them. Sometimes it can be useful to “corral” a task, giving it a very fixed timeline in order to ensure that it gets one. Here are some examples of what you might do in spurts or by chunking:

• Accounting – rather than doing this daily, you could schedule time every month for data entry, invoicing, review etc.
• Writing – while writing daily can be a great practice, you could do this for multiple projects. Think – blog, book, articles, podcasts, scripts for courses. One of the most useful spurt processes I have engaged in for several years now is the writing support I receive from NANOWRIMO – November’s month of daily writing. This process helped to birth several of my books Effective Virtual Conversations (my 2017 book), the Coaching Business Builder. It also laid the seeds for future publications by getting me into the habit of regular writing spurts.

Activity
What are the elements you need to break down?

Connection to the Workbook and Planner
In your monthly planning process, break down your activities and projects into smaller chunks – tasks, activities. Use the To-Do pages to start drilling into the core packets of work.

Download a one-page copy of this week's 52 Weeks of Plan, Do and Track here.

Best wishes, 
Jennifer

Read and download the initial weeks of the 52 weeks of Plan, Do and Track

​Jennifer Britton - Potentials Realized
Author of PlanDoTrack (2019),  Coaching Business Builder (2018), Effective Virtual Conversations (2017) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (2013). Pick up a copy of any of her books at Amazon
Book Jennifer for a coaching session to explore productivity, teamwork and business issues.
Contact her by phone at (416)996-8326
Check out the new 19 Productivity Tips on-demand program. Explore this video based program at  your own pace, and join Jennifer for bi-weekly calls as part of your course.
Follow the #90DaysPlanDoTrack series on Instagram

Scattered throughout some of the 28 different planning tools of PlanDoTrack and the Coaching Business builder is the question “what will wild success look like?”. I love asking this question to people I am coaching as it gets us to think about WHAT IS POSSIBLE, often without a lot of censure.
​
There are several ways to reword this question:

• What’s possible?
• If you were to wave a magic wand, what would be the end result?
• If there were no limits, what would you do?

​The benefit of these questions is that it:

• Helps us look larger and bigger
• It may shift some of the limiting beliefs and inner critical voices we face around that goal and the related change we need to take in order to make it happen
• Helps us stretch
• Supports more ideas and possibilities

As you go about your planning for the next month or quarter, what can wild success look like for you around your most important goals?

Best wishes,
Jennifer 

Week 32 Focus – One Percent Rule to Business Development
Focus Question: What are the consistent daily steps you want to undertake?
​
Description
Since 2005 I have been sharing what I call the One Percent Rule to Business Development. I've heard from a lot of entrepreneurs that they like this notion of incremental business action. So here it is!
The 1% rule to business development consists of a series of 8 different stages:
1. Create the Vision: Our vision sets the broad swath of possibility. It gets us thinking about what is possible. It also helps to anchor us when we think about where we want to go and what we want to do. Making our vision detailed and keeping it visible can be important. How are you enshrining your vision?
2. Prepare. During the preparation phase we want to get clear on what the requirements are for our work and projects. We want to know what a successful result looks like. We want to be clear on what resourcing is needed. During the preparation phase we will gather all the information we have so we can pull together a plan.
3. Create an action plan. In my work as a coach, I usually get my clients to create a One-Page Action Plan. The value of the One-Page Plan is that it contains all of the most important information in one page. The One-Pager be placed in a visual location so that you can refer to it quickly AND regularly. What’s on your action plan?
4. Seek out support. What is going to help you achieve the key goals you have set out for yourself? Support can take many forms – financial, technical, people. What do you need to be successful?
5. Take ongoing small steps. As my father, a retired entrepreneur himself, always reminds me that “Rome was not built in a day”. The premise behind the workbook planners is about taking REGULAR, CONSISTENT action. In building a business by ourselves burnout may be a possibility if we move too fast. It can be important to take regular small steps to create the momentum needed for things done quickly.
6. Test, Learn, Retest. In the sixth step were going to test things out. Today's volatility and complexity requires that we experiment regularly.  With the data we receive from the initial test or action we can learn and apply then retest and learn again. This is an iterative process which continues. Throughout the business cycle we may move through different bouts of experimentation. Each cycle creates an opportunity for learning and growth.
7. Learn, Iterate and Act. Each action creates a reaction, which over time creates its own momentum, making it easier to achieve the goal. Along the way learning and feedback will help to shape what we do.
8. Ultimately our goal is achieved. Based on our experience we will further refine the vision that we set out for ourselves, expanding it or modifying it based on our experience. This will further support and shape our actions are we move forward with the next cycle and process.
This cycle may take place in a short amount of time, for example a day or it may be phased over the longer term of a project.
 
Activity
Using your business or a current project, work through the One Percent Rule. What can action and learning look like around one of your most important goals? Map out the 8 steps of the One Percent Rule.

​Connection to the Workbook and Planner
Refer to the One Percent Rule to Business in Section 1 on page 29 of the Coaching Business Builder, or page 31 of PlanDoTrack.

Download a one-page copy of this week's 52 Weeks of Plan, Do and Track here.

Best wishes, 
Jennifer

Read and download the initial weeks of the 52 weeks of Plan, Do and Track

​Jennifer Britton - Potentials Realized
Author of PlanDoTrack (2019),  Coaching Business Builder (2018), Effective Virtual Conversations (2017) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (2013). Pick up a copy of any of her books at Amazon
Book Jennifer for a coaching session to explore productivity, teamwork and business issues.
Contact her by phone at (416)996-8326
Check out the new 19 Productivity Tips on-demand program. Explore this video based program at  your own pace, and join Jennifer for bi-weekly calls as part of your course.
Follow the #90DaysPlanDoTrack series on Instagram