In the remote workspace working ahead (a little bit) can be an important practice, especially if disruption is more the norm than the blip in your work style.

While some things will change if we undertake them too early, there are several things that you might benefit from working ahead around. Consider these items:

• Reporting
• Administrative tasks
• Presentations
• Small tasks which add up

Over the course of a day, we can pull off tangent many, many times. That may be the reason that several schools of thought in time management assert to get the most important, and often the most difficult thing done first.

I see this happen in my work on a regular basis, especially when I work around proposals, and presentations. I need a certain amount of creative and deep thinking when doing these two things, and if I can, I’ll find very early times of the day to at least get started, and sometimes finish, these tasks. Usually I am thankful given that inevitably urgent pressing matters pop up, requiring, my time, focus and brain power.

If you were to invest in starting 30 minutes a day earlier, or getting a head start on thinking on a train ride, what would you want to work ahead around? 

Best,
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!

​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!

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

​This year, the topic of habits is getting significant focus. Books from authors like James Clear and his Atomic Habits book, along with older ones from writers like Gretchen Rubin – Better than Before, and Charles Duhigg, the Power of Habits, each take a deep dive into the topic.

When I went to write Coaching Business Builder and PlanDoTrack, I wanted to encapsulate some of the practical exercises I had been doing with individuals, teams and groups for many years. As I write in Coaching Business Builder,

“Habits and practices are things we do automatically, sometimes unconsciously, because they have come so ingrained. There are many schools of thought that create a link between habits and success. That habits lead to success.”

As the tagline in the Coaching Business Builder and PlanDoTrack asserts:
Daily Steps + Consistent Action = Momentum

Habits play a key role in shaping our regular actions. Habits are things we do automatically, and if we are able to instill regular go-to activities that can help us move forward, it can support automation of tasks and activities.

Habit development takes place over time. While the commonly held time-frame a decade ago was that habits took about 21 days to form, today we know that many take longer than that. Lally’s research has been influential in expanding that window to approximately 66 days to a new habit. Check out James Clear’s article on this and other research.

Habits are connected to our behaviors and therefore results. It’s our regular behaviors which shape the results we get. As my doctor recently asserted, my regular habit of walking more than 12,500 steps, along with other factors has helped to lower my cholesterol and blood pressure in the last couple of years. While they were not at a danger zone they were in the higher zone.

Another one of the habits I have built in over the last few years has been around work flow. My Mondays and Thursdays are full, long days, which does free up some time on either Wednesday or Thursday for blocks of writing and other creative pursuits. As an author, and writer, finding these times are critical for reflection and creation.

This year, take a look at the goals you have set for yourself. What are the results you are looking for? Increased sales, new programs, building your network? Work backwards and reverse engineer what are the behaviors you are going to need to undertake on a regular basis?
​
As you consider your current goals and priorities:

1. What will help you be successful this year?
2. What are the habits that are going to help you?
3. What are the regular activities you want to build into your work?
4. What are the consistent behaviors and actions you want to or need to undertake to move you towards your goals?
5. What could amplify, or magnify, your regular behaviors?
6. What's missing that could make a difference?
7. What consistent flow do you want to get into?

Enjoy your thinking around habits and perhaps you will also pick up a resource.
For more on this topic, check out these posts from other writers:

• 7 Steps to Developing a New Habit – Bryan Tracy 
• Three Steps of Habit Change - James Clear
• Zenhabit’s Cheat Sheet – 29 Ways to Successfully Ingrain a Behavior 

While each author has their own framework, notice what is consistent across them.
 
Enjoy the reflection and action!
Jennifer

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

As a Fitbit embracer (no paid commercial endorsement here – just my own love of how it’s made me more aware of my lifestyle choices), I’ve become fascinated by the new sleep score provided to me every day when I wake up.

An increasing number of studies are pointing to the importance of sleep as part of our regular routine.

As someone who embraces and requires, early morning time at my desk (I’m usually there by 5 or 5:30 am), I do know that it’s a trade-off-and that my body really does need as close to 7 hours as it can get in order to not only function, but thrive.

Linked to memory, health, immunity, sleep is a key part of high performance. Studies now also show that we can get too much sleep.

What are you doing to incorporate more quality sleep into your regular routine?

Best,
Jennifer

​Week 51 Focus — Momentum
Focus Question: What is the momentum you are creating in your business right now? What’s become easier as you moved throughout the year?

Description
Over the last 51 weeks, we’ve covered a range of topics – from onboarding and team development, to growing your relationships. Each week I have also encouraged you to undertake some consistent action on your work/business. My guess is this has supported you in creating some momentum in areas which were not present before.
Momentum is a scientific term. It has the following definitions in the Oxford Dictionary:

1. the quantity of motion of a moving body, measured as a product of its mass and velocity.
2. the impetus gained by a moving object.

One of the key premises in the Coaching Business Builder and PlanDoTrack is that consistent action, and daily steps will add up and create momentum. These, coupled with the experiments you may undertake, are key to generating its own energy.

Activity
Consider the area(s) you have created momentum in.  What has helped you pick up speed? What do you notice about momentum at different times of the year?

Connection to the Workbook and Planner
Look back at the daily actions you have been taking in key activities? What do you notice?
​
As you think about your key goals for the end of next year, are there some new daily steps or consistent actions you want to commit to?
 
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 is all about taking consistent action, starting out in 15-minute bursts. The tagline for my Workbook Planners, PlanDoTrack and the Coaching Business Builder, is that business success in today’s disruptive environment is about taking consistent action on a daily basis, in order to generate the momentum needed around projects.

A key challenge of today’s VUCA and ever-changing context is that things are occurring so fast many times we are abandoning long term projects in trade-off of short-term creation.

We still need to get our big projects done. For leaders, these are the strategic issues that are going to move the business forward. For business owners, these are the big projects - like writing a book or creating something else – that is going to keep the business moving.

The challenge is finding the space to work on projects. As Thoreau wrote “I love a broad margin to my life”. I have been enamored of his writing on Walden Pond since my early 20s when I was a grad student in Environmental Studies. As many of you know, each summer I retreat and work remote out of my cottage in the solitude of nature. Even with that, the margins of my life are compressed most of the time – as a business owner, author, mom and primary support to my aging parents. Finding huge swaths of time for creative projects is always a challenge. Two years ago, after my return to the city, I didn’t return to watching TV or Netflix. I still have ample screen time in my line of work, but it created a bit more margin for creative and strategic thinking.

Even with this, I started finding that some projects really could only have 15-30 minutes dedicated to it at any given time. Great examples of this are this series – the Weekly Journaling Prompts which have been created in 15 – 30-minute windows of writing, posting and recording throughout the year, as well as a lot of my writing on the Teams365 blog.

You might not think 15 minutes a day adds up, but it does. Take a look at the volume of content generated over at the Teams365 blog which has now shaped not only one, but three of my books.

What are the key strategic and long-term goals you want to work towards? How might 15 minutes a day of focused effort, and consistent action on a daily (or regular) basis help you?

Experiment with it. See what happens. AND – Let us know!

Best, 
​Jennifer

Week 30 Focus – Marketing Review
Focus Question: What’s working and what’s not?

Description
In this week’s focus, we’re taking stock of different marketing approaches – what is working and what is not. We’ve spent several weeks exploring different promotional strategies, including LinkedIn and Instagram.
 
Building a regular practice of doing a review of what’s working, and what’s not, around marketing in your business, can save a lot of time in the long run.
 
Some of the things you will want to consider as you go to do a marketing review are:

1. Note metrics. What things are getting traction? What’s getting read? What’s not?
2. With certain posts, is there a tweak or adjustment you can make?
3. What posts could be repurposed and republished in other ways?
4. What are the items that you could use for redistribution?

Activity
Note the data you are tracking. From a high-level overview what does it indicate?
Looking to each of the marketing items you track, which one is progressing as you would like it to?
If you have multiple posts, which ones are working best?
Which ones are not getting traction as you would like?
Are you tracking the things that you want?
Where is your energy and enjoyment with this process?
​
Connection to the Coaching Business Builder/PlanDoTrack Workbook and Planner
Review the metrics you have which may be part of:

• The Monthly Daily Tracker
• Taking Stock – Monthly Reflections (refer to Key Metrics)
• Monthly Content Trackers
• Monthly Content Journals – One Line a Day
• Don’t Just Do It Once! Scaling Content

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
Follow the #90DaysPlanDoTrack series on Instagram

​As we move from one season to another, we have the opportunity to undertake a “clean sweep”. Having lived and worked in the tropics for the first 15 years of my career, and now having been back in Canada for 15 years where the seasons are so distinct, I have come to (re) appreciate, how significant seasonal change provides an impetus for change and review. Have you done a clean sweep of your surroundings lately? Is it time to clean up your files? Your desk? Your contacts?

There is a lot written on clearing and creating order – from the work and writing of Marie Kondo to Gretchen Rubin’s new book – Outer Order, Inner Calm.

Last fall, I offered up a weekly planning tool (separate from the Coaching Business Builder and PlanDoTrack) called the Clean Sweep. Structured as a five-day planning tool, it also offers some prompts and reminders for business owners or virtual workers to take action on some of the more overlooked aspects of our work. For example, outreach and building of relationships. Taking these small steps continue to “add up”. Download a copy of the Weekly  Sweep  for your business document here.

Where could you benefit from a "clean sweep"?

Best wishes,
​Jennifer