With regard to my productivity, the concise and not too surprising news is that my process works much better when I actually do it! I was so busy making presents the weekend before Christmas that I was totally fried by Monday and didn’t get my to-do list made. And guess what? I didn’t get much done Monday. Funny how that works. I’ll give you a more complete report on how my process is working next week when I’m back in work mode.

This week I’m visiting my sister in Philadelphia. I’m the one who’s supposed to be living in the cold, white North (in western New York), but it’s snowy and blowing like the tundra here right now. I’ve wisely decided not to go outside today and huddle up near the fire to write a blog post for you instead.

I hope you’re getting the opportunity to spend some downtime with family and friends during the holidays. I’ve had a nice mix of friends, family, and alone time over the last week. The alone time included lots of holiday preparation so it wasn’t totally relaxing, but I still took time here and there to just sit and read or watch a movie.

Now that I’m visiting family for most of the week, I pretty much just go with the flow, not needing to do much or make many decisions. Since that’s the opposite of my normal life, it’s a fine break.

Last call on the special retainer offer for web work that’s good only until 12/31/2010. While I’m not too available to talk this week, I will be checking email, so if you want to get in on the lower 2010 rates, there’s still time.

I’m also still working on new product and service offerings for January. More later…

Enjoy your holidays!

Having decided on my 5 streams of income – plus list building – I needed to make more detailed plans so I would know exactly what to do to achieve these goals. The first thing I did was better define what was required to achieve each of these streams.

For example, one stream of income was paid teleclasses. So, I asked myself how many participants at what price I needed to attract each month to make the amount of income I wanted for this income stream. I did this for each of the five streams to make it very clear what I needed to accomplish to earn the monthly income I wanted.

By breaking down each stream this way, I could make sure the subsequent, more detailed plans I made would support the number of clients, registrants, customers, etc. I required for each area of my business.

Now I had to get down to the nitty-gritty. I knew I needed to make more detailed plans I could execute each month, week, and day that, if executed diligently, would lead to the results I wanted.

I designed a weekly schedule that included activities in each of the 6 areas – income streams and list building – every week. As I did this, I realized that I couldn’t actually do everything every week, so I chose the activities that were the most essential to achieving my goals and those that were leveraged – helpful for more than one project – to do each week. I then divided the remaining activities between two weeks.

So, my plan has an A Week and B Week. Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday’s activities are the same each week, while Wednesday and Friday are different between the two weeks. Saturday and Sunday are reserved for catching up on email, reading various blogs, and reading or listening to learning materials.

The key to coming up with these weekly plans is to make sure that over the course of every two week period, I’m actively making progress on all six of my projects. When you do this correctly, that’s the main benefit of having these plans.

The other benefit is that you know exactly what you need to do each week, and when you’ve done enough. One of the pitfalls of working for ourselves is that it’s tough sometimes to know if you’ve done enough. After all, there’s always more you could be doing. So when can you feel comfortable quitting work for the day or week? This plan makes that a lot clearer.

Of course, your weekly plan might work out differently than mine. You might be able to work on all of your income streams and list building every week. Or you might require 3 weeks to cover everything at least once. I urge you not to let too many weeks go by without working on one of your projects, though. You’ll lose momentum and have a harder time making your monthly income projections if you don’t make steady progress toward each goal.

Once I created these weekly plans, I wrote them up in a document as checklists. Each one has space for the date at the top and check boxes next to each day’s activities. As each item is accomplished each week, I check off the box for that item. I find this very satisfying!

I put together a binder with a tab for four weeks. I printed out two A Week Checklists and two B Week Checklists and put one in each tab. I use a small Post-It note on each tab to indicate which calendar week it’s for. When the first week is complete, I remove its contents, move the tab to the back and add a fresh Week Checklist and Post-It to that section.

The next step is to create detailed checklists for each activity on the weekly checklists.

Well, it’s late February now. How are those New Year’s Resolutions going? I’ve never really liked making resolutions in January because we all expect to break them almost as soon as we make them. So why bother?

I’m sure you received many emails at the beginning of the year, as I did, expounding on the virtues of establishing goals for your business this year. I, as usual, chose not to go through the exercise at that time. But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in setting goals. I just don’t think we should reserve the process for January 1st.

And it’s that word – process – that we need to focus on. It’s not just about setting goals, but about following up with more details about how we plan to accomplish them. It’s this lack of additional planning that causes New Year’s Resolutions and other goal-setting exercises to fail.

For the last few months, my business, my mindset, and my finances have been changing. And I’ve spent time in denial, distracting myself, confused, paralyzed, as well as working very hard. In my own way, I was processing the changes. (I wouldn’t mind finding a more efficient way to do this!) I finally found my way out of the fog last week and starting some serious business planning.

First, I clarified how much income I wanted each month. Then, I decided what streams of income I would continue, create, or enhance to achieve that income. I used a few guidelines here. First, I couldn’t have too many streams. It just becomes unmanageable to split my time and attention between too many “departments”. I chose five streams for now since several of them are new and will require a lot of attention to get going. As these streams become more established, I can choose to add new streams if I wish.

Each stream of income needed to involve a product or service that I knew I would enjoy providing. There’s nothing harder than trying to start up a line of business when you just hate what you’re doing. Why try to force it? There are so many ways you can earn money, and this is how you’re going to spend a great deal of your time, so make it something you enjoy.

The next guideline was to be realistic about how much I could really make with a stream within the next few months. I didn’t want to start with totally unrealistic estimates for these streams of income because if I did, I would certainly fail in making the income I needed each month. That would mess up my finances, but even more importantly, it would doom me to failure right from the start. This is a key problem we often have with goal-setting. When we make our goals too lofty, we’re almost guaranteed to fail and of course, that’s pretty discouraging. We might decide that setting goals is pointless and we lose our motivation to keep moving forward. As I execute my plan and the income from each stream meets my goals, I can always adjust my target income for a stream upward.

Now, you may be saying to yourself, “Duh. I know to do this. Is this the first time Peggy has ever done this?” The answer is “No.” I do know this and have done it many times over the years. I’m going over it again now for two reasons,

First, I want to emphasize that we need to do this over and over again through the years of our businesses. And not necessarily just at the beginning of the year. If we’re working a plan and getting the results we want, great. But if we’re feeling at all off course, going back to this exercise can help us refocus on where we want to being spending our time and energy. And even if we are getting the results we want, we will want to readjust our plan – raising income targets, adding additional streams – periodically.

The second reason for discussing these goals is to move on to what comes next. Far too often, I’ve set these goals but not continued the planning far enough or detailed enough for the level of successful results I wanted and could have had. I’ve resolved (“resolved,” get it? ) to do better this time, which means drilling down into each stream and creating plans that make it simple for me to know what I need to do each week and each day to achieve my goals.

So in the weeks to come, I’m going to share more about my planning process, hoping to inspire you to make yours as effective as possible. You’ll also be hearing more about the new products and services I’m going to be offering, so stay tuned!

Do you have a business plan for this year? How do you stay on track? I’d love to hear what works for you, so share what’s working – or not – in a comment below.