90 days planner
I found myself in a kind of technical limbo, not knowing how to move forward. Because yes, I have my goal, to publish books, sell them and make it work. But it’s a bit vague as a plan, anyway, I just didn’t know what to do. Because it’s all well and good to want to sell books, but how? How do I successfully reach my audience, and who is my audience? In short, the more I thought about moving forward, the more I found myself faced with questions piling up and the more I felt like I was throwing my arms around and wasting energy for nothing.
I came across this technique of the 90 planner a bit by chance. Of course I also found people who sell you this technique to succeed at a price that exceeds 1000 euros. Now when you’re starting out, it is an amount that you don’t have. I certainly didn’t even if these same people kept sending me emails telling me that it would be the best thousand dollars to spend on for my whole life and that I was going to miss my life if I didn’t do it. You see the trick.
So I poked around and found out what that famous 90-day technique was. And I’m offering you the option to buy it… no, I’m kidding. I’m giving it to you for free, because if you’re here reading my blog, then you too want to create something beautiful.
Plus it’s pretty simple, but it takes courage not to let yourself be sidetracked from your goals. Basically, it’s a method that cuts your goals smaller and smaller to come up with very tangible things to do each week.
Therefore :
1) Define your main objective.
2) Define my 90 day goals
3) I do a list of ways to achieve those goals. It can be long or short it doesn’t matter.
4) Every month I define the 1 to 3 things I want to focus on.
5) Every week I define very tangible things to achieve the monthly goal.
To give you an example:
For me:
1) writing and selling books
2) a) write books
b) publicize my books
c) sell my books
3) a) Finish my children’s book
b) Have a blog that holds up
c) Have 10 people on my mailing list.
For me the 90 days objectives are few, so they coincide with my monthly objectives.
And from there, each week I decide on three things to do to achieve this goal. As I have three months to reach it, I don’t have to, say, finish a manuscript in a week, but I have to work on it every day.
And once you’ve finished your 90 days laps, you assess what worked and what didn’t. What you should and shouldn’t keep doing. If your long term objective has changed this is the time to acknowledge it and readjust your ways.
Most of all, remember that nothing is lost. If you’ve tried to do something and it didn’t work, that’s okay. Now you know it doesn’t work because you’ve tested it thoroughly and you can move on.
We can see that I did not have three ideas to move my blog forward. Never mind. However, on Friday, I saw that I had not worked on my blog, so I remedied that.
This approach has more than one advantage. First, it forces you to clearly define what you want. Then it forces you to try to find tangible ways to get there. So when you watch stuff on FB, you can’t lie to yourself and say yes it’s useful in some obscure way. No, it’s to procrastinate and you see it right away. And, finally, by giving yourself weekly goals, you see your project moving forward, the progress you are making, and that’s great for morale and for the desire to keep going.
So it’s up to you and your pens to put in place your plan of attack.