Top tips for creating time for planning and strategising

I love organising and planning, and it’s probably one of the things that makes me such a great Change Manager! But it can be hard to really carve the time out to do planning and strategising without feeling like you’re falling behind on that to-do list and not achieving everything you can in the limited time you have. Here’s 6 quick tips to creating time for planning and strategising both in your personal life and career.

1. Take an extra day of holidays

There’s some magic that happens on holidays - you switch off and zone out and hopefully forget all about work and projects for a while. You might have noticed that you then start getting inspiration and ideas - for work/business and your personal life. It’s because you’ve made space to receive those creative downloads. Rather than miss the call and go straight back into the hubbub, take an extra day of holidays just for you to feel into what you truly want and deserve this year. After my recent beach holiday over Christmas / New Year, I’d actually forgotten to carve out time for annual planning (I was distracted by my 7 year plan and some business tasks I had to get done before heading on the European ski trip I was about to go on). But I was pretty tired and had some endometriosis pain the day after flying back from the coast so I curled up on my bed and did my normal annual planning and I’m SO glad I did. Taking that extra day set me up for success with clarity and confidence for the year. If you can’t take a whole extra day or you’ve already come back from holidays, take a couple of hours from your evening as “me time” or from your work meetings as development time and do the planning.

2. Reflect and plan on regular cycles

One of the things that helps me create time and speed up planning is that I always plan on regular cycles. My 7 year plan breaks down into annual goals. My annual plan gives me a container for my quarterly goals and my monthly planning. And my monthly planning gives me focus areas for my weekly planning. This means I’m not always having to start planning from scratch - the cascade means a lot of the thinking work already has a foundation and I can just “fill in the gaps”. My 7 year planning that I did with my partner took us about 2 hours. My annual plan took about 3-4 hours, because I set up some templates and looked up some business stats. But monthly planning only takes about 2 hours and weekly planning can be done in just 30 minutes. And this isn’t just because I’m in business - I did this the exact same way when I worked in my career both internally for project and development tasks, and externally for my personal life.

3. Complete an inspirational career vision

I think sometimes people avoid career planning because they think it will be boring. But this is simply because they are “goal setting” rather than “vision setting”. Goal setting is stating what you want to achieve. Inspirational Vision Setting in a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Coaching sense as I teach in my Leading Successful Change program, goes much deeper on details and most importantly - what you’ll actually experience and how you’ll FEEL in your career and your life. It creates so much incredible inspiration, empowerment, energy and passion that you’ll start to look forward to planning and strategising and prioritise it in your life. So get the heart involved and not just the head.

4. Use the same diary year-round and year-on-year

Another hack I use to save time is to buy the exact same diary every year. I use the A5 Daily Diary from Kikki K (unsponsored shoutout!). I start by putting my annual goals and targets in the lined pages at the back, plus creating the structure for my quarterly goals and monthly targets and focus areas. I use the same format as the year prior so it’s fast and easy to replicate. My diary has monthly calendar view double-page spreads at the front and this is what I use to map out my plan each month. Then weekly planning is simply done on the daily pages, along with any journaling I do through the year (I use my digital calendar for actual meetings and sticky notes for daily tasks, not a physical diary). I used to have a separate booklet for the monthly plans but when I realised the same calendar view was in my diary, it made sense to bundle it all into the one tool. This means throughout the year, I only use one diary, and year-on-year I use the same format. It sounds a bit groundhog day but the consistency takes away the stress and each year a different colour and pattern come out so it feels fresh.

5. Migrate tasks as soon as possible

If you’ve used a diary to handwrite goals (I connect more with my tasks this way and get things clearer in my head by seeing it on a physical page), but you’re like me and use other tools for work completion, migrate them to the final location in the same planning session. I use a physical kanban board on my office wall, my online calendar, and digital launch calendars for actual task completion. So once I’ve finished the monthly planning in my diary, straight away the tasks go up as mini sticky notes onto my wall, tasks in my launch calendars, or scheduled meetings in my online calendar. This means the planning session felt productive - I never look at the monthly plan again until the end of the month when it’s time to reflect.

6. Sign up to a workshop for accountability

Sometimes, it’s easier to carve the time out for planning and strategising when someone else has scheduled it for you. There’s lots of new year goal setting workshops out there and in fact I’ve got a free one coming up myself. 

I’ll be running my free Underpaid and Overlooked Workshop from Monday 10 February where I’ll be talking more about how you can confidently and strategically set and achieve your career goals and action plans for 2025. 

Register your free spot on my Underpaid and Overlooked Workshop now

The time is already scheduled - so all you have to do is register and I’ll hold the space for you to plan and strategise for year ahead.

Lata xx