A few months ago I shared how I plan big projects with paid subscribers, using my upcoming group programme Marketing without social media as an example. Writing about planning for big projects made me think about how I plan on a smaller, day-to-day scale.
In this post, I share how I plan my days, weeks and months in my business—and how from being very structured in the past I’ve now landed on something much looser that works well.
Join the newsletter club for more like this
Sign up with your email address to receive strategies, experiments and tips to create a slow, gentle and profitable business–no hustle, no hacks.
I used to create much more elaborate plans: plans that were quite detailed and that allowed for relatively little wiggle room. Since embracing unplanning last year and gaining more trust that things will get done even if I haven’t planned them down the centimetre, I plan much more loosely.
I won’t go into detail in this post how I plan on an annual level or beyond the monthly level. While I do make annual plans that I check in with regularly, and often have projects that take months to prepare and/or run, I want to write more about how the monthly, weekly and daily planning happens.
In essence, of course, big plans become reality on the smaller scales of our days, weeks and months.
Monthly Plans
Apart from projects that span several months, I do a minimum of monthly planning. Since adding paid subscriptions to my Substack in February, I publish five posts a month and this requires me to be a bit more organized than I was when I was writing twice a month.
These are the monthly parameters within I plan:
- I publish the majority of my posts on Thursdays;
- I publish two posts a month, and three paid ones;
- Every other month one of the paid posts is the mini-mastermind, the other month is a discussion thread;
- Every month I publish a thread for the Accountability Club: generally on the first Tuesday or Thursday of the month;
- Once a month I have a business money date in which I do my admin.
Having these parameters makes monthly planning really easy, as this plan below shows:
Big plans become reality on the smaller scales of our days, weeks and months
Weekly Plans
Once I’ve got my monthly plan, I can start adding things on a week-to-week basis. As my business has grown, I’ve had to be more deliberate about protecting writing time. At the beginning of the month I go in to my calendar to block a couple of hours every week for writing. I’m also doing this with the work I’m doing on Marketing without social media, blocking hours and occasionally entire days to spend prepping the programme.
A view of my calendar with time pencilled in for writing + the group programme
This means, of course, that I have less time for clients. Any time when we set boundaries to our availability is scary and I certainly felt some time scarcity when I first started blocking out time to write. But the alternative, of course, is that I feel stressed, pressured and overwhelmed because I want and need to write and have no time for it. So blocking hours it is.
About six or seven years ago I listened to a podcast where someone shared their Friday review and plan session. I no longer review the week on Fridays, but I do spend 5-10 minutes every Friday to look at the week ahead, both in terms of appointments and to-do list items.
When I see that some days have filled up, I make sure that no other appointments can be added on that day. If I have meetings or need to read student work for my part-time teaching job, I check whether I have all the required materials and time to prepare.* I review whether I need to move tasks or appointments, based on how full my week is, where I’m at in my cycle and anything else that could influence my energy, time and mental bandwidth.
Looking at the week ahead is one of my favourite things to do. Monday mornings are no longer fraught with feeling like the week ahead is a mess. It’s so ridiculously simple but gives me a lot of peace of mind.
Next to my business, I work part-time in higher education, so don’t have five days a week for my business. Depending on the week, I spend roughly half my time on my part-time job and half on the business (and I have very exciting and scary plans to expand the business time next year 🎉). You might have similar parameters: children who you have to pick up in the early afternoon, other care responsibilities, or a weekly painting class that you always attend one afternoon a week.
If my newsletters and free resources resonate with you, I might just be the right mentor for you. I don’t believe in 10-step-plans, or get rich quick schemes. I do believe that it is possible to create and run a business that fits you and your life: your values and rhythms, your strengths and passions. I strongly believe that you don’t need to do all the things, or be on all the channels to make your business work.
I’m here to help you feel more supported in your business. I’m here to give you the confidence to run your business from that place of deep inner knowing inside of you, offering my signature blend of mindset shifts and practical steps.
These are the weekly parameters within which I plan:
- Tuesdays and Thursday I check in with email and Voxer messages from 1:1 clients, with Substack comments and any other email;
- I want and need time to write Female Owned newsletters;
- About half of my time goes to part-time teaching job, limiting the time and energy I spend on my business;
- Whatever stage of my cycle I’m in and how my mental health is doing.
As I was taking pictures and screenshots for this post, I realised that I don’t do a whole lot weekly planning on paper, or even digitally, any more. I don’t have weekly to-do lists. My planning happens on a monthly or daily level these days.
Daily Plans
On a day-to-day level I have a number of parameters:
- Time for explicit rest/napping;
- Movement more days than not (gardening/walking/yoga/pilates);
- 30 minutes of novel reading;
- No work before 10am;
- Client meetings and newsletter work always come before other business activities.
A couple of years ago I realised that I allowed myself to read during the day only if my work was done. Reading was my reward at the end of the day. But reading is one of my most favourite things to do, so I decided to prioritize it more.
Since then, I always start my days with thirty minutes of novel reading after breakfast. I love this time. Even after five or six years, this time still feels luxurious: just me, a blanket, a cup of tea and a book on the sofa. Since we bought our new sofa I’ve discovered a corner that I love especially: it feels slightly secluded, I can put my tea on the window sill, stretch out my legs and also look outside and see the birds. The past couple of weeks I’ve gotten so much joy out of watching the blue tits and coal tits at the feeder in the front yard, with the occasional robin stopping by and some neighbourhood blackbirds eating the crab apples. These are moments that I want to fill my life with.
In a similar vein to the reading, I decided more recently that I didn’t want to leave movement until the end of the day either—when I’m hungry and tired. Instead, whenever I do yoga or pilates, I usually do so in the mid-afternoon and often go back to my desk afterwards.
For the past two years I’ve needed a daily nap. I can function without, but I function much better with it. I struggled with this need for a while: at first I felt okay about it because I was ill with clinical depression, but nearly 1 1/2 year of not being clinically depressed later I still need it. I know that I need this, and that it is not abnormal to need this. In fact, I applaud anyone who takes explicit time for rest. And still it can be hard to accept.
A daily view in OmniFocus
All of my daily planning happens in OmniFocus, a very expansive and extensive to-do list app that I’ve been using for over a decade. I love how it syncs across all of my devices, how easy it is to use and especially how I can easily add recurring items to it. I love putting a recurring item in there (like sending people birthday cards) and it just magically reappearing when I need it.
If I compare how I plan now to how I used to plan ten or fifteen years ago, it’s not just a lot looser but also a lot more by feeling. I know instinctively how long something will take me roughly.
The more distance I get from productivity culture (which I used to be very invested in), the more I believe that you can’t teach people how to plan. You can give them examples and offer them strategies and support them while experimenting with these. But I’ve long stopped believing in magical templates or approaches—which is why I don’t teach ten-step plans and the like.
If you find planning really hard or near impossible, you’re not broken. You’ve just not found the thing that works for you yet (or you have, but think it’s not good enough because it doesn’t look like someone else’s approach)
As people, we all need to figure out a way to move through this world. We can be inspired by other people’s approaches, but someone else’s approach will never wholly work for us. Our plans need to fit in with our quirky lives and whatever season we’re in personally and professionally. If you find planning really hard or near impossible, you’re not broken. You’ve just not found the thing that works for you yet (or you have, but think it’s not good enough because it doesn’t look like someone else’s approach).
An experiment
Take a moment to think or journal about these questions:
- What are your monthly, weekly and daily parameters?
- How can you add a feeling of more spaciousness to your plans?
- How can you make your plan your own?
Read more inspiring posts
Join the newsletter club for more like this
Sign up with your email address to receive strategies, experiments and tips to create a slow, gentle and profitable business–no hustle, no hacks.