better business blog

Tips and stories to add value to you and your organisation

Review Your Plans

16 June 2013

It’s the Summer, although you wouldn’t know it, judging by the colour of my tan. Normally by now I’ve had at least three days in the sun going crispy brown, but this year I’d have just got waterlogged so have been unable to top up on the old vitamin D.

However, I have been able to review my plans for the year. We are six months into 2013 so now is a perfect time to ask:

What is going well?

What is behind schedule and for what reason?

What is clogging up my to-do list and needs to be dropped?

I started the year with six projects and have, after a review, dropped two through lack of progress. I have also congratulated myself that three of the remaining four have borne fruit. To be honest, I wanted to keep all six items on my list, but sometimes you have to be tough minded or you can just end up in a muddle. Knowing when to stop something is as useful a skill as knowing when to start – how often do you say ‘Stop! That’s enough!’

A review is also a great time to pause and congratulate ourselves on a job well done. I’ve won six pieces of work in the last two weeks, and all of them stemmed from a decision to focus my brand more on: ‘Richard Maun – Business Coach’. When we’re asked ‘What do we do’ it’s tempting to take a shotgun approach and hit as many targets as possible, but that approach loses out over the long term. We are always better focusing our brand on one key product/service/skill/niche because people can more easily remember us and therefore are more likely to refer us onto colleagues.

The same applies when we are planning – there is probably one key project that unlocks a whole box of follow-on projects. My key project for the first six months was to rebuild my sales process pipeline, as it had become a bit unloved and had stopped delivering. For the next six months I am going to work on……ah well that would be telling.

Over to you. What have you done well over the last six months? What do you need to drop from your to-do list? And finally – what is your key project or task for the next six months?

I’m off to complete my review. Have fun completing yours!

Next week: Mindfulness and sleep