For this work at home Wednesday, we are talking about how you can fit 12 months in just one hour. So what this means is that you should be planning ahead 12 months at a time and it’s really not hard to do this.
12 months in one hour?!
Where do you start?
When we make things complicated, things do not need to be complicated in our business. So there are some there four keys that we’re going to talk about, about how to do this.
Okay, the first key is to batch things. Batching is actually very easy and straightforward. Once you know what the heck you’re going to be putting out for the next 12 months, right?
It doesn’t have to be complicated.
We don’t have to run around last minute trying to get things done. If we just know ahead of time.
Planning ahead 12 months will free up your time to focus on whatever it is that you bring the most value to your business. It frees up your time to really focus and dive deep into particular aspects of your business instead of trying to just barely do everything, it also is going to let you get ahead like with batching.
You can be three months ahead, you can be six months ahead, you can even be 12 months ahead. And it’s all just there waiting to go out into the world so that you can focus on growing and expanding your business instead of worrying about the day to day right.
BRAINSTORM
Categorize your content
The keys for getting ahead for the next 12 months, maybe it’s for your content like blog posts or social media, you want to group things by themes. So I would say every month, maybe every quarter, would have a separate theme, depending upon how many posts you need to do within that month.
You can brainstorm a giant list that would include anything that you’ve ever considered talking about. Things that you’ve had ideas to write, but you just haven’t had the time.
Make a huge brainstorm of this. Pull out a giant piece of paper.
I have a wall calendar right now that’s pretty big. So once that’s over, I actually use the back of those wall calendars and I use them for mind mapping. Just get everything out of your head that you’ve ever wanted to create for whatever it is that you’re doing.
LOOK FOR CONSISTENCY
Save time and group relative categories
Notice the things that keep popping up? Try to find a way to categorize them together. And then you have a category, or maybe you want to work through through a system about going from beginner to intermediate to advanced level. Maybe you want to do ‘How-To’ tutorials around one certain platform that you work on.
Whatever it is that you’re doing – Once you get the ball rolling and you have the ideas flowing out, you’re going to realize how easy it is to actually plan 12 months ahead in just one hour.
Batching Tasks = Time Saver
The results of the amount of time that you will save over the next year, because it’s 12 months that you’ve just created a calendar for the amount time you will save over the next year, because you already have a plan. Because you can batch these tasks.
The amount of time that you’ll have is insane. And all that time can be focused back into your business, to grow and to expand to try something new.
IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE COMPLICATED
I know a lot of the times in business, it feels like in order to be successful or to be profitable, it has to be complicated, but it really doesn’t.
So your action step for today is to start brainstorming.
Take one hour, brainstorm things out, use a mind map, whatever it is that you need to do, maybe you’re into Post-It notes. Whatever is that that you need to do, to get all of those ideas out. Things that you’ve ever wanted to create, things that you’ve kept pushing off, or new things that you want to look into writing a post about already.
Whatever it is you’re sharing content on, create that post and then start categorizing things. You’ll probably see 12 different categories, if it’s a blog post or YouTube video, depending upon how often you need to put out new content.
If you do once a week, that’s 12 months, so you need 12 general topics, and then just four pieces of content for each of those 12 topics. Four or five, it’ll be easy. By the end of this, I promise you you’ll probably have way too many to even fit into a year if you’re just doing once a week. That’s how it was for me and I was super surprised when I first did this.
So it’s much easier than you think it will be.
That’s your action step for today is to just spend one hour and plan out the next 12 months. And then after that, you have your categories and start batching your content.
Take one day a week, and write out four blog posts or create four YouTube videos, right? And then you have your whole month of content is done in that one day.
Simple, right.
And if you want to get three months ahead, six months ahead, 12 months ahead, it’s not that hard to do it once you have your plan. All right, that’s your action step for today. And tomorrow, we’re going to be talking about why you gotta write it out.
