Quarterly Planning: How to Do it in a Way That Won’t Burn You Out

I am such a dork for planning. I love it. I love planning stuff. 

But I do my business planning a little differently than I've seen some people do it. 

You see, in my previous business, I would put in essential family things first but then I would just fit in work as much as possible. I didn’t think about why I was working so much – I was just kind of on autopilot.

But then I also realized I wasn't happy when I hit my goals. I had just put the blinders on and I was working towards them.

And then I kind of had a breakdown when I realized that I had hit four really huge goals in about a six week period. I thought I would be super stoked. 

Instead I just felt really burnt out.

So now, in answer to that experience, I approach my business planning in a very particular way. 

When it’s time to sit down for quarterly planning, I get very clear on my personal and emotional priorities before anything else.

I don’t want you to go through what I went through. So here’s my quarterly planning process, step by step.

The Big Rocks and Seasonal Demands

Start with that blank calendar. 

And then start by putting in the “big rocks”.

I really go by the Leslie Knope from Parks and Rec mantra of “friends-waffles-work or waffles-friends-work. Either way, work comes third!”

If you are always putting work first you will definitely burn out. I have been there and it is not fun. And so while work is important and while our businesses are important, they should not be the most important things in our lives.

So in planning the quarter, I consider my “biggest rocks” to be my personal things. This could be time off for travel, or events, or dinner with friends. Anything that is really important and meaningful to me. Make sure that you get that documented first.

And then you identify the “big rocks” for your business.

Those might be launches or pre-scheduled sales that you're going to be running. Or if you have physical events, like a maker’s faire, especially if you have to apply and pay for them. Anything that takes place on a specific date and specific time.

And depending on what industry you're in, you might have different seasons or points of the year that are super important. 

So if you're a wedding photographer, maybe your busy season is May to October… or if you live far south, it could be the opposite! Either way, you want to be prepared for those seasonally important times.

When I worked in retail, it was really common that we'd get some spillover of holiday spending in January. But February tended to be really slow. We needed to be cognizant of that and plan ahead.

So you're going to put everything that is really, really, really essential – for your personal life first, and then for your business life.

Name the Feeling

The heart of this whole process is this question: how do I want to feel?

I think that a lot of times what ends up happening is we go straight to the goals first. And we negate how we want to show up and what we want to truly accomplish and why we want to accomplish it. 

This insight was really born out of my blunder in my previous business. 

I’m a good carrot chaser. And the direct sales company I worked for would offer incentives like a trip after hitting three milestones.

Rather than asking myself if I actually wanted the trip, I just went for it. I was going to perform. And when I reached that goal, I was disappointed. I had never really taken the time to step back to think about how I wanted to feel. 

Another aspect of this is that I was constantly working on the weekend doing parties in people’s homes. I didn’t want to work on weekends but I did it anyway.

I wasn’t in tune with how I wanted to feel. I was just going through the motions because that's what I felt I needed to be doing. 

It did not end well.

So ask yourself the important question: how do I want to feel?

Do you want to feel relaxed, abundant, grounded, energized? Be specific. 

And then what are things that you can do that you can put into the plan for the quarter to make you feel that way? 

Get Tactical With Time

When do you want to work? And when can you work?

Maybe your business is a side hustle. It might be easy for one person to say they will work from 12pm-4pm. But for you, you’re at work 9am-5pm and only have evenings and weekends. 

Everyone is going to have different answers.

Once you know when you’re going to work, you're going to block out these days and times.

And then look back at your goals, look at what you want to achieve. Will there be enough time to do the work that you want to get done to reach those goals?

So let's just say you want to get four new clients in the next 90 days. Awesome. What are the things that you need to do to get those new people? And then what is the time commitment going to be when you actually start working with those people?

I always have to consider how many monthly calls I can do a month, physically and mentally. If I was booked out with clients, how many hours would that mean on calls?

Be real with yourself: does something need to be delegated, does something need to not happen? Does another part of your life need to be automated in some way to give you more work time? Does it mean getting support for childcare or meal prep or errands? Where can you give yourself time back to grow your work?  

Or maybe it looks like building out a course or starting a podcast and hyping it a bit over the next quarter. 

Look at the project and ask if it makes sense in this season. 

Do I have the actual time that I want to spend to do all the rest of the stuff I have to do this quarter and start a podcast? 

At one point, my answer was NO. I wanted to do a bunch of website revisions and other projects. So I moved the podcast to the following quarter. Easy.

And then if you have something that you need to promote, something that is time bound, like a course launch or a program, block out runways. 

Let’s look at the maker faire again – when do you want to start promoting it? Are you launching a new product at that event? How much time will you need for the preparation?

The runway is part of your time blocking. So take a pencil, go through and mark out what that is going to look like. And then you can effectively create the micro content plan to support it.

Schedule Breaks

And lastly, don't forget to schedule in downtime.

Chances are, if you're anything like me, because you're ambitious, you forget to schedule rest. 

Make sure to plan and schedule in breaks and rest time.

Are your evenings available but you want to protect them from work? Or you have weekends free but want to protect them from work? Or maybe the nature of your business requires you to work on Saturdays and or Sundays so then plan your days off during the week.

This is so important. 

Because if you don't, you will let your work time spill into the open spaces. 

And you can only do that for so long before you start to have some not so good feelings about it: resentment, anger, frustration, anything like that. You will start to be angry at your business because your business will feel like it's taking over your life.

Instead, head off this problem by prioritizing rest and planning for it in your schedule.

Bringing it All Together

In Q1 last year, my feeling word for the quarter was “grounded.” The holidays felt really frantic and so going into the new year, I wanted a different energy. I was aware that I was going to need to change some things to change the feeling. So I started a morning routine. I would get up and do things that helped my energy and brain, like reading for fun. I loved it.

I used to get up and just sit down to work with my morning coffee, thinking I wouldn’t have enough time if I didn’t rush into my to-do list. 

And that was a bunch of crap. 

I put off things that mattered to me, like reading, until “later in the day,” but then it never happened, and it was starting to make me feel resentful. 

And so one way to help myself feel grounded and feel like I wasn't letting myself down was to make time for those things in the morning before the day could get away from me. 

In turn, it made me more excited to put focused energy into my business.

I named what I wanted to feel in Q1 and then made a plan of how I was going to get to that feeling. 

And whenever things would start to feel a little bit like, “Oh, I'm feeling stressed and overwhelmed,” I had that North Star to go back to and evaluate: Am I feeling grounded right now? If the answer's no, what do I need to do to get back to that feeling?

Name how you want to feel. Name when you can and want to work towards your goals. 

Give yourself enough time to promote offers. 

If there's something you can delegate, delegate it. If it can be eliminated, eliminate it. if it can be rescheduled to a future date, do that.

The point is to know what you want your life to look like for work and productivity.  Know what you're working towards, and why you're working toward it, and how you want to feel overall. And that will be the foundation of your plan for the quarter.