I couldn’t quite believe my eyes on a run the other morning through the streets of Hamilton. I knew the days were drawing in and so the light was less, but I could see this black mass running toward me on the sidewalk.
My first thought was ‘skunk’! I was ready to turn around or sprint across the road. But it was too big and it certainly did not have the shape of a raccoon.
As I got a little closer I realized it was a wild turkey! Happily out for a run around the neighbourhood too, although their intentions were probably very different than mine!
Or perhaps they had made a pre-Thanksgiving escape from a backyard!
That got me thinking about the fall and the final quarter of the year. I like to set aside a day at the end of each quarter to do a review of the quarter and also make and revise my plans for the last quarter of the year. I will be doing that later this week.
Do you do the same?
Perhaps things have gone well for you or maybe it’s been more a turkey year so far. Either way, there is still 25% of the year to go and you can achieve a lot if you set in place some solid plans and stay focused.
Let’s be honest, it can become a challenge for many of us.
Either you have achieved what you set out to do in the year already and then you can be inclined to take your foot off the gas in the final quarter. Or the opposite might be true. You are so far off your goals that it seems hopeless and there is always next year so you sort of give up.
But you can approach it from a different viewpoint.
That each quarter is a year in itself.
This is taken from a book by Brian Moran and Michael Lennington – The 12 Week Year. I am not following the full intention of the book though in this instance. Their approach is about getting more done in 12 weeks than most get done in 12 months- effectively accomplishing 4 years in 1. However, you can adapt their system and use it to make the final quarter of this year a great one for you, regardless of what has happened in the last 9 months.
Three things you can do in the next week to start setting yourself up for a great final quarter of 2021;
- Set or reconnect with your vision. This needs to be on three time levels. Long term aspirations – 5,10 maybe even 20 years. Mid term goals – usually about 3 years in the future. The next 12 weeks.
- Set a 12 week goal that directly relates to and moves you toward your vision.
- Build a plan for the next 12 weeks to achieve that goal.
Once you have this 12 week plan in place then you can get to work on planning the first week. I usually do this on a Sunday afternoon or evening but many people set aside 30 minutes first thing on Monday morning and some do it at the end of the day the Friday before.
It’s not about when you do it but it’s the fact that you do it, consistently. It’s not hard if you have a basic template to follow.
A useful worksheet to help with the vision part of this is The One Page Strat Plan that my brother shared from his corporate days at Nike and other companies. You can download a copy here or in the box below. Then start to plan out your week ensuring you are blocking out the time for the important versus the urgent.
My brother goes into some detail about the One Page Strat Plan on an episode of the REI Branded podcast which you can listen to here – Branding Lessons from the Corporate World it’s been one of the most popular episodes so far.