Today, I spent 4 hours on financial planning and 1 hour on schedule planning, and I still have a few hours left for goal setting. Too much time planning? In reality, I had delayed this for a while, given I wanted to start the year with a big wave of “doing” and thus capture momentum for the rest of the year, but today I felt like I had earned the time to do less and plan more. At the end, I did just as much of both, because they need each other more than we often realise.
Closing January: Planning through Action
For me, the hardest part about planning is not doing. To adapt to my own personality, I learned that I have to mix both. That means that I get through quite a lot of tasks while I am in the process of planning for them! Confusing, perhaps, but here is what happened today.
I started the morning with my monthly planning. As I went through the closing of January, I had to make a decision on the tasks that were left undone. Were they still due, or were they ripe to be dropped? A few got crossed out as they lost relevance, but quite a few got “transported” to February and immediately ticked off! Cheating? Not quite.
The reason I still transport them is that, in reality, I did not do them in January, so I should not mark them as complete in that month. That allows me to have a visual clue about the number of tasks I can actually get done in a month and continue to improve my forward planning. The reason I do them straight away is part of the Bullet Journal (“BuJo”)technique. If you are dragging something month on month, is there something you can get started on? And there definitely was!
As a bonus, by getting some of these easy tasks done, I can move to the next step for each of them. That makes for more efficient planning. It’s not just about a neat list; it is about making space for what else is on the way.
Breaking up a Big Task: Financial Planning
One of the items on my list for the early part of the year was to do some financial planning. Financial planning is one of those tasks that feels heavy, largely because it can often be undefined. Thus, as a project, it has the potential to stay on my list for months without end. This required that I apply another rule in the BuJo method, and I decided to break this further into its different components. What does financial planning really mean?
Well, in my case, it meant updating my balance sheet, compiling the last months of income for the year, and evaluating a few tax and instrument options. I started with the most basic task possible – booking a call with an accountant. And then moved on to retrieve information from all the different platforms and aggregate it. As I was feeling brave, I moved to my next step and did the analysis for the year.
This may, yet again, feel like execution rather than planning, but with the information in hand, I can now plan for the next actions. In these smaller chunks, I now know the next smaller steps to optimise my portfolio further. And, because I was feeling brave and had all my accounts logged in, I downloaded all expenses for a year so I could do some work on expense analysis and budgeting. You can’t plan for your goals without costing them out!
It’s that time of the year: Taxes
No, I have not started on my taxes. I am not that organised. However, I have started taking the steps to make sure I have all the information at hand when it is time to take care of them. Because I do taxes in two jurisdictions, things are sometimes a bit tricky to put together. And this year, for the first time, I have the closing of the year for my own business, Inside the Business Mind. I have learnt so much over the years about not getting set up the right way when you first start, that I am a bit obsessed with the details of getting everything in place and on time from the first year.
Tax planning, for me, is less about forms and more about understanding the systems I operate in.
The thing with taxes is that if you start planning ahead, you can actually take the time to understand what works and does not work and how you can optimise your personal and business situation. Once again, a mix of doing and planning, but in my world, one does not go without the other.
A return to business trips: When?
Planning is not just about money or taxes. It has been a long time. And mine is segmented into all the puzzle pieces that compose my life choices. That makes trips complicated.
For someone who used to travel every 2 weeks back to London, I have gotten very sedentary. I am guessing that for the first year or so, I just wanted to avoid the dreadful routine of 4 am wake-ups and 1 am returns to the house. I had my fair share of those. But as my life normalises into a new routine – one that caters to all the elements of my portfolio life – I feel like some business travel is overdue. Plus, I miss my friends in London!
As I looked ahead, I was in awe to find out that my first truly open week to travel was the end of April. And, as I booked it, I wondered what other trips I was better off getting a slot in the calendar for. Amongst teaching, speaking events, kids holidays, school events, family trips, special birthdays and even friends reunions, weeks tend to book up pretty quickly!
And finally, goal setting
With the structure in place, I feel like I can move to the overarching piece of goal-setting. Given that I wanted to start the year with a strong amount of execution, I decided to work on my detailed goal-setting in February. This would also align with my Vision Board workshop coming up. I am conscious that my goals are not due to suffer massive changes, so I figured this would not affect the overall outcome. Well, if my goals don’t change very much, perhaps you wonder why I need to write them down all over again.
Well, whilst they may not change much in concept, every year I look deeply at what I said I was going to do but did not. I try to understand why that happened, what is still relevant, what changed and what actions will get me closer to how I want to lead my life.
I have learned a long time ago that the joy is in the journey, not in the destination.
Therefore, it is extremely important to spend time thinking about what I will do to bring to life each part of my portfolio. The activities and the milestones are, after all, what matter the most.
Today wasn’t about getting ahead. It was about bringing the different parts of my life into the same conversation. And, arguably, I ended up doing a lot for myself. I had done planning for my business and my charity in the early part of the year, but not for my whole self. This is how it all comes together.
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