“What are you doing this month to get January off to a fast and solid start?”

It’s not easy to get past being busy and instead get focused and proactive - especially at Christmas when there’s so much going on around us.

Perhaps, like me, you have heard people say things like:

“I’m finishing projects and getting my desk clear ahead of the holiday.”

“I can’t think about the new year, I’m too busy getting through December.”

“Yes, I want to look into [insert your ‘should’ of choice] in the New Year.”

All of which are understandable, but tend to leave us facing a blank sheet when we come back to work: which makes it easy to slip into familiar habits even though we have every intention of doing things different.

How can we avoid this?

How to avoid a blank sheet problem in the New Year: Make a plan

My thoughts went to planning as a way to avoid the blank sheet problem.

After all, it’s the obvious solution. Plans help us get things done. Yet despite the grim warning: “Fail to plan and you plan to fail”, lots of people struggle to make plans.

How come? Well, even without a plan, mostly we don’t fail - at least not with a capital ‘F’.

Perhaps we don’t quite achieve what we hoped for, but generally the wheels keep turning.

Planning, it seems, isn’t always essential for survival.

And because we often think planning takes a lot of time, we get busy with what needs to be done in a day and promise we’ll get to the plan later.

So, planning can seem like a good idea, but it’s not always easy to do in practice

.Result? Lots of businesses don’t really have plans.

At best there might be a business bucket list from which we pick things to do, at worst we just do stuff.

Business goes on, but this approach can mean the goals are out of focus ... and without focus there’s less possibility of achieving them.

It’s not impossible, but we’re relying on luck.

All of which means many businesses do okay, but not as well as the owner would like or initially expected.

This is a pity, because the right type of planning - followed by action - really can help build a more profitable and more rewarding business.

A plan you CAN do and act on before Christmas

I started to think about how to create a plan for 2010 using whatever time could be made available before December 25.

I've pulled some of the most important questions from plans I’ve seen work in the past to create something that should be do-able in a couple of hours.

The goal is to take action this month that will get January off to a fast and solid start.

We want action to improve the business; planning is simply part of the how.

By the end of the process you’ll have a few sheets of paper on which you’ve written:

• where you’re heading,
• how you’ll get there, and 
• what you’ll do next.

Example: let’s say you realise you need a cash flow forecast.

This is not a quick thing, so you make it a January project and take the action this month to call your accountant and set up a time to do it.

Step 1: Schedule a meeting

We’re only looking for a couple of hours over the next 3 days.

It’s simply not possible to imagine you can’t find two hours for something important, so go ahead now and decide when.

Step 2: Show up at the appointed time

Bring whatever you need for the meeting to be effective (coffee, folder, timer, pen, notebook, etc) and do what’s needed to make the time interruption free.

Step 3: Have the meeting

During which you answer three questions:

• What significant business issues need attention?
• What are our financial goals for the year, and for each month?
• What actions or projects can we do that could help us address the issues or get us to our goals?

Next ... identify which projects to get underway this month or next then write down the next step to be taken, who will do it and by when.

Now ... Schedule and DO this month’s actions and prepare for what's to be done next month.