Welcome to the Secret Lab

Since you’re a subscriber to the Productive Flourishing Newsletter, you get to see this stuff before everybody else does.

When I think something is ready to go public, I’ll move it from here and share it with the rest of the world. Don’t worry about having to check back here – I’ll let you know when there’s something new to check out.

Here’s the latest and greatest…

The Annual Strategic Planner

As you might guess, this one is a strategic planner that focuses on the major objectives for the year. There are no projects and tasks, as that level of detail isn’t appropriate for this perspective.

It’s fairly straightforward. Just remember that when you’re thinking at the objective level, you’re thinking in terms of what your monthly focus should be. Here are a few examples of what might count as objectives:

  • Finishing an ebook
  • Launching a website (if it’s your first time or you’re doing a heavy launch)
  • Attending a conference that requires a lot of travel, prep time, and time on site
  • Moving into a new home or selling the one you’re in
  • Completing a major part of a book
  • Designing and coding the first iteration of an application

You wouldn’t want to plan on completing any of those things in a week, and there are a lot of projects and tasks attached to those objectives.

The Annual Strategic Planner lets you stack up your year’s objectives so you can space things out. It’s okay if you want to stretch an objective out over several months, but it’s probably better to chunk it into smaller, manageable parts.

It’s the season for annual planning, so I hope this helps. Check it out: Annual Strategic Planner - 2012 (436)

The Quarterly Objective Planner

This is the logical extension of the Annual Strategic Planner. If you started with the Annual Strategic Planner, you’ll take those same objectives and write them in their respective places on the quarterly planner.

This one requires a bit more explanation, though. You’ll see two more blocks: the Milestones and Benchmarks blocks.

Milestones are easy enough, as they’re just the intermediate steps that you need to take to complete your objectives. There aren’t a whole lot there, I know – but at the quarterly level, you should be looking for those major milestones.

Benchmarks might throw you off, as it seems that a milestone and a benchmark are the same thing. They could be – but what tends to happen is that we reach points along our path that we didn’t specifically plan to hit, but they’re relevant to what we’re doing. For example, let’s say you’ve been trying to increase your income by a specific amount and you manage to do it on time and/or early. That’s a benchmark worth noting, and it’s too easy to forget those things.

That should be enough to get you started, so check this one out: Quarterly Objective Planner (Q1 2012) (276) Remember, January starts a new quarter, so you’ll need to update to this one if you’ve been using the Q4 planner.

Grab your Monthly Planner Packs

Yes, the monthly Packs are still here, too.

In case you haven’t seen these, I’ve taken the Productivity Planner Series and the Freelancer Workweek and sandwiched them with the Monthly Action Planner. If you choose to print out either one of the sets, they’ll print out in their logical order. For instance, the Productivity Planner Set will print out 1 Monthly Action Planner, 1 Weekly Productivity Planner, and 7 Daily Productivity Planners, followed by another Weekly Productivity Planner, another 7 Daily Productivity Planners, and so on.

There’s been a name change for the Productive Planner series that I’ll explain another time. They’re now called the Daily Action Planners and the Weekly Action Planners. They’re the same basic thing, but there’s some moving and shaking going on behind the scenes and the reason for the name change will be clear before too long. I know, the suspense is killing you…:p

Go ahead and grab whichever set works for you:

If you dig these, I recommend getting a small three-ring binder, printing them out, and putting them in there. That way, you’ve got everything there, and your reviews will be more automatic. When you turn the page and see a Weekly Productivity Planner, for instance, you know it’s time to review your Monthly Action Plan and last week’s Weekly Planner so that you can have a realistic, grounded picture of what you need to do this week. Easy peasy!

All of these planners are designed to fit together once you decide between the Action Series and the Freelancer Workweek. While I’m here, the Freelancer Workweek is actually misnamed in a way – a lot of clients and friends who aren’t strictly freelancers like to use them instead of the Action Series. The annual, quarterly, and monthly planners mate very well together, and the monthly planner works really well for either of the series.

Happy planning!