Strategy, why it’s important in business and life.

Do you consider yourself to be a strategist?

Strategy is a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim, as defined by the Oxford Dictionary. It’s also known to be the art of planning and directing overall operations.

The key point with strategy is that it involves a plan. A plan is something that has been thought about and put into actionable, reachable, steps that can be followed to reach a goal. Understandably then strategy should be a very important thing in our business and in our lives.

Business wise, without a strategy, our hard work and all of our endeavors will not give us the best possible result. However, with strategy, we would know what our end goal is and would be able to have a plan with steps that are realistic for us in order to then reach our end goal.

Each area of business should have a strategy. Our offered services, our social media posts, our finances, our sales funnels, and so many other areas. But honestly, having to have a strategy for “ALL THE THINGS” is very stressful. One way to simplify your strategies is to plan quarter, by quarter. Yes, we need an overall goal for our business in our minds at all times, which also connects with our “why”. But concentrating on three months at a time allows us to narrow in on what needs to be done week by week in order to reach our next small goals. What goals top 3 goals will you plan out to reach this upcoming quarter?

Then, of course, outside of business, there is our life! Our businesses are a large part of our lives no matter how many hours we are able to invest in it, because the main reason for many of us for having a business in the first place is to make some form of income. However, we should never allow our business to consume every second of our lives. As we have seen in the past year almost everyone is coming forward expressing the importance of self-care and setting boundaries in business and life.

I challenge you to take a day, or two, to really think about the flow of your weeks, to examine your weekly routine. If you don’t have one, now’s the time to make one. Having a weekly plan, and in turn a strategy, will assist with minimizing stress and overwhelm by allowing you to already know, ahead of time, what the flow of the week will be.

Granted, unique tasks and plans will come up each week, however, the core of your weeks should have a general flow. For example, you may plan to spend 30 minutes each Monday and Tuesday creating some content to share on social media. You then may spend 2 hours each Wednesday creating blog posts to have automatically posted weekly. Sitting down to write out and think about what needs to be done and finding a realistic place on your calendar to do it, truly makes for a more productive week.

There is nothing worse than going week after week upset with yourself for not finishing tasks that you had planned to do weeks ago, because in reality you didn’t have time to complete it in the way you scheduled or anticipated in the first place. Make a routine or schedule that flows with your family and your responsibilities, not forgetting to plan for realistic timeframes or time blocks. Don’t say you can do content creation for 2 hours each Monday, when you have to go to regular appointments, and do laundry, and cook on Mondays as well. Be realistic.

Keep the peace in your business and life by creating strategies to reach your goals.

Until Next Time,

Amanda

P.S.

Learn more about quarterly focused planning by reading “The Twelve Week Year” by Brian P. Morgan.