How To Plan For A Successful Eight Week Cycle

Choose A Focus Area. Because we're planning for business we use 5 pillars: Brand Awareness, Lead Generation, Conversion, Retention, Delivery.

Now, if you're using this to plan personal projects you might have different pillars like family, relationships, career, health. You choose.

We rate ourselves in each pillar and choose the one where we are lowest. It doesn't become a choice. That is the one.

Pitch Projects. Once we've chosen our area we start to pitch projects that can help us bring up that chosen area. If we are focusing on lead generation we might have a new funnel or campaign we want to build.

Find The Big Easy. Once we have our project list we rate them according to ease and impact. Any that fall in fairly easy and biggest impact are The Big Easy and we immediately lock them in. Harder ones we might break up into a few phases.

Check Our Capacity. Once we've chosen a few we'll check to see if we can actually do all the things we say we can do. Usually, we cull a few more at this stage.

Get To Work. Then we'll assign a project lead to each and get to work. Every project has two phases. The Uphill or Working it out phase and the downhill or Getting it done phase. By week 4-5 we want to make sure most projects are in getting it done.

Guaranteed, you'll make some mistakes in the beginning. But the more cycles you complete, the more you learn what works for you.

Read Part 1 of this essay Forget Quarters... Start Planning in 8 Week Cycles.

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