How to Create a Business Plan in 1 day

We all know at least a hundred of great tips on how to improve your concentration, or how to finalise plans and follow through with strategies till completion. We know the tricks to tackle procrastination, how to divide a task into several smaller ones, and how to organise our work so that we are able to complete it on time. But hand to heart, who actually follows this advice?

10 hours to go

I recently understood how to finally make time for the tasks that I had been putting off for ages. How to actually set a few hours aside to fully immerse myself in planning, strategy, presentation… and how to tackle what I used to spend as much as a full year on in the office, at home or in cafes within as little as 10 hours. So what’s the miraculous formula here?

The answer is ‘a plane’. Writing a clear, concise and yet high-quality content-saturated plan can be quite an intellectually demanding activity. Those who have written a book, a screenplay, a strategy or even an academic essay know what I am talking about. I had been faced with such a task — and tried in vain — for almost a year. That is until I found myself sat on an eleven-hour flight without any Wi-Fi.

I then asked myself what made it possible for me to finish a job that I had been struggling to complete for months on one plane journey. Here are the things I identified as the main reasons:

11 hours

Knowing that I now have eleven hours of being stuck in the air without any option to leave.

No internet connection

No, I did not buy the wi-fi access, even after the initial urge.

No phone reception

and phone turned off. I’m not going risk someone ringing me and the plane crashing.

Silence and darkness

Most people were fast asleep.

Alcohol availability

That free supply of wine which came in handy — of course with moderation.

Preparedness

I already had all the ideas in my mind — they just needed to be given a structure and written down.

Good music

Some people prefer subtle, ambient playlists, others keep their motivation up with more energetic rhythms and positive tunes. I alternate mine depending on my mood.

So, try to be a disconnect (sometimes)

The main takeaway message here for me was that if I want to be able to create a good strategy or draw up a new creative campaign, I have to disconnect and cannot let anybody interrupt me. The same goes for not letting my concentration be jeopardized by my own everyday thoughts of whether we are going to be able to supply our clients with the resources in time, whether Honza has filled out the KPIs table and whether I have sent off that invoice. An aeroplane trip is the more relaxed version of locking oneself away in a remote cellar — saves you the worries of not being able to eventually escape from it. The lack of phone reception and internet offers a great opportunity to disconnect completely, tune everything unnecessary out and truly immerse yourself in the creative process. So, if the closing date is near or you have an important presentation to prepare for that you haven’t even started on yet, then I recommend booking the next flight to somewhere in Asia or the Americas. And for low-cost budgets, there is always the remote underground cellar option.

Do you have another tips?