How to get the most out of your first 30 days of 2020

If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that the older we get, the faster the years seem to go. I’ve never really felt the effects of this until a couple of weeks ago, when on the 30th of December, my husband went to Coles to hunt down the new #CaramilkTwirl for me and came back with a Caramel Easter Egg chaser. Easter Eggs on the 30th December! I mean, really?!

It made me think. January is usually a blur of holidays, skeleton staff, clients on leave, parents focused on surviving the 6-week school holiday childcare juggle. We can easily blink and one twelfth of the year is gone!

This year, rather than my usual slow ramp up back into action, I thought I’d approach it differently. Spin the January vibe on its head and use the time as the most productive of the year. So, I sat down and thought about the top four things I can implement now to create the most momentum to propel me through the year. Here’s what I came up with:

1. Reflect on your previous year:

Not in a woo woo, “how has my life changed” kind of way, but more in a “What did I excel at, and what were the things that I struggled with?” kind of way.

Grab a piece of paper, create two columns, and write down the top 5 things you excelled at, and the top five things that you struggled with. Be honest with yourself here – no one else is going to read these but you.

In the interest of full disclosure, for me, my reflections on 2019 were as follows:

From these lists you can easily see the top five things that you can concentrate on improving to make your life easier in 2020. For me, 2019 was about scaling and growing. I did all of the right things – I expanded my team, I delegated, I serviced my clients well – but this came at a cost to my health, sapped my energy levels, and left me frustrated about not prioritising enough time to implement some of the great new growth ideas I had for my own business.

Now that it’s all written out, my direction for January is clear:

1.     Identify time-sapping manual tasks and implement systems to streamline/automate these.

2.     Re-configure my team and make sure that the support I’m receiving is high-output and impactful (not just creating more work for myself).

3.     Creating a daily routine that is realistic and encompasses more sleep and exercise.

This brings me to my next focus:

2. Set realistic priorities:

If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s writing to-do lists. What I’m not so good at is making sure the number of tasks on them are realistic for the timeframe I’ve set. On reflection, what I’ve realised is, this always makes me feel like I’m “behind” my own unrealistic deadlines and puts me in a state of frenzied catch up all year long. I have never really noticed that I do this, until right now. I mean, I always knew I felt like I was always behind, but I never identified why.

So, rather than writing one mega to-do list, I have started writing a monthly “goals” list, of everything I want to achieve in the month, and then breaking that down into realistic, daily to-do lists. On my daily list, I make sure to include any “life admin” stuff like paying bills, replying to personal messages, organising social activities, organising grocery shopping etc, as this takes time and mental load too, and is often just lumped in to fitting it in outside of work hours, without any regard to how long that’s going to take me.

My top tip when setting to-do lists is to also write down how much time each task will take. This helps to recognise when we’re over-committing our time and gives us a check point to make the to-do list more realistically achievable.

3. Connect with stakeholders:

Whether this be clients, colleagues, managers, suppliers – don’t just rock up at the office and bury your head in the mountain of emails that’s piled up. These can wait. Take this time to really connect with the people around you. Initiate conversations in person and on the phone, read their social posts, comment on and engage with them, ask how you can help them. This is a big one. Too often, we get swept up in the whirlwind of life, work and routine, that we can get in the habit of transactional conversations – i.e: “who do I need to talk to, to help me complete this task?”. Take the time now, while work is a little slower to connect with people around you and ask what you can do for them. How can you help them achieve their goals, or solve a problem they are facing? Take the time to develop deep relationships now and you’ll find that your enjoyment and fulfillment will sky-rocket through the rest of the year. Because at the end of the day, we spend a huge chunk of our year working, so why not do our best to enjoy it.

4. Review and tweak strategic plans for the year:

While it is a bit quieter, January is the perfect time to review your strategic plans with a clear head and make sure that you’ve set a direction that is going to be achievable both budget and resource-wise in 2020.

If you operate with a rolling implementation roadmap, take the time to review your campaign schedule and milestones to make sure your timing is right, and that you’ll be creating the most impact across the year. Do some research on your customers and competitors to make sure that your goals are still achievable and that you’re amplifying opportunities in the market.

If you don’t yet have a strategic plan for 2020, sit down with a blank piece of paper and create one now. List your goals (aligned with the company’s overarching strategic goals), then identify what you can implement to make an impact on these goals. Break these down into an actionable roadmap, and identify the resources and budget needed to execute this roadmap. If you need a hand with this, let me know. I’m happy to help.

Taking the time to plan now, while the office (and your brain) is quiet, will set you on the right path for a productive and fruitful year.

Erin Smart is the Managing Director of Impact Marketing, a full service marketing communications agency offering affordable, high quality, targeted marketing strategy development and implementation support for small, medium and large organisations. If you're looking for a marketing partner who will deep dive into understanding your business, dedicated to helping achieve your business goals, feel free to get in touch with me via [email protected]