Here at WatzThis?, we don’t work particularly hard. Instead, we tend to put great concentrated effort toward one or two important things, and we spend A LOT of time planning.
Our headquarters currently has 2 whiteboards, one large paper flip chart, and a wall covered with index cards. We have a quarterly “retreat” where we review our “goals and intentions”, we have planning sessions (aka lunches) several times a week, we make mind maps (not as often as we should) and our shared Google Drive is filled with ideas, outlines, thoughts and concepts. We’ve learned from experience that when we fail to plan, we stumble, and things start to get rough; so we consider planning to be part of the most important work that we do.
Planning is a big reason why WatzThis? has been so prolific in our first year. To summarize, here’s our year-end catalog of our accomplishments in 2015:
- Wrote three books (a total of over 1000 pages)
- Revised one book
- Revised an online course
- Wrote and recorded a video course
- Wrote 51 newsletters
- Produced over 50 training videos
- Taught 3 one week-long web development courses
When we have our weekly, quarterly and yearly plans in order, as well as a clear plan for each of our projects, there’s no stopping us. If we plan to have a 320 page book done by December 18, we’re completely confident that we will meet that deadline (and we’ll probably have it done a day or two early).
While it may be true for some that “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry”, we haven’t found this to be true. Of course, we can’t plan everything that happens and we wouldn’t want to. But, we have found, that in our business, poorly laid plans go awry much more often.