Have you ever seen someone charging ahead, making progress and wondered how they seem so confident with what they’re doing?

How do they know what to do next?

There are a three key questions they know the answer to, to know what goals to set at the beginning of a new year and give them the confidence to know what to do next.

Answer the following three questions and you can have that kind of confidence too!

⭐Q1 : What do you want?

This can be a difficult question to answer without some context so don’t be concerned if you can’t answer it right now.

Thankfully there’s an exercise you can do to help answer this important question.

In the Confident Planner Club we call this exercise Begin Fresh.

Every year no matter where you’re at, what season you are in or what you achieved or didn’t achieve last year, we all start here!

Fresh is the foundation for success and I’m pretty certain that most people, the ones who set goals at the beginning of a new year and have given up a few weeks in, haven’t done this exercise.

The reason it’s necessary to do the Begin Fresh exercise is that you want to avoid setting unrealistic goals otherwise you’ll be chasing a fantasy. Those that chase fantasies become poor. Proverbs 12:11, 28:19

When we chase fantasies we waste time and lose hope. Scripture says that hope deferred makes the heart sick. Proverbs 13:12

Sick at heart is an idiom for being very disappointed, feeling unhappy and deeply depressed.

So you can see how important it is for your physical, mental and emotional health to set realistic goals.

When you do the Begin Fresh exercise you can be confident that the goals you set will be realistic and get you from where you are to where you want to be. You won’t be wasting your time chasing a fantasy.

And most importantly you’ll know what to do next to make those goals a reality. Which leads us into question two …

⭐ Q2 : What do I need to do to make that happen?

This is the exciting part … make plans!

It’s time to get out your planner create some Action Plans. Set out the Milestones and take consistent action over time.

That’s all it takes to succeed … take consistent action over time.

Time is going to pass by anyway so why not use it to achieve something amazing?!

It’s important to note here that how you do about taking action can be a lot of work or you can work smarter not harder as the saying goes.

So let’s find out how we can take action smarter and avoid unnecessary work and save ourselves a lot of time, energy and effort.

There’s two parts to making plans that doesn’t create extra work for you.

The first part is what most people don’t know about or if they do know they skip it and end up working harder to achieve their goals and get things done each day.

Taking the time to set up this first part can save you at least an hour a day!
I know it’s a lot of time.

Given how many hours people spend on social media and watching tv alone, you could even save more.

When you dive into your day without habits and routines that are aligned with what you want, you are starting each day from the beginning trying to answer the question, what do I do next?

You force yourself to answer a lot of the same questions day after day which is exhausting. It’s no wonder you get tired and feel worn out.

Your brain is wired to conserve energy and so answering these hard questions can be just too hard to answer in the moment, when you’re feeling under the pump to get things done.

That’s where procrastination, feeling overwhelmed and perfectionism steps in, to try and help you out.

This first part of planning is actually the second stage of the FUSElife Framework called Auto.

It’s where we  turn specific actions into habits and routines that make getting the important things done  easier, you could say almost automatic.

This isn’t just about drinking more water, exercising or getting to bed earlier, although those things are great and actually help you be more productive.

The habits and routines we create in the Confident Planner Club help us to achieve our goals and consistently work on projects without making more work for ourselves.

It’s the secret to building momentum, increasing your energy and making consistent progress that will get you over the line this year!

The second part is your daily planning practice, this is where most people begin when it comes to taking action on their goals. They want to tips and tactics to stretch their day to fit their todo list.

If all it took were a few tactics and secret tips, we’d all be super productive and achieving incredible things with little effort.

The good news is the people those tips and tactics do work for have done these three things, they :

• answer the question, “What do I want?”
• set up routines + habits to make getting the important things done almost automatic
• have a daily planning practice that helps them unlock their time, energy and focus

Writing down your goals is a great start just as the Dominican University study by Gail Matthews has proven. People who write down their goals accomplish significantly more than those who don’t.

Just by writing them down you’re going to achieve more than the person who simply thinks about them.

But just writing them down doesn’t mean they will happen.

An interesting outcome from that study showed that you can almost double your rate of success if you :

• analyse your goals and the resources you need to accomplish them
• then write down your goals
• set commitments to achieve them
• share your goals with a friend
• and send weekly progress reports to your friend

As you can see it takes more than just writing down your goals to achieve them. You can have that kind of support with us inside the Confident Planner Club, join here.

While there is a framework to daily planning success, how you plan your day is unique to you. It’s a combination of your personality + planning + productivity styles, or your plan+do™ style.

And if you’re looking for some insight on how to get things done in the most productive way for you, then take this 1 minute quiz here.

And that brings us to the last question …

⭐ Q3 : How do I stay focused?

To answering this last question you’ll want to use the most important and valuable productivity tool we have.

This tool shows you how you’re making progress, can tell you when you getting off track and even show you why you’re getting stuck and what to do to overcome what’s holding you back.

Yes, you already have this tool!

The greatest productivity tool we have is reflection.

And in the Confident Planner Club we do reviews at specific times throughout the year to get the information we need so we stay focused, know what to do next to reach our goals and continue to work smarter not harder.

Planning and being productive isn’t just a one time thing. It’s not just having a goal, schedule or a morning routine.

Yes, those things are important and are part of the process.

What makes us successful in achieving our goals is reflecting on what we’ve done and seeing how it measures up to what we want and where we’re going. Those answers are found in doing reviews.

Without reviews we can end up way off course before we realise.

Just like a course correction at sea, those small 1% adjustments can mean the difference of arriving in Kailua, Hawaii or Tokyo, Japan.

Reviews are the 1% adjustments that help us get where we’re going and overcome the obstacles along the way.

They can help us uncover the reason we find ourselves procrastinating, feeling overwhelmed or caught up in perfectionism.

So lets’ recap …

To know what to do next and to succeed with our goals we need to answer these three questions :

• Q1 : What do you want?
• Q2 : What do I need to do to make that happen?
• Q3 : How do I stay focused?

If you’d like help answering these questions so you know what to do next and take consistent action over time to achieve your goals, join us inside the Confident Planner Club.

We’d love to meet and support you!

. . . .

Success comes when you #takeAction

• 📝 Answer the three questions to set the right goals and know what to do next
• 📌 Join the Confident Planner Club for support and strategy to achieve your goals this year!