What will You do with YOUR New Year
January 1st, 2020 // 1:56 pm @ Scott Manning
What will You do With YOUR New Year: 3 essential components to your 2020 blueprint for success.
Well the day has finally arrived. Here we are. Some so excited to get rid of the last year and some so excited to start a new one, to many it is one in the same.
Every year, every person, receives the greatest gift of them all. And it just so happens to come right on the heels of Santa Claus. It is, of course, the New Year. In your case, not just any “new year” rather specifically, YOUR New Year.
And my question to you to start this new year, new month, new time in your life as it hopefully was long before the turning of the calendar late last night…
What will YOU do with It?!
At the end of one year and the beginning of the next I find it somewhat ironic that so many people coast into the end of the year because of the Holidays, the marathon months that preceded the November/December blitz, and for many other reasons I’m sure.
It’s ironic that, this time of the year, more than any other you really should be stepping back, getting ready, and then running as hard and fast as possible to start the next set of nicely packaged up one-dozen months that you have just been presented with once again.
My suggestion is to think of your year like Book Ends, collectors editions, that you have holding together everything you plan to do in all shapes and sizes. Just like real book ends you can expand them condense them, you can take out things, and add things to it.
However, the one very important part is you have limited shelf space in the context of one calendar year and that shelf space represents time. You can only do so much with the time you have, you have to pick and choose carefully what you put on the shelf, what goes in between your book ends.
Your goal of course, for business and personal is to put the most valuable experiences, knowledge acquisition, wealth, relationships, business systems and growth in between these end caps on your year. Fitting these in, in an organized, disciplined, preplanned way on the life-shelf of 2020.
I’d like to give you some specific “volumes” of books that I include on my shelf that I recommend for you.
Opportunities for growth. What are you doing to increase the value of your efforts, your knowledge, your business, and your customers.
Specifically, what things are you creating and pursuing this year that are going to elevate your results. This is very important and one of the three most important parts of planning your year.
Because you only have so much time, each year you want your score, money, happiness, etc to add up to a greater number than the previous year; that is what growth is all about. The way you do that is by finding ways to make what you do worth more to you.
This could be finding a different set of customers to sell to, finding ways to raise your prices, and implementing more advanced, effective marketing strategies. Definitely making your efforts more profitable through systems and honing your own skills and management of your enterprise.
The next section on your 2020 shelf should be what you are doing to make your life more productive, in essence to get more out of the same amount of time. This of course can be and must be leveraged through systems in your business, through resources, staff, delegation, software and many other things.
It is imperative to take a long hard look inside your business at what you have lost in terms of time, opportunity, money, customers, or other things this past year and ask yourself – why, and what could have been different.
Here’s what you already know, everybody loves the bright shiny objects, all the new warm and fuzzy ideas, and things that they get excited about, all those big crazy ambitions for the new year and then just a few days, weeks if you are lucky, hardly anyone makes it months…your focus and plans fizzle out because REAL LIFE HAPPENS.
And that Real Life, is what I’m talking about here, you must have things in place to, what I call, “stack the deck in your favor” to put the advantage on your side and the best way to do this is, eliminate distractions, fire the bottom portion of your business in terms of all things – customers, employees, opportunities, etc.
In other words you must make room for more in your life.
And you must proactively counteract the negative detours that are going to try to get in your way. When you do this you will be much more apt to stay on track with your goals and be successful doing what you plan to do in the new year.
Lastly, the next and most critical section of your business plan for 2020 is the people you associate with and those whom you let into your world. You want to arm yourself with positive, productive, sources of influence both personally and professionally.
And you want to protect yourself from both personal and professional energy, life, money sucking negative forces that will try to work against you even if they have good intentions.
You see, this is really what life is all about and how you structure a new year for yourself.
One, opportunities: what all will you pursue, create, etc and what is the sum of all the potential value.
Two, how will you facilitate this: through systems, resources, productivity management, etc.
Three, who will be a part of your plan.
Finally, you want to prioritize all three of these things. This includes your value pyramid for your customers from most valuable to least, from the most critical things to eliminate down to the ones you can tolerate, and from the highest potential opportunities to the lowest.
Now you have a clear blueprint for what you will achieve next year and what all needs to be on your 2020 shelf, stabilized, organized, and held in tact by your bookends of the new calendar year and it all begins today.
The best part about that calendar is that it is always the same, predictable, controllable, and it gives you a built-in measuring stick as to how much progress you are making based on the time, days, weeks, months that have elapsed.
I like this visual that you can use from now on to become more successful and make the most of YOUR NEW YEAR so while you are celebrating the start let’s see clearly the end and build a successful blueprint to ensure that you are making the most of every day in between.
I know you will make it a Happy New Year not just because the calendar says you should but because you make it so with everything you do, experience, achieve, accomplish and enjoy throughout YOUR Year of 2020.
Go get it my friend and make it your own and create everything you could ever want it to be. Because I can tell you this, the clock never stopped ticking, the sand is still flowing in the hour glass of life and tomorrow you’ll wake up and it’ll already be the 2nd and whether you are not, the rest of the world and the year itself will be off to the races… let’s make sure it’s not leaving you behind.
Category : Blog
