Unlock Success: How Quarterly Planning Helped Me Achieve More in 3 Months Than in a whole Year
Have you ever gotten to the end of the year, deciding to sit down and re-evaluate your goals for the new year ahead, yet you end up daydreaming not writing anything at all due to being so overwhelmed with the pressure?
I can tell you, you’re not alone. Writing a big list of goals and things you want to accomplish all in one year can seem so daunting. Yet all of this changed for me when I discovered ‘quarterly planning’. I split my year up into quarters and became hyper - focused on timely, efficient and achievable goals instead.
With quarterly planning, you can easily avoid flaking off on your all your new year aspirations like you usually would throughout January. Instead, you can be confident in actually achieving your goals, becoming consistent in everything you organise and schedule in your agendas.
Read on for more if you want to figure out how you can do this with clear actionable steps that will transform your life.
What exactly is quarterly planning?
Setting a quarterly planning agenda allows you to break up the time you have during the 12 month year and opens up the space to create better and clearer actionable goals.
Instead of creating yearly goals you can set your goals into 3 month segments throughout the year. This is simple and yet so effective as I personally split my year into; Q1 (January - March), Q2 (April - June), Q3 ( July - September) and Q4 (October - December).
I find this is the easiest and most efficient way to also reflect on goals you may not have achieved and to create better ones as you reset for a brand new quarter.
You may find that this way doesn’t work for you, yet you can also split the months around your schedule and what you believe would be most beneficial within your daily life.
How you can use ‘the quarterly planning method’ in your daily life to transform your yearly goals
The quarterly planning method isn’t just for efficient goal planning, it can also be used as a tool to strategically step forward with action in your life. Through implementing the quarterly planning method throughout your daily calendars you are guaranteed to become more intentional in almost everything that you do!
Each quarter has specific intentions that you can use to build and maintain consistent momentum and motivation. Think of using each quarter as a fresh time to reflect, re-align and reset your dream goals in small actionable steps.
“What if you could start January four times a year, what if you started with all that excitement, clarity and momentum four times a year… You would be so much more productive.”
- Danielle Hu - The Wanderlover Podcast -
(If you want to listen to more content like this, listen to Danielle’s podcast, here.)
Q.1: Building foundations & the initial goal setting plan
The absoloute first thing to do when setting your goals for a fresh new quarter is to reflect on your previous plans. Ask yourself questions like; what have I done well this past year? what am I proud of? what haven’t I done well?, what did I want to do, yet haven’t?, what habits do I want to implement into the next fresh quarter in my life?…
Then you can think of ways to improve, what habits you want to focus on in your first quarter and how you are going to get there!
January through to March is essentially seen as a time to ‘keeping your foot down on the gas pedal,’ which means moving forward with any plans you set throughout the new year and building the momentum to maintain it throughout the rest of year.
Yet, this can prove to be difficult if you don’t have a structured or well enough organised plan to look back on. Setting firm and realistic goals in this time is then so important, I personally use S.M.A.R.T goals to do this. These are a specific goal framework in which you can use to enhance your goals. It is essential to make them Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.
For example my first goal throughout my first quarter this year was to create my blog website! I set a smart goal in this specific time frame and asked myself these questions, as follows;
Specific goal : design, write and contribute to my website at least 2-3 times per week.
Measurable : how will you measure your success? the website will be complete and ready to publish.
Achievable : is it achievable? do I have enough spare time in my daily schedule to achieve this? Yes.
Relevant : Does this goal align with my bigger goals and dreams? is it an habit that contributes to my overall success? is it beneficial to my life?
Time bound : Give yourself a specific time frame to complete this step - Until the end of the quarter and the start of Q2.
Doing these small reflections towards each of your quarterly goals will ensure efficiency and careful strategic planning that will almost guarantee you success.
Top Tip; start tracking your progress, either visually, write it down or note in a journal your plans and thoughts, maybe you’ll start to realise patterns!
Q.2: Consistent Growth and momentum
The second quarter (April through to June) is all about re-aligning and re-defining your goals from the start of the year, even making the effort to include new goals and habits into your routine especially if you aren’t comfortable with how you performed in the previous quarter. This season can be associated with spring-time. A fresh re-start on your goals, a reflection on your current progress, and a boost of clear and intentional motivation to carry on, creating clear and consistent momentum.
Ask yourself questions such as; How well have I performed so far? what steps do I need to take in order to improve? what new habits and routines can I implement to further my productivity?
By doing this, you will have a clearer vision of how you want the rest of your year to look like. you will have new ideas and if not you will at least be moving into a motivated mindset to take action on the things you may haven’t started yet.
Remember it’s okay if that specific smart goal is still hanging in the back of your mind, if you haven’t started / achieved what you thought you already would’ve; this is a perfect time to bring it into the forefront and start planning on how you can. Know your priorities as the key is to be intentional, realistic and actionable with your goals.
Q.3: Keep Calm and carry on : reflect on progression
July - September are the months were you are glowing, having fun and enjoying the brighter seasons, you may become distracted, forget about your quarter plans or push them to the back of your mind. This is perfectly okay, but when this happens it’s important to look at the progress you have made so far and reflect on how you can avoid the summer blues.
If you created a physical (or digital) tracker at the beginning of Q1, now is the perfect time to create a mid year review with this in mind. Again; reflect, realign and restart your goals as much as you want, the key to quarterly planning is that by switching methods from a long list yearly plans that easily drags on, you can allow efficiency to take you even further.
You may still have goals from Q1 that you are still completing, or even completed them and now have room for goals you missed off. However, its important to prioritise and not overload yourself with brand new tasks that can easily lead to burn-out and exhaustion.
Q.4: The Final Push : start preparing for the end of year review
At the start of Q4 it’s important stay focused on the goals that you feel you haven’t quite achieved yet, for the end of the year. It’s the final push to work towards your ‘ultimate goals’ that you set out to do in the beginning of Q1. After this, it could be the perfect time to review what you are proud of so far, your achievements (big or small) and reflect upon the coming year ahead.
If this seems daunting, or you don’t feel you’re in the right place to do so just yet, you can always create weekly check in’s throughout the months to balance out your schedule, time management and clarity of what you want to achieve for the new year.
Then, towards the end of Q4 you should be in the right place to create an end of year review. If you have tracked your progress throughout the year either digitally, on paper or even mentally, reflect on this and create a S.M.A.R.T goal plan for the brand new fresh year ahead, during the last month of the quarter.
Doing so, will not only ensure you are prepared for the year ahead but you are ready to tackle any new goals and aspirations early before you have other tasks and work goals to complete.
Now, you can incorporate the quarterly planning strategy into your daily life, as a powerful tool to achieve your dream goals that you would usually flake out on with yearly planning. The main benefit to changing to organising your year into quarters is how flexible it can be! You don’t have to wait until the new year to recreate and reset your goals, you can do so anytime you like, which takes the pressure off feeling like you need to achieve all of your goals, all at once.
Whether you're building a business, improving your lifestyle, or pursuing personal growth, quarterly goals provide the structure and clarity you need to stay on track and see real results. Start planning by the quarter, and watch your big dreams become achievable, one quarter at a time.
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