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Quarterish planning is a term that I hope that you end up loving just as much as me.
I’m sure you’ve heard of quarterly planning, probably 90 days planning…
What is quarter-ish planning?
Quarter-ish planning is my own variation on the yearly business planning quarter system for how I plan out my digital business year and I have found it to work the best.
I know it’s a weird word but it actually means exactly what it sounds like it means…
A quarter-ish plan
A quarter with a little adjustment is how I prefer to plan & I think you might benefit from using this system as well.
Why I like the Quarter Planning System
I like the quarter system for business planning because it gives me enough time to really see accomplishment and goals.
Sometimes a month isn’t quite enough time to be able to see accomplishment.
But, it’s not too long that your goals go totally off track and things just are completely different than you thought they were going to be.
Sometimes this happens in a quarter, but it’s much more rare than if you’re trying to plan out an entire year. It’s hard for me to tell you right now in fall of 2024, what fall of 2025 is going to look like? And there’s a lot of reasons for that.
By next fall, my kids are going to be driving. I have an idea of what that’s going to look like, but who actually knows?
A lot that can change in a full year.
Dealing with about a three month window is a much better chance to be able to plan and actually see accomplishments… and have things not be really different than what you intentionally set out.
In our digital world, things change rapidly.
Think about last fall, it was before the HCU update! The entire landscape of the digital industry can change in a year.
There might be a whole new app by next year. Everything moves at a really quick pace.
So while I love long term planning and if you guys look at our planners that are coming out here real soon, we start with 10 years. We want the big picture planning for sure when it comes to ideal planning of our business and life.
However, when it comes to the actual tasks and goals that we’re going to work towards. The things that we want to see happen quarterly is a really, really good range to look at.
The Reality Of Planning For A Year
So now you might say, but why not just call this quarter planning?
Here’s why… because the general business quarters of three months each starting in January, never really worked for me.
I would try to plan that way because I like the window of a quarter.
However:
- I have kids in school.
- My husband’s a teacher. So my planning has to take my capacity at different times of the year into consideration.
- In digital business that QUARTER FOUR is kind of a huge, big quarter for us. Where a quarter two is oftentimes more mellow.
- You have the holidays & Christmas rush coming up.
- We all have vacations to plan for.
- Big events like weddings & babies that you know are coming up.
The whole year doesn’t map out evenly.
Every quarter is not the same
Every quarter is not equivalent in your capacity, or in your business’s capacity. So we really have to take these things into account and be able to adjust our business capacity and our goals and our ideals of what each season is going to look like to match the reality of where we are.
What About 90 Day Sprints?
I really love the idea also of planning 90 day sprints.
This is a planning system where instead of basing your year on the quarters, you’re going to base it on the 90 day sprint.
Unfortunately, this didn’t add up to my actual life schedule either.
One of the principles I took from that idea was that your quarters don’t have to back up next to each other. You can leave some space for downtime, for reflection, for trips in your yearly planning.
So I’ve kind of put the two of these together.
Quarter planning + 90 day sprints + the variation of my own reality as a busy mom entrepreneur = Quarter-ish planning
The fact that I really like how the business quarter, big fortune 500 companies function on a quarter system… and I also love the idea of like the 90 day sprints and designing our business to have these short bursts of work focus, maybe with some downtime in between.
So, I’ve put these together to develop my own system of quarter-ish planning for the year.
How Quarter-ish Planning Will Help Our Businesses
So what exactly is quarterish planning? It’s planning based around a quarter system.
Having three or four quarters a year, but they vary in length and they vary in depth of work done.
This I have found totally works for me. And I think it might work for you as well.
So how to set this up:
First, you’re going to look at your year ahead or what’s left of this year depending on when you listen to this podcast.
Using our Pink Pop Planners can really help you with this. You can actually do this with any system that you’re working with right now. You’re going to look at the year ahead and you’re going to think about your own yearly cycle as far as your family obligations.
- Are you a mom?
- Do you have kids home in the summer?
- Do you have vacations planned?
- Do you have things you’re responsible for outside of work?
- Or times that you know you will not work is hard. Do you just really, really love Christmas and you want to have a very mellow December so you can cozy up by the fire and bake cookies every day?
Part of the joy of being a digital entrepreneur is that you can bake those things into your yearly planning.
- Think about trips that you might have coming up, or big events that you might need to take focus and time, or you have a wedding coming up in the future.
- Do you have kids that are graduating school?
- Do you really love spending a couple weeks at the beach every summer?
The cool thing about this type of planning is that every year can be different, and that’s totally okay.
I take two weeks off every spring break to spend with my family. And I know that next year I’m going to do this again and again.
And so I’m able to block that into my quarter-ish planning. You kind of have to look at your whole year as a map first to figure out how many quarters you’re going to have and what those are going to look like.
What Do Your Own Quarters Look Like?
My quarters tend to be from about mid-January to spring break Quarter 1, and then from after spring break to summer Quarter 2, and then I take some time off in the summer. The back half of my year holds a Quarter 3 mid-August to fall break, and then November and beginning of December is a short Quarter 4.
I have some quarters that are eight weeks.
I have some quarters that are 12 weeks.
All of July is not part of any quarter, because I just know for myself and my need for maintenance mode, that that time of year is not a time of year that I’m going to be planning to work towards and achieve goals.
Summer is the time that I’m going to be focusing on my people at home and the trips that we’re taking and things that we’re doing.
This in a nutshell is how I do quarter-ish planning
We want to plan our businesses in a professional way. We want to use quarters and set goals and work to achieve those, but doing it in a way that serves our life, it’s going to help us be better digital entrepreneurs in the long run.
I would much rather work really hard and then be able to take the time off that I want.
I’d much rather be able to accomplish the goals in a time set aside for that.
If you prefer that as well, I hope this way of designing your year and system is going to help you to plan in a more effective way.
Once you have your quarters planned out, you can go ahead and start adding in your goals and your ideas and your plans.
Add in the things that you really want to move forward and push forward in your business.
I would love to know if you’ve ever attempted to plan this way and maybe it’s just something that you even do like intuitively.
It’s fun to be able to look at your year & lay it out this way.
I think it helps us all to be more effective and allows us to be more focused and harder when we give ourselves those limited windows to get what we need to get done, accomplished!
Happy planning.