How to Plan a Quarter in Less Than an Hour
A quarterly planning meeting sets the tone for the next quarter. It's a time for you to assess your goals to make sure they still align with your vision/season of life and to schedule which goals you're going to focus on over the next 3 months.
In Hustle Sanely land, there are 2 parts to a quarterly check-in meeting: reflecting and planning. Tune in to this episode to learn about both and how you can plan a quarter in less than an hour!
Let’s lay some groundwork first: around here, I implement these things called Hustle Sanely Habits in my life that help me plan a peacefully productive year. I introduce these in The Hustle Sanely Handbook and I teach them in-depth in the How to Create Your Peacefully Productive schedule course but real quick they are:
⋒ Yearly Vision Meeting
⋒ Quarterly Check-In Meetings
⋒ Monthly Check-In Meetings
⋒ Weekly Prep Meetings
⋒ And then you have your daily habits: Morning routine, Hustle Sanely 5, and evening routine
They all build off of one another. So doing a yearly vision meeting in December for the new year lays the foundation for your quarterly check-in meetings. And quarterly check-in meetings lay the foundation for your monthly check-in meetings.
Here’s how I want you to think about each one:
Yearly Vision Meeting: Casting vision for the year as a whole and deciding some goals you want to work toward that align with your life vision
Quarterly Check-In Meetings: Assess your goals to make sure they still align with your vision/season and schedule specifically when you’re going to focus on each goal
Monthly Check-In Meetings: Create specific plans of action for each goal
I basically want to walk you through how I do my quarterly check-in meeting and as always, the goal here is for you to take the framework and adapt it in a way that makes sense for your life!
Let’s start with the purpose of a quarterly check-in meeting: The main purpose of a quarterly check-in meeting is to assess your goals by reflecting on them and the methods that you’re using to approach them and to intentionally prep for the next quarter.
I am a big fan of checking in with my yearly goals every quarter because it allows me to keep a pulse on things and make adjustments as the year goes on instead of getting to December and then realizing that there are some shifts I could’ve made to better support progress on my goals earlier in the year. It’s being proactive.
One thing I want to note here is that during your yearly vision meeting, one of the steps is assigning which quarter you want to focus on each of your goals. That means deciding if you want to work on each goal during Q1, 2, 3, or 4.
When should you have a quarterly check-in meeting? I always suggest doing it before the start of each new quarter, before we head into January, April, July, and October aka at the end of December, March, June, and September.
The next question is: how do you plan for a quarter and do this meeting I keep talking about?
So there are 2 parts to a quarterly check-in meeting: Reflecting and Planning. Let’s break down each one.
01. Reflecting
Purpose: So before the start of each quarter, you’re checking in to make sure that your goals and how you’re working toward them still align with your vision for the year. As our seasons change (expectedly and unexpectedly) sometimes we have to shift our goals, too.
Tools: I use the Peacefully Productive Journal™ to guide the reflection part of my quarterly check-in meeting.
Process: Now, the cool thing about the journal, it has this process built right in so I just open to the Quarterly Check-In spread and answer the prompts. Obviously, you could do this without the journal, too, because I’m going to share the prompts with you right now.
If you don’t want to get the journal (first of all, why not? It’s the best Hustle Sanely product in my opinion) you can always write out these questions in a blank notebook but PLEASE write them down, don’t just think about your responses. Writing things down is incredibly powerful!
Here are the prompts I answer during the reflection part of my quarterly check-in meeting. I grab my Peacefully Productive Journal™ and open to the Quarterly Check-In spread and they’re all right there on the “reflect” page.
⋒ What are the best thing(s) that happened last quarter?
⋒ What didn’t work well last quarter?
⋒ Do my current habits and routines support my vision? (aka is how I’m showing up in my daily life aligned with my goals?)
⋒ Are there any new habits or routines that I need to adopt to better support my vision?
Now, these are big picture kinds of questions because, during your monthly check-in meetings, we ask different, more pointed questions like, “Did you make rest a priority?” and “Did you make progress on your Focus Goal?”
Think about it as an upside-down triangle - we start with the year at the top because it’s the biggest and most broad, then we go down to quarterly where we get a little more nitty-gritty, then we go down to monthly where we get even more nitty-gritty, then we go down to weekly where, you guessed it, we get even more nitty-gritty, and finally we have daily which is the most detailed.
You might be wondering if the reflection part is REALLY necessary or if you can just skip right to the planning and I’m here to tell you, as your productivity BFF, you better not skip the reflection part! The reflection part is what makes the Hustle Sanely lifestyle different from other productivity methods. It is intentionally checking in with your mental health and the status of the important relationships in your life as you pursue your goals. Because hustling sanely means you’re working toward your big, amazing goals WHILE prioritizing both of those!
If you skip the reflection part of the quarterly check-in meeting, that’s when the potential to tango with burnout and overwhelm increases because we’re just going through the motions. Reflecting is taking the initiative to pause and evaluate your processes to make sure they’re serving you well.
02. Planning
Purpose: To schedule and intentionally prep for the goals that you assigned to the quarter. Remember that part of what we did in our yearly vision meeting was deciding which quarter we wanted to focus on each of our goals. So by the time we get to this quarterly meeting, we should have a general idea of what goals we’re wanting to work toward.
This quarterly check-in meeting helps us to really nail the timeline for the goals we decided to put into the specific quarter. So think of it like this: in your Yearly Vision Meeting, you’re telling all of your goals where to go wait and in your Quarterly Check-In Meetings, you’re grabbing each goal and assessing it/making sure you still want it in that quarter and then in your monthly check-in meetings, you brainstorm a plan detailed plan for making the goal happen.
I know we’re only technically talking about quarterly check-in meetings here but I want you to see how they all work together.
Tools: I use the Peacefully Productive Journal™ and the Peacefully Productive Planner® to guide the planning part of my quarterly check-in meeting.
Process: In the Peacefully Productive Journal™ I open to the Quarterly Check-In spread and respond to the “prepare” prompts:
⋒ 3 words that I want to describe the next 3 months are?
⋒ How can I offer my resources (time, money, and skills) to help others this quarter?
⋒ What exciting things am I looking forward to this quarter?
Then in my Peacefully Productive Planner® I open up to the Goal Scheduling page that I filled in during my Yearly Vision Meeting and see what goals I have tentatively scheduled for this new quarter. I take a look at what events are coming up that quarter that may have not been planned at the beginning of the year (trips, conferences, etc.) to help me decide if the goals I assigned to the quarter still make sense.
Maybe at the start of the year, I thought Q2 was going to be full of margin and white space so I scheduled a pretty intense Focus Goal for April (like launching a new course) but then in February I found out my husband got a new job and we would be moving to a new state in March (this is not happening in my life this is just a random example). Clearly, my life circumstances changed so I don’t have as much margin in April as I thought so I have to shift my goals around a bit and change when I’m focusing on each one.
Your quarterly check-in meetings help you make sure that your goals and your season of life jive.
If the goals I picked for the quarter all still align with what I want to do and my current season then I leave everything as is. If not, then I switch things around.
And there you have it! I keep my quarterly planning meetings really simple and focus mostly on checking in with my mental health and making sure that the goals I chose for that quarter at the beginning of the year still make sense based on what has happened throughout the year.
You may be thinking, “okay but when do you create actual steps for your goals?”
I do that during my monthly check-in meetings! Here’s an example tying everything together:
In my Q2 Check-In Meeting, which I have toward the end of March, I check in and see which goals I assigned at the start of the year to focus on during April, May, and June to make sure that they:
⋒ Still make sense for my vision
⋒ Still align with what’s going on in my life
Then at the end of March when I’m having my monthly prep meeting for April (which to be real, I usually do at the same time as my quarterly check-in meeting) I create my specific plan of action for my April Focus Goal (I use the SWITCH Goal Mapping page in the planner to help me with this).
Then at the end of April when I’m having my monthly check-in meeting for May, I create my specific plan of action for my May Focus Goal.
Then at the end of May when I’m having my monthly check-in meeting for June, I create my specific plan of action for my June Focus Goal. (I also have my Q3 Check-In Meeting at this time).
I don’t like creating action plans for my goals too far in advance because I never know what is going to change in my life, causing me to have to shift things around.
The big takeaway here: the main purpose of your quarterly check-in meeting is to make sure that how you’re working toward your goals is allowing you to prioritize your mental health and relationships (the reflection part) and to schedule what goal you are going to focus on for each month of the quarter in a way that makes sense for what you have going on in your life.
Want to learn how to plan peacefully productive year, quarters, months, weeks, and days?
If you enjoyed this blog post, tune into episode 124 of The Hustle Sanely Podcast to dive deeper into this topic:
