Ideas to make the most of the rest of 2020 – Part 1

It’s fair to say this year hasn’t gone as planned so far. Do you need some ideas to make the most of the rest of 2020? This month I’m going to do two blogs to help you bring home the year end strongly, whether that’s personally or for your business.

Build a battle board

Did you lose months to furlough, lose opportunities to progress and now find yourself under financial pressures?

Coronavirus hasn’t gone away, there’s much insecurity and in previous articles, I’ve discussed leading your team out of lockdown, regardless of your role in your business. 

How will you make sure that you capitalize on the five remaining months of 2020?

To borrow from Brendan Burchard, the award-winning author and coach; make a battle board. It’s the wall in your house or office where your yearly plan is mapped out visually. It’s seen daily and is used to focus people on the job at hand. It’s not hidden on a computer or project management software, it’s front and centre and teams regularly spend time on it.

Big corporations do this well and I was trained to build our annual goal planning charts, how to use them to frame the activities we undertook as a team and how to adapt them.

A battle board visually represents your plan for the year.

Many small businesses don’t know how to do this and consequently don’t have a plan. Even if you do, the first iteration rarely survives the first few months of the year and it flexes and adapts to the realities as the year progresses. 

But the plan must exist and ideas to make the most of the rest of 2020 must be bang up to date – make one now. 

• Take a big sheet of paper – as big as you can get and tape it to the wall. 
• Draw 5 boxes, one for each remaining month of 2020 (the January version had 12 boxes).
• Now map the year – for each month add the goals that have to happen, the key activities for the month, metrics of success, financial information and other mission critical objectives. 
• For projects spanning months or building up over time, map the steps to each month too. 
• At the month end, review progress against targets and score yourself as a percentage achievement. Now remap the next month to keep yourself on target.

For us to salvage the rest of 2020, we need a plan because hope is not a strategy.

Tips for a battle board

• Buy a big roll of craft paper and some masking tape from Amazon. It’s cheap and you can re-do the board as needed. It doesn’t need to be a masterpiece, but it does have to be regularly worked on
• Use big post-it notes or cue cards to move ideas around, so you can juggle progress without having to re-write the whole thing every time you need to adapt. Use your smart phone to capture it in case a note falls off.
• Leave it up and encourage the team to scribble, annotate and add ideas
• Spend time working on the board every day, preferably more than you spend on social media. Make it a habit. 

Park 2021 projects without guilt

Did you find 2021 projects creeping onto your board? It’s normal to start planning ahead, building budgets and projects for the next year.

But these are not normal times and right now, with five months remaining to leverage those ideas to make the most of the rest of 2020, it’s likely that thinking about 2021 will be using valuable brain space and attention.

Look at the battle board you made. What’s on there that could wait? What ideas or projects can you park, because as valuable as they are, you need to bump them to free up your time?

• Create another box – labelled 2021. Push those projects forward and park them there. 
• Consciously move them out of the way and tell yourself; it can wait. 
• Now give yourself permission to forget about them – guilt free.

They’re good plans and you will get to them, but for now you need to focus closer to home. It’s consciously consigning them to the future allows you to focus on the here and now.

There you go, part one of my ideas to make the most out of the rest of 2020. There’s still enough time to have a good year, it’s a choice you can make and I’m here to help. Check out my other blog articles for other ideas or subscribe to my regular newsletter for part 2 of the August blog.

Want help working on your battle board? Let me help with 30 minutes of free coaching on how to build a great one.