In late February, a professional Slack group I’m part of posted its question of the day: How are you doing with putting your Q1 strategy into place?
Of the 30 or so people who answered, one said they were making progress. Everyone else said some version of the same thing: We haven’t looked at the plan. We haven’t measured anything. We haven’t even finished the plan.
I was in the latter group.
I’d made time in January to review 2025 with my mastermind group, the Quad, and that went well. But just as I started pulling together strategies for each part of my business, work got busy enough that I couldn’t find the few uninterrupted hours I needed to get started. I could peck away at it, but I needed a solid block of time to organize myself.
I knew this was a problem. In my year-end review notes, under “Committed to Stopping,” I’d written “Complicated strategies—I can’t/don’t follow them” and “Taking days to create strategies.” Yet there I was, weeks into the new year, still trying to build the pretty version.
Why Business Plans Stall
I love making detailed plans: SMART goals, quarterly and monthly breakdowns, and weekly task lists. But I think this is where many of us get stuck. We use up the energy we have for a plan on making the plan itself. We spend days on the details and on creating a polished document. When we finish, we feel accomplished.
And we did accomplish something, though perhaps not the most important thing. Because then our energy for the task peters out and life reasserts itself.
Carrying out the plan takes a whole new batch of energy. It means scheduling tasks, assigning them, and checking whether any of them worked. Somewhere in there, many of us fall off.
Sometimes we never finish the plan, or we finish it so late that we can’t call it that year’s plan.
Sometimes we do the tasks, but never measure them.
And sometimes we don’t do the tasks at all.
I see this in my own business, in the volunteer groups I’m part of, and in what other professionals tell me. It’s a very human pattern.
By late February, the delay had left me frustrated and feeling like a failure.
Creating a Good-Enough Plan
Then someone in that Slack group shared a trick: record voice notes, upload the transcripts to your favorite AI tool, and ask it to summarize the notes and pull out the tasks. I had weeks of ideas swirling in my head, so I holed up in my bedroom and poured them into a series of voice memos.
I then uploaded the transcripts to my business project in Claude, one at a time in the same thread. For each one, I asked for a bulleted summary, my conclusions, and any tasks that could be extrapolated from my ramblings. Then I asked it to pull everything into one loose plan.
I’d talked about many projects across my business. For each area, Claude gathered the goals I’d mentioned and the tasks to get there. It then sorted the tasks into “now,” “next,” and “soon” rather than by specific dates. If life happened and a project didn’t get as far as I wanted, I didn’t want to beat myself up over a missed deadline.
With the draft plan, I made the decisions—what mattered, what came first, and what I’d do that week—and finalized the plan. My first task was to reach out to past clients and reconnect, in hopes that they’d remember me the next time they needed an editor.
Letting go of the pretty plan, with every goal and task broken down by quarter, month, and week, wasn’t easy. I like a pretty plan! But it wasn’t working for me this year. So I called the new one what it was: good enough. I was starting later than usual, but as long as I could start something, I’d be happy.
How It’s Going
It’s now October and I’ve been working my plan since the beginning of March. The good news is that I’ve stuck to it and made some progress. In my next post, I’ll look at what actually happened: what got done, what didn’t, and what I’m changing for next year.
In the meantime, is your own plan stuck somewhere between your head and the page? Let’s get it out on paper. Book a one-hour coaching session and bring everything in your head: a voice memo, a list, a brain dump. We’ll untangle it, and you’ll leave with one priority, one task, and a deadline to get you moving.
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