Hey friend,

The first quarter of the year is quickly coming to a close—have you done the projects you set out to do?

If not, don’t worry.

There are still another 3 quarters of the year left.

This week I want to talk about quarterly planning. It’s a critical part of the multi-scale planning strategy to design an intentional and successful year.

Now Lets Get into It…

Can Newport is a big inspiration for my approach to making quarterly plans.

A quarterly plan is your high-level, strategic blueprint for what’s important in the upcoming quarter.

It’s a strategy for sustainable productivity.

Because it’s your opportunity to learn from your previous quarter’s experiences and map out your plans for the upcoming quarter to avoid overwhelming you schedule and working yourself into the ground.

I use a Notion database to track all my quarterly plans and reviews in one spot—I can easily go back through the year to look at my reflections and plans if I wanted to

I usually do my quarterly review and planning session in Notion at the end of the quarter.

There are 3 parts to my quarterly review and planning process.

It typically takes 30 to 45 minutes (depending on how much reflection and journaling time I want to do).

I’ll use the quarterly planning system in Notion that I created for my client to demo the process in Notion.

Lets dive into each part of this 3-part process.

1. Review progress on your goals & projects

Open up the current quarter’s database entry page and review the goals and projects you’ve set for yourself.

Assess if you’ve completed each of the goals or projects.

Depending on the goal or project, it might be yes or no it’s completed, or it might be a % completion.

The goals and projects are also tracked it its own Notion database.

The beauty of this is that every entry in the database is a page that you can open on and see in more details (e.g. what tasks are remaining for this project)

If a project is been completed or a goal has been achieved, change the status to “complete”.

If not, decide whether the project or goal should be

• Migrated or extended out to the following quarter.

• Put on the back burner.

• Deleted.

By using power of Relations Property of Notion databases, you can link entries from different database together.

For example, here I’ve linked the projects and goals to the quarters database so that the client can easily assign them to the relevant quarters as they make their plans.

Then I use the Linked Views feature of Notion databases to create dashboards to show exactly what the client needs to help her take the next action.

Having projects and goals are important.

But more importantly is creating systems and processes to turn those aspirations into tangible, consistent daily action to move closer to your goals.

That means, personally, the quarterly review and planning session isn’t the only time I look at my quarterly plans.

In my own Notion setup, I have a direct link to the relevant quarterly plan in my Weekly Planning template, so that I can quickly and easily reference my priority projects and goals when deciding what tasks to focus on for the upcoming week.

The key takeaway:

Create a system and process that aligns your daily actions to your longer term aspirations.

(p.s. If you’re a fan of Cal Newport and productivity without overwhelm, I think you’ll like Slow Productivity Systems in Notion Master Guide. I’ll send it to you when it’s done—just let me know you’re interested)

2. Self-Reflection

Journaling and self-reflection is a powerful tool to celebrate the wins, identify key lessons and what can be improved, and make better future plans.

The mistake many people make when reflecting on their quarter is chastising themself for everything they didn’t get done.

Instead, I urge you to look at your past quarter through the lens of a journalist—inquisitive, non-judgemental, pragmatic and future looking.

If you’re a recovering perfectionist like me, I know it’s hard!

So here are some guiding questions that I include in my own Notion Quarterly review template, as well as other reflection questions used by my clients in their quarterly review setups.

1. Top 3 things I’ve learned this quarter

2. My biggest win(s) this quarter is?

3. What I wasn’t able to accomplish this quarter / Could have done better?

4. What was the #1 thing I did to improve my energy?

5. What action did I take that I am most proud of this quarter?

6. How did I show up for myself this quarter?

7. How did I increase my wealth this quarter?

8. What was the most fulfilling part of serving my community this quarter?

9. What did I have the most fun doing this quarter?

10. What will I do next quarter to have fun?

11. What I am committing or re-committing to do or improve next quarter that will make me feel most fulfilled?

12. What systems can I build to make work easier?

13. What can I automate to reduce manual work?

Don’t use all these questions at once, just pick 3 to 5 questions to get started with.

Remember, make the quarterly review and planning process productive, easy and fun—so you actually stick to it for the long term.

3. Plan the upcoming quarter

You’ve reviewed your projects and goals for the current quarter.

You’ve sat with yourself to reflect on how things went.

Now it’s time to plan and get excited about the the upcoming quarter! It’s the fun and aspirational part of the process!

In additional to the goals and projects you might be migrated from the current quarter to the next:

• Look at your full list of goals and projects to see if there’s anything you want to add to the upcoming quarter.

• Your self-reflection may have also spurred new project or goal ideas that you either want to add to your backlog, or start working on in the upcoming quarter.

To save time and eliminate manual work, turn your quarterly review and planning page into a Notion template.

(If you’re interested in something like this and want help getting it set up in Notion—go ahead and book a call)

Wrap up

People are often making a yearly list of aspirational goals they want to hit or projects they want to complete by the end of the year.

And they might have a task manager to help track their daily action.

But the missing link is something more medium term—a quarterly plan.

This is where you put specific time frames to achieving those goals and projects. And sequence them in the right order to work on throughout the year. Then create tangible daily tasks that need to be done for those goals and projects to become a reality.

Tools like Notion makes it easy to connect the dots between different time scales help us achieve our goals, projects and aspirations without feeling overwhelmed.

So if you haven’t tried doing a quarterly plan and review session, it’s never too late to start.

That’s it for this week!

Will you try planning your next quarter?—If you need some pointers to get started in Notion, reply with your situation and I’ll be happy to send some through.

See you next week,

Janice CK

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