Game Plan for the Next 100 Days

Personal Offsite Session 4 – Building your game plan for the next 100 days

Lets assume that you left session 3 with a good idea of your goals for the next 100 days. I’d hope you have managed to get this down to a single business goal and a couple of personal goals. Don’t worry if you have more than that, this session will help clarify whether you are still trying to achieve too much.

I’ll start with a simple example. You have already decided that becoming healthier is one of your aims for the next 100 days. Lets start by making sure you know exactly what it is you want to achieve. I think the best way to tackle this is by making the goal SMART. Its also time to get everything in your brain about your aims for the next 100 days onto paper. I find a mind map is a brilliant way of doing this.

First, lets get specific. Exactly what outcome do you want? The outcome will drive your game plan for the next 100 days. Is this purely a weight loss exercise? Is the aim to be fitter to help with a sporting aim? Be absolutely clear what outcome you want.

Make the outcome measurable. If its weight loss specify the target. 10lbs? 20lbs? If its endurance then be clear what it looks like. Maybe the aim is to run a race at the end of 100 days. If so how far? in what time?

Now lets think about actions. Here’s where we really get into the game plan for the next 100 days with some tactics. The mistake at this point is to think solely about you, and what you can achieve. You must think team. Ok you don’t have a team? Wrong. Everyone has access to other people that can help. In the fitness example you can start thinking about an exercise regime or a diet, but, what other support would really make a difference? What about a coach to advise you? What about a personal trainer? Think about what tactics you can put in place to make sure you can’t fail. Do you need more information, some training? Right now just capture all your thoughts and get them onto a piece of paper or a mind map.

If we look at a business example the same principle is true. If you want to achieve something, can you talk to someone who has done it before and get some help or advice? But you can go wider. Think about some of the key tasks you will need to achieve. Are you really the best person to do all of them? If you have a team around you start thinking about how you can maximise the value of the team and how to best use them to achieve the goal. But there’s also a huge pool of resources beyou can draw upon these days. Can you assemble a virtual team around you? Start thinking who? what? & when?

Think about some of the services you might use. There are a number of ways you can get things done even if you don’t have a team.

• Fiverr is a great place to start, with its of people offering to do simple things from just $5.
• Want something more complex? there are loads of freelancers ready to help with technical stuff over at Upwork,
• 99designs is a great place if you need some graphics,
• 24slides is a great way of getting professional powerpoint slides,
• Rev is a fantastic way of getting audio transcribed to speed up the writing process.

At this point you should be able to get some idea of whether what you are aiming for is realistic. Are you trying for too much? remember, less is more.

Lastly lets start thinking about time scales. We’ve already made things time bound by using the 100 day approach, but to deliver results you need to get a whole lot more specific. There will usually be 3 or 4 key things that need to be achieved over the next 100 days, lets make these our milestones we need to hit. What are they? When do these need to happen?

So, do you have a game plan for the next 100 days?

Armed with this information you can move on to the next stage and pull together a plan on a page.