Spring marks a new beginning in many ways and is sometimes close to the end of the financial year. It’s an opportunity to spring clean your mind, your workspace, and your plans and figure out what could help you spring forward into the next few weeks and months.
Today’s episode is a quick guide on reviewing your plan, cleaning your workspace, tidying your mind and looking more holistically rather than just refreshing your current strategy and tactics.
We will cover the following;
– How to Get Started
– Evaluating Your Current Plan
– Listen to Outside Advice
– Set Your Personal and Biz Goals
– Tweak Your Tactics
– Upgrade Your Technology
– Streamline Your Workspace
– Block Off Time for Reviewing
Let’s dive in!
Links mentioned in this episode:
My top ten tools podcast episode: https://henbe.co.uk/2022/12/15/ep-105-top-ten-tools-for-efficiency-and-time-saving/
Liked Listening today? What to do next:
Get my FREE roadmap to get more strategic with communication activity in your business.
Listen to more episodes, take some training, or download a resource: Find out more here.
Hire my expertise
Whether that’s support with a one-off comms project or an entire strategy for your business, drop me a line if you want to explore this further. You can also work with me 1:1 as a trainer and mentor – emma@henbe.co.uk
Work with me closely
If you’d like to work with me to develop and implement your communication strategy through 1:1 work, podcasts, workbooks, sharing ideas, and lots of accountability and up-skilling, then email me at emma@henbe.co.uk to register your interest for you or your entire team.
Leave me a voicemail on my Speakpipe page I would love to hear your feedback on this episode and thoughts on any topics I could include in future ones too.
Full Transcript (unedited)
Spring marks a new beginning in many ways and is sometimes close to the end of the financial year. It’s an opportunity to spring clean your mind, your workspace, and your plans and figure out what could help you spring forward into the next few weeks and months.
Today’s episode is a quick guide on reviewing your plan, cleaning your workspace, tidying your mind and looking more holistically rather than just refreshing your current strategy and tactics.
We will cover the following;
– How to Get Started
– Evaluating Your Current Plan
– Listen to Outside Advice
– Set Your Personal and Biz Goals
– Tweak Your Tactics
– Upgrade Your Technology
– Streamline Your Workspace
– Block Off Time for Reviewing
Let’s dive in!
Sometimes the most challenging part is getting started with these things. So I like to take bite-sized chunks at first.
Look around you, and assess how organised your workspace is and how organised you feel about it. I find that a good clearout is often an excellent way to start to plan how to be better organised.
Add to that some tactics like the Pomodoro technique, which helps you to undertake tasks in timed 25 mins chunks and gives you a little break in between before moving on to the next task. This can help you to get more organised and focus on what to take on next, So it’s an excellent place to start.
I also streamlined everything into an electronic notebook about a year ago. After carrying around five or so – one for each client – I decided to put it all in the cloud and have one notebook to bind them all! I use Remarkable. And it’s great as you can have as many notebooks as you like, take notes, copy and paste notes from the book to book, do doodles and drawings etc.
Evaluating your current plan.
Reviewing what has worked and hasn’t can help you get an idea of where to focus your time and efforts and identify any mistakes you may have made. For example, someone suggests you float a giant pound sign down the river next year to raise awareness of tax increases. You should remind them why you should (or shouldn’t) do that. Your data will also help shape your argument for yourself and your management team.
And lastly, use insights to make changes for the future. These could include setting new targets or changing your strategy to ensure your comms plan is successful in 2023.
I like to use “Start, Stop and Continue” for this.
What you need to “Start” doing is what you could try based on your findings from this year’s comms activity: What new thing will you start doing based on where you see gaps in your comms activity?
“Stop” is for those activities that do not show you a return. The activities you do ‘just because’ and there’s no tangible value to them. Put these in the Stop column, and make sure you add a reason so you can reflect on it.
Finally is the “Continue” column. These are those activities that show you a return. Activities that you need to nurture and get better at. These metrics are where to focus your time in 2022.
If you’re looking at recording your productivity and campaign outputs – check out my free activity tracker in an episode all about measurement and evaluation. I will add the link to the show notes.
Talk to people
I talk to people when reviewing what to take forward in my own business. In larger organisations, talking to internal and external stakeholders about how they view communication from your company or team is an excellent way to get first-hand insights into your performance and take on board anything you may not have thought of, allowing you to tweak your tactics accordingly.
Set personal goals, not just business ones.
Feeling valued in the workplace is intrinsically linked to productivity, a feeling of worth and, ultimately, our well-being and self-esteem. So it’s important to make sure that personal goals are set and achieved. Just focussing on work-related ones is not enough, and they can be linked to work or not.
Upgrade your technology
Some great tools are out there to help us plan, manage and review our activity.
BuzzSumo https://buzzsumo.com/ is an easy way to monitor your content performance, discover which topics and influencers have the most impact and keep an eye on your competitors.
Analytics software to track campaigns and measure success – the best being Google Analytics https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/#/report-home/a58740513w92763539p96588341
Influencer marketing platforms like Klear https://klear.com/ and Upfluence https://www.upfluence.com/ can help you reach critical influencers.
The best social media scheduling tools for 2023 include Hootsuitehttps://www.hootsuite.com/, Buffer https://buffer.com/, and Sprout Social https://sproutsocial.com/ these can save you lots of time and help you plan ahead.
Content creation tools like Canva https://www.canva.com/, Adobe Spark https://www.adobe.com/wam/sprk.html, and Visme https://www.visme.co/ are great options for creating custom graphics, presentations, and other visuals.
Tractivity https://www.tractivity.co.uk/ is an example of a stakeholder management software that helps you organise, manage and track critical stakeholders.
Read more about these and others in my top ten tools podcast episode. I will add the link in the shownotes: https://henbe.co.uk/2022/12/15/ep-105-top-ten-tools-for-efficiency-and-time-saving/
Reflection and reviewing what you’re doing is a great thing. So why not round off this I session by adding an hour every other week n your diary to check where you are at with life, work and in general?