If you want 2025 to be a productive year, you need to make a plan for it. Because it’s simply not going to just happen on its own. (Though, wouldn’t that be lovely!) Today we’re talking about how you go about setting yourself up for your most productive year.
And we’re paying special attention to quarter 1 of 2025! I’m sharing specific exercises to walk yourself through to establish how much time you’re realistically working with and what to do with it. We’re also looking at how to allow for obstacles that will inevitably pop up throughout the year.
If by the end of the episode, you find you need additional accountability and support to stick to the plan you just created, have a listen for what’s available to you! Alright, let’s jump in!
In this episode, we cover:
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- The benefit of breaking your year into quarters as a business owner
- How to determine how much time you have to allocate each quarter
- Why it’s so important to be realistic with yourself and your business plans
- An exercise to establish what productive actually means to you
- How to plan to overcome the obstacles that will pop up throughout the year
If you don’t have a support system or a plan for improving your skill sets, emotional safety, and ability to say no and stick to the plan, that’s what I’m here for! And that’s what the productive quarter is designed for.
I urge you to come into the productive quarter if you don’t have the support you need to actually stick to your productive quarter plan. Because planning it is nice, but if you’re not honoring it, you’re not going to have that productive quarter.
Links & Mentioned Resources
The 12-Week Year (book)
Related Episodes:
Ep 151: 3 Step Year-End Review Process for Business Owners
Connect with Kirsty:
More about The Time & Productivity Podcast for Entrepreneurs
The podcast to help you, as an ambitious high-achieving Type-A woman, master work-life balance as a business owner.
Join Kirsty Knight each week, so she can help you create the level of success you truly desire, in a business that you love, without needing to sacrifice time for yourself, your health, your family, and your enjoyment of life outside of your business. Without hustling, without working yourself into the ground, and without burning out.
Kirsty will be sharing lessons from her own business journey, business strategies, time management and productivity hacks, and the psychology you need to understand – to help you go from overworking and overwhelmed, to mastering your time and productivity, so you can be working less, and earning more.
If you are trying to build or scale your business, but find yourself struggling with overwhelm, self-sabotage, procrastination, distractions, perfectionism, people-pleasing, hustling, overworking and always thinking “there just aren’t enough hours in the day”, this podcast is for you.
You CAN have it all. And she’s going to show you how.
The unedited podcast transcript for this episode of the The Time & Productivity Podcast for Entrepreneurs
Good morning lovelies, how are you doing today?
So if you are listening to this when it comes out, we have just stepped into the New Year of 2025 – so I wish you a Happy New Year. And I hope you had the most wonderful Xmas break.
Hopefully you did actually take a break from your business. And you allowed yourself to properly wind down and enjoy it. And I hope that if you hadn’t had the best year either personally, business wise or emotionally, i hope that you had done a reasonable amount of processing your emotions and thoughts about that past year so you could properly enjoy it.
Please go back to the last episode though if you still have some rawness or disappointment there that you haven’t processed through yet – and work through the exercise I took you through in that episode, because that will help you start the new year with a somewhat clean slate. And then reach out if you need more help.
Anyway, today I want to talk to you about how you can set yourself up for your most productive year.
We’ve actually just kickstarted my latest program, The Productive Quarter, where I am essentially setting my clients up for their most productive quarters, helping them establish their targets in their business, their needle moving activities, their calendars and then coaching them through any obstacles in the way. And so some of the concepts I’m going to be sharing on here are what I’m teaching inside of that container. So if anything resonates or you hear this and think damn that’s what I need. I need some accountability and focus and direction this quarter. I want to have my most productive quarter in my business, you are not too late to join. I’ll drop the link in the shownotes so you can immediately get signed up and added to the fold.
Ok so let’s get into it.
Because actually that is the first thing I wanted to talk about. If you want to have your most productive year, or at the very least, a really productive year, one of the things we want to do is break the year into quarters. Particularly for business. There is a reason why that’s a common standard business practice. Talking about quarters. Looking at quarters. Setting quarterly targets and goals. There’s even a book you can buy called the 12 week year. Because we actually struggle to plan a year well.
And I guess that’s a whole separate point – if you want the year to be productive – you will want to make a plan for it. Because what tends to happen if you don’t, is you get busy rather than productive, you get distracted rather than focused, you miss opportunities because you weren’t looking for them rather than looking for them, and spotting them and using them, you waste time because you spend more time in confusion and overwhelm and indecision, you overwork, you underwork, and you get to the end of the year, surprised that a whole year has gone by, without you really moving the needle on the thing you most wanted to achieve that year. So we want to make a plan for it.
And because we aren’t the best at planning a whole year out. We either underestimate or overestimate what we can achieve, we are too ambitious or not ambitious enough, we are too restrictive or we are too vague – we want to break the year into quarters. 12 week sections. Like mini years.
Those are easier for us to wrap our heads around. And we can roughly map out the quarters at the beginning of the year, but then adjust and tweak and plan more detailed each next quarter as it comes round. That is how we are going to ensure the year is productive. Focus on a quarter at a time. So let’s just take the first quarter for now.
We then want to assess how much time we actually have got in that quarter for our business. Are we planning any breaks or holidays or time off in that quarter? Are there major life changing things happening, like – are we moving house? Are we having a baby? Are we travelling for several weeks in that quarter?
I can’t stress how important enough it is that we make a direct link between how much time we physically have, and the tasks we are expecting ourselves to achieve. It’s the same reason why a to-do list in isolation is not a good time management tool. Because it has no relationship to any specific timings or durations or your life in real time.
There is your time supply – that is how much time you have, how many hours you have to give. And then there is your time demand – how much time all of the things you are responsible for and are telling yourself you have to do, takes up. And the two need to match up – in order for there to be enough time to do the tasks you have on your plate. And it’s impossible to tell if you have enough time – if you don’t look at the quantities of both.
So within that quarter, identify how much time you actually have to work on your business. And to do this, this means making decisions on how much time you want off. On what your work/personal life boundaries look like.
Ok so once you’ve done that, what you are left looking at, is essentially what I call the “perfect” quarter, right. This is how much time you have in that quarter to work on your business in “perfect” conditions. So if no-one is sick, if you don’t get sick, if your kids don’t bring home the lurgy from nursery, if your childcare doesn’t cancel, if you don’t get any unexpected personal fires crop up, if you could work like a robot, without taking breaks, and had unlimited energy. That is how much time you’d have.
But of course, we know this isn’t realistic. You are not a robot. You need to take breaks, even in the middle of the working day. You have personal relationships that require things of you, often unexpectedly, and there is the chance that you will get sick, a family member will get sick, or someone will interfere with your perfect quarter, right?
That’s normal.
And it should be factored in to your plan for having a productive quarter. Because you can still have a productive quarter, even when it’s not a perfect quarter. And you won’t have a perfect quarter. It’s impossible.
So we want to somehow determine how much productive time you realistically will have in each quarter, knowing that it won’t be the full quarter, knowing that it won’t be perfect.
So how we do that is by looking at past patterns. And trying to determine your baseline minimum repeatable unit. So what is that? What is your baseline minimum repeatable unit?
This is the unit of time within which you can be 99% sure of how much time you have as a guaranteed minimum baseline to be able to work productively on your business.
So for example, say I have a kid who gets sick in nursery every three weeks – and so in a 3 week period, guaranteed at least 2 working days are lost to the sickness – either me looking after the kid, or me being sick myself. If that pattern shows up frequently, I can safely say that my baseline minimum repeatable unit is 3 weeks. And then within those 3 weeks, my guaranteed time for working on my business is however many days I work each week, minus 2 days.
Or another example – say most weekdays are the same, but every second week, you like to take a Friday off completely and one of those days always gets interrupted by a family emergency. So your baseline minimum repeatable unit is 2 weeks. And your guaranteed business working time is however many days you work, minus a Friday and another day.
And the reason why this is helpful, rather than just assuming we have 12 weeks in the quarter and we work 5 days a week each week and every week looks the same, is that we now have a much more realistic representation of what we have to work with inside that quarter.
Which means we can plan and map out our strategy much more effectively. And set ourselves up with it to succeed, rather than set ourselves up to fail because there is a mismatch of our time supply and the time demand.
For example, we might want to revise our strategy of committing to posting every single workday on social media – when we know that every 3 weeks, 2 complete work days are a wash out. Or we might have to adjust our plan for getting those things done and maybe look at batching and scheduling in advance, because we know we can’t rely on ourselves having time every single workday to get them out spontaneously.
When we just assume that every week is going to be the same. Or every day we will have the same amount of time available, we make commitments that don’t stand up, when those weeks or days get squeezed, as they invariably will.
Basing our strategy instead on our baseline minimum repeatable unit instead, gives us a better chance of committing to something that can be sustained.
Ok so that’s the first point – to set yourself up for a productive year, think in terms of quarters – and get realistic about what a quarter actually means for you, and how much guaranteed productive working time is in a quarter for you.
The second thing we want to do in order to set ourselves up for a productive year, a productive quarter – is to get clear on what “productive” means to you. Does it mean “tick off a lot of tasks”? Does it matter which tasks? Does it mean working every minute of the day? Does it mean a couple of core projects get completed? Does it mean you made more money? What does “productive” mean to you? If you imagine getting to the end of the quarter, and looking back, and saying – “Jeez, that was a productive quarter” – why would you say that?
And this is important because sometimes we confuse busy with productive. We confuse “working all the time” with actually creating the outcomes we want. We think “more” is better, when sometimes the “more” we are focused on, isn’t the important stuff.
Imagine you could choose between a quarter where you ticked 150 different things off your to-do list, but made no sales…or you did the same 3 actions each week, and completed one major project, and at the end of the quarter, you had made 5 sales, and grown your email list by 200 people. Which would you choose? Which would you think was the more productive quarter?
Or you worked 8 hours a day solidly every day for 10 weeks, and made 12k in revenue, or you worked 3 hours a day, and made 15k in revenue. I think we know which one you’d prefer – but which one would you automatically think was a productive quarter?
We want to think about what “productive” means to us, and decide what we want out of that quarter. And we want to make this as clear and specific as possible. So we have actual targets, or goals. Or milestones.
That is going to help us create our strategy – what activities and tasks we are actually going to be fitting into those hours and days we have, and which ones are essential for creating the results we want. And then again, we can do a check to see that it definitely fits. And that it fits around the necessary other things we may have to do in our business.
So that then gives us a decent foundation to start with.
Ok so we’ve got our quarter. We know how much time we realistically have within that quarter. We have our targets or goals. We have our tasks and projects and activities in that schedule.
What else do we need to consider in order to actually make that productive quarter happen?
We need to consider that there will likely be obstacles come up to thwart our productive quarter plan.
One of those obstacles will be other tasks and projects and fires and interruptions and distractions that we can’t foresee – and that will be shouting loudly for our attention.
Another will be resistance to doing the thing that is part of our productive strategy.
So there will be things pulling us away from our plan. And things pushing us away from our plan.
There will also be moments where we just don’t feel like following the plan. And doing the thing.
So take a minute to think about what obstacles might come up for us. And see if you can come up with a strategy to help you overcome it.
Because really it’s how we tackle those obstacles that really are the make or break of your productive quarter.
It’s how committed we are in the moment to honouring the plan.
It’s how committed we are to getting back to the plan, when we get derailed.
It’s what we make it mean when we do go off piste from the plan.
It’s how committed we are to developing the skillsets of honouring our plan.
To developing the emotional safety around taking action anyway.
To prioritising our plan and saying no to everything else and feeling that discomfort.
These things matter.
And so hopefully you have a strategy to help you with those things, but if you don’t have a support system or a plan of how to improve your skillsets and emotional safety, and ability to say no and stick to the plan, I urge you to come into The Productive Quarter, because the coaching we do inside there will help you overcome those obstacles, as well as providing you with the external accountability to stay focused on your plan.
And then the last thing to think about – with regard to setting yourself up for a productive next quarter – is that you want to be taking last year’s growth and learnings around the obstacles you faced last year into the quarter, but none of the bad feelings, disappointment, frustrations, and bad juju.
So this is where having processed all of that from last year will be super helpful. So again, if you haven’t done that properly, make sure you go back to the last episode to get the audio and the worksheet to work through for that.
Ok – and that is how you are going to set yourself up for a great and productive year.
I can’t wait to hear what you create over the next few months.
And if you are inside The Productive Quarter I will see you in there. The link is below if you want to jump in.
Until next time. Have a good one. x
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