On today's episode, Matt and Garrett celebrate the arrival of Matt's beautiful baby daughter, Elizabeth Grace, and continue their celebration of their 300th episode by tackling a couple more listener questions which they didn't get to cover earlier. These excellent questions are all about planning and blocking time in the most productive fashion, and you know our experts have a lot to say on these crucial topics.

In this episode, our hosts discuss business planning tips for 2022 and the value of blocking out time to make plans far enough in advance, explain the need to carve out time to take care of ourselves during business planning, and review three essential pieces of business planning and the vital pieces that are left out of many business plans. They also talk through the need for breaking the plan down and analyzing it, share tips on how to be effective at executing business plans, and address the fallacy that business plans have to be complicated. There is so much to celebrate at Ninja Selling lately - Elizabeth Grace, over 300 podcast episodes, and now today's masterclass regarding the power of business planning and time blocking. Join Matt and Garrett here today to share in the excitement!

Join the Ninja Selling Podcast group on Facebook at Ninja Selling Podcast Facebook where you share ideas, ask questions, and connect with other Ninjas. You can also leave a voicemail with your direct feedback at 208 MY-NINJA. And visit Ninja Selling Events for more information about upcoming open installations. Or if you're interested in taking your goals a step further, visit Ninja Coaching to check out all of our amazing coaches.

Episode Highlights:

The need to set time aside for planning.
Take care of yourself and turn business planning into an event you look forward to every single year.
The correlation between people that have a completed business plan to the ones who don't.
Putting a business plan into a structured plan of action or a roadmap.
The three separate sections of our business plan.
Being objective in planning and learning from mistakes.
Tips for planning.
Recommendation: that you get the business plan for a new year done early November.
Addressing the fallacy that business plans have to be complicated.
Learning how to time block better.
Putting priorities on the actual items that you set up.
The five daily activities and four weekly activities.
Starting with gratitude.
Showing up and staying on your agenda.
The uncontaminated week to start.
The need to understand the importance of the activities that you're putting on your calendar.
The beauty of building a real strong routine and making your environment distraction-free
Atomic Habits by James Clear
The Time-Block Planner by Cal Newport.

Quotes:

"Every single time we watch somebody that sits down, fully plans out, not just planning but fully plans out and gets it mapped out, they have a way stronger, less stressful year than the person that's winging it."

"When you build your business plan, think of it in that way of what are the steps that I need to plan on the calendar before the things happen."

"Get the business plan done early November."

"When people start their business plan, they start moving into the next year already."

"A nice way to, like, pull business planning together is it doesn't have to be crazy complicated."

"The whole part of the planning is to get things on the calendar so that you can take action."

"On the business in the morning, in the business in the afternoon."

"When you have the routine set in place, you get better control over time."

"You have to limit yourself to the time available."

"If it's on the calendar, recurring, and you're not showing up, you're now constantly training yourself to not show up, which is a problem."

"Part of the ability to not be interrupted comes from making your environment distraction-free."

"Another interesting thing, too, is that most of our distractions in our world come from our own thoughts versus actually pings and dings from our phone, so we have to slow ourselves down."

"You always have the ability to refocus, readjust, and take action on the things that you know will help you be productive in your business. And if you do look at it that way, each day and each moment is a new opportunity to be on purpose versus on accident, then you're going to be better."