The Four Levels of Planning That Actually Help You Accomplish Your Goals

Think back to January. You set some goals for the year. Now be honest, have you made any real progress on them?

If that question stings a little, you're not alone, and it's not because you picked the wrong goal or lost your motivation. It's because most of us were never taught the planning structure that actually holds a goal together past March. In this episode, I'm breaking down the four levels of planning that work together to carry your goals through the entire year, starting from the ground up instead of the usual top-down approach.

In This Episode, I'll Cover:

• The most detailed level of planning we do, and why it's actually the one that gives you the fastest wins.
• The level that quietly prevents you from waking up next month just as overbooked as you were this month.
• Why one specific planning rhythm is what keeps you connected to your longer-term goals and tells you when it's time to pivot.
• The biggest mistake I see people make when they try to run all four levels off their Google Calendar alone.
• Where most people's goal setting completely falls apart, and it has nothing to do with the goal itself.

Mentioned in this episode:
Plan-a-Palooza - https://www.megansumrell.com/plan

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Thanks for tuning in!
Megan 🩷🐝

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Think back to the start of the year, right? January 2026, when you may have set some kind of goals for yourself. Do you remember what those goals are? And if so, have you made any progress on them? Now, if either of those questions are making you cringe a little bit, don't worry. I promise you are not alone. There is a reason why this happens to so many of us, right? And when I say this, what I mean is all of a sudden we spend all that time making goals and then we make zero progress on them all year. And the reason why, the most common reason why this happens is it comes down to something that I call the four levels of planning. And today I'm going to be walking you through all four and how they keep your goals alive all year long. Welcome to the Work Life Harmony Podcast. Guess what? You don't have to feel constantly overwhelmed, exhausted, and stressed out. There is another way. When you have the right systems and tools to plan and manage your time, you can live a life of harmony. If you're ready to stop feeling overwhelmed, this is the show for you. Hey everyone, welcome back to the Work Life Harmony Podcast. Now, I know this concept of the four levels of planning might sound like maybe the least exciting thing that you're going to hear all week, but I promise you this is worth a listen here today because this is the thing that helps you understand why when you set these big goals in January, they are completely like evaporated and gone by March or April. And most of the time, this has nothing to do with it being a bad goal. It has nothing to do with your lack of desire or motivation. It's the fact that the planning structure around it is not there. And it's not there because unless you've been taught how to build it, this isn't a skill you're just naturally born with. All right. So today I'm going to be walking you through at a high level what are these four levels of planning to help you understand why you need all four of them and then how they actually work together and support you all year long so that at the end of the year, you can be looking back, going, wow, those dreams, desires, plans that I'd set at the beginning of the year, they actually held up and happened. Now, before we dive into these four levels, I want to share with you an email that I just got this morning. As you know, we are gearing up for our annual Plan Apalousie event. We have tickets on sale right now. The event goes down in October. And there's a reason why women come back year after year after year. And just this morning, I got an email from Christy and she said, Megan, your annual and quarterly planning sessions are simply the best. The planning rhythm you teach has changed my life and my entire family's life as well. I can't wait for Planopalooza. Guys, this is what keeps me going day after day. This is what makes me love what I do. I know for a fact that when you learn how to plan and manage your time correctly in a way that supports you and the realities of your life, it 100% transforms how you live. I've experienced it and I've watched thousands of other women experience it as well. Now, when other kind of people in the productivity or planning space teach goal setting or planning at the start of the year, what I see time and time again is that people are really good at teaching how to identify a goal, how to even break it down right into bite-sized steps and how to build a plan around your goal. But where most of these plans fall short is that they don't marry it back to the reality of your life. Is the plan that you just made for that goal even remotely reasonable given what you carry on a day-to-day basis? Right. Usually those things are very, very separate. And the fact is, goal setting is 100% useless unless you have your daily and weekly life under control. All right. I repeat, you are wasting your time going through a goal setting exercise if you feel like you're barely staying afloat day after day. Because the first thing to fall off your plate when time is tough, when you are overwhelmed, are those goals. So this is why when I teach true planning mastery, I teach it from what I call the bottom up. Meaning we've got to get our daily life under control where we actually have some space to breathe, where we are in control, where we are feeling proactive, right? We've got to fix that first before we start really gearing, kicking our gears into goal planning, because otherwise it will likely be a waste of time. And so today I want to walk you through at a high level what are the four levels of planning that are included in real planning and time management mastery. And I want to help you understand the purpose of each one because they're all they all serve a subtly different purpose, but they work together, meaning one level of planning is an input into the next. All right. Now, oftentimes when I introduce this concept of the four levels of planning, I start with the kind of highest least detailed, which is the annual plan. I'm not going to do that today. All right. Today I want to start walking you through that bottom-up approach, meaning what is the most detailed level? Because this is where you can get some amazing quick wins. So at the most detailed level of planning, and the one that we do the most of is weekly planning. Now you may be wondering, Megan, where does daily planning fit in? It does not. It is part of your weekly planning process. All right. The way I teach weekly planning, it's done in such a way that it allows you to absorb and handle all the pop-up things that may come at you all week long, right? We have to recognize that exists. If you, if you're being taught to build a weekly plan that's not teaching you how to protect the space and handle all of the what I call pop-up tasks that come at you all week, your weekly planning process is not going to hold up. All right. So the purpose of weekly planning is to keep you on task, if you will, throughout the course of your day and week at a very detailed level. It shows you not only what you're doing, but it shows you when you're doing it and how it's getting done. All right. So this really gets into the most level of detail. The purpose of weekly planning is to help keep you realistic about what you can honestly get done in any given day or week, instead of constantly creating these ridiculously long lists that there was absolutely no way that they were going to get done. All right. Weekly planning also provides the structure to help you prevent procrastination, which is a biggie. And it also helps support you in managing the unpredictability of life without all the dominoes falling. If you're doing planning in a way where all of a sudden something unexpected pops up, it means the entire rest of your week falls apart, means you haven't been taught how to do weekly planning the right way. All right. So weekly planning is really the engine that just keeps everything humming. Now, monthly planning, it's going to help keep things moving. But one of the key benefits to monthly planning is it prevents you from getting overbooked and overscheduled in the future. Right. How many of you have ever had one of those months where you're like, man, if I can just get through this month, who next month's going to be so much better. And then you, you know, quote, turn the page and your planner to next month at the start of the next month, and you look at what's on there and you're like, oh my gosh, it happened again. Right. Well, this is because you aren't learning how to do monthly planning the right way. So monthly planning really is there to prevent you from constantly getting overscheduled in the future. And monthly planning is where we really see the biggest reward in terms of protecting your time for those goals and longer-term projects. All right. So the way we do monthly planning, kind of builds some boundaries, if you will, around your time to make sure, again, that you're not getting overbooked and scheduled and that you've got the time you need for those bigger projects, goals, and dreams. All right, monthly planning is also an input into your weekly plan. So we look at our monthly plan every time we sit down to do our weekly planning. Now, the third level up is our quarterly planning rhythm. All right. And one of the key benefits of quarterly planning is keeping you on track with your longer-term goals and projects for the year or, you know, whatever long-term window you're looking at. All right. Quarterly planning is where we really, really zero in on that. All right. And quarterly planning is what highlights for us if we may need to make a pivot or a replan in terms of those longer-term things that we're working on. That's really what lives there at that quarterly planning. And it also reconnects you back to your core values and priorities. Because in day-to-day life, it's so easy to get disconnected from those. And this is why part of the quarterly planning process is an exercise where we reconnect back to that to make sure that we're just not kind of sailing in the complete wrong direction. And the plan that we create during quarterly planning, that quarterly plan is input into your monthly planning, right? So we start to see that they connect. And then finally, at the highest level of planning is this concept of an annual plan. Now I call it annual, but we have a lot of people that choose to do planning on like a school year schedule, right? So maybe they do a 12-month plan that runs from September to August, or maybe you do one that runs from July to June, or maybe you do planning in nine-month increments, right? But the idea is it's that longer window, usually somewhere nine to 18 months. I'm just going to call it annual planning here. And the exercise of creating an annual plan is what connects you to what is most important to you in this season of life while also acknowledging what is realistic. That part right there, the acknowledgement of what is realistic, really is the secret sauce to the way I approach annual planning. Because I see it time and time again, where if we create these kind of goal setting, visioning annual planning in what I call a vacuum, meaning you're not looking at the reality of the season of life that you're in, the constraints on your time, the responsibilities that you have, what happens is we create something that is completely unattainable. And then we feel like we failed when we were not the failure. It was just the plan was completely unrealistic. All right. And so our annual plan ultimately paints a roadmap for you of the year ahead that not only includes the what, right? But it includes some rough guidelines around the when. Meaning that weekly planning is super detailed. What day are we doing things? What time are we doing things? With our annual plan, we're kind of getting the when of what months are things happening, right? So that instead of just this goal and going, well, I'll figure out what I'm gonna do with this year, we start setting some milestones. We start recognizing when we have already, you know, months at high capacity versus not. And so we're building a realistic roadmap that's gonna kind of that we're gonna navigate along through the year, knowing how to pivot and replan during that quarterly planning if we need to. And our annual plan really, really, really helps support us in strategic decision making. When we have a solid annual plan in place, this is what supports us when requests of our time, large requests of our time come in. When we have an annual plan in place, this is the tool that we can lean on to help decide what makes sense to say yes to and where we may need to say, not right now, right? Because if I say yes to that, it's gonna derail my annual plan. And that is what is most important to me right now. Again, you can always choose to change the plan, right? But we're doing it from a place of intentionality and thoughtfulness. And so our annual plan sets the roadmap for the year and defines your goals, right? With kind of that when at a high level. Then an annual plan is a tool that feeds into our quarterly planning, right? So with quarterly planning, we're pulling pieces and parts of our annual plan out and we're creating that next level of detail. What does the next 90 days look like? Then once we have our quarterly plan, we're gonna use that every time we're doing our monthly planning inside of that quarter, and we're gonna be pulling from information from our quarterly plan to keep those goals and projects in our line of vision, right? We're keeping them in sight. We're making sure that we're prioritizing and protecting time to keep those things on track. And then with our monthly plan, that is an input into our weekly plan. And this is where the rubber meets the road, right? This is where we build out with specificity what are we doing? When are we doing it? And what this weekly plan does is it keeps you from living in a constant day-to-day, just-in-time living. When we put all four of these together, this is where the magic really, really happens. Now, some of the biggest mistakes that I see people making when it comes to any of these four levels of planning. Mistake number one is that they're operating in constant daily planning mode. I talk about that a lot here on the podcast because when we, when you're operating from daily listing, list making, right, you're always going to be incredibly unrealistic with what's going to get done. Another big mistake that I see is that people only do weekly planning and never do anything longer term beyond that, right? They're not, they're not embracing this concept of monthly planning or quarterly or annual. And so what happens when we're only ever thinking weekly and not thinking longer term ahead, right? Is this where, and I mentioned this before, we tend to constantly be in a state of always being kind of overbooked or overscheduled. And so things start always kind of happening at the last minute. Now, another interesting thing that I want to mention is a mistake that I see people make, is that they believe they can do all four levels of planning solely on their Google Calendar or iCalor Outlook and start your planning tool of choice. There is a reason why monthly and annual planning don't land well on a Google Calendar. And it's simply because if you were to go look at the monthly view or the annual view of your Google Calendar, you cannot see the relevant information that supports you to not be getting overwhelmed, overcommitted, and supports you to staying on track. All right. This is why when we do monthly planning, we're not leveraging it digitally unless you're using a recommended piece of software that I always encourage people if they want to be fully digital. Now, another mistake is on the flip side. I talked about mistake number, you know, one of the first mistakes is only doing weekly planning. The other mistake is for people that only do long-term planning. They do goal setting at the start of the year, but they don't have any other more detailed planning rhythms to help make those goals a reality. Then the final and biggest mistake is that there is no planning tool that they are using that connects their goal setting with real life. That is 100% what we fix in Planapalooza. So you've been hearing a lot about it. If you would like to join me in creating an annual plan that integrates all the realities of your life, that gives you a realistic roadmap for the upcoming year, make sure you head over to Megansumeral.com forward slash plan. We've got all the details there. And you know, if you've been listening to this and realizing, hey, I've got some of these levels of planning, but now maybe you're having an awareness of what level might be missing, right? When you build all four of these together, I promise you it will change your life. All right, friends, have a great rest of your week and happy planning. Getting on top of all things, time management, organization, and productivity doesn't have to stop just because this episode is over. If you are feeling overwhelmed, your calendar's out of control, or you're just running in a race that will never end in terms of your to-do list, I have great news for you. I have an app in both the App Store and Google Play called the Pink Bee. And it is chopped full of small but incredibly powerful trainings to help you get out of overwhelm. It includes my signature Ditch the Overwhelm training and introduction to my time management framework built specifically for women. So open up either your App Store or Google Play, do a search on the word The Pink Bee, all in Word, and download the app to get started today.