Have you noticed that things tend to get organized around your calendar?

The Power of the Calendar

If something is in your calendar, it’s considered important. If it’s not, it’s often bumped for a meeting or something that will be put in the calendar for that time. The best way to ensure anything gets done is to make sure it’s in your calendar long in advance.

The final step is hopefully the easiest. You need to ensure you and your team have each of these steps added into their Google calendar (or whichever calendar tool you use). This is a really important step to complete. Once something is scheduled in a calendar it becomes a priority that gets done. If it’s not in a calendar, it’s often pushed back in favor of other meetings or things that are.

Remember, all those other daily community tasks you need to do? Removing spam, updating information, etc? They need to be organized around the tactical steps in your calendar today, not the other way round.

So, make sure the steps are in the calendar for you and your team. You do not need to do this for an entire year in advance. However, you might want to do this weekly, staying one month ahead of when the tasks need to be complete.

There are two simple steps to do this. The first is to ask people to go through the steps and put each one in their calendar themselves. This is the easiest for you, but also the least effective.

The second is simply to invite people, via a calendar invitation, to participate in that activity at that time and for the duration of time it is supposed to take. They only have to click accept and it’s scheduled in for them. You can do this for every single task and let Google do the reminding.

Now everything is pencilled into the calendar and you should be good to go. Good luck.

Your Strategic Plan Is Nearly Complete

Your strategic plan is now almost complete. You have an agreed goal, you have strategic objectives set. You have developed strategies to achieve each of those strategic objectives. You have prioritized tactics to execute those strategies and reallocated your resources to execute those tactics.

You have also identified what great execution would look like and broken this down into individual steps. You have discovered who is the best person to perform this step and any skill, knowledge, or resource gaps you need to close. You have ensured each step is assigned to a person and scheduled within their calendar.

At this point, everything is set for the successful execution of your strategy. Now you just need to do one more thing, which is to figure out if the strategy succeeded.