Planning tool and templates for small business owners

Give Me Balance Planner Sort your business and life in just 5 simple steps

At In Just 5. we hate complicated business planning tools that don’t take your personal life into account and vice versa.

It’s easy to try and focus on things we think will make money, or get distracted by tedious tasks we hate, but in the process we neglect important parts of our life and us. We forget the fun! We don’t focus on things at work we enjoy.

We need a simple tool to help us focus on the right kind of activities. Activities that will give us a business and life we love!

Forgive the food metaphor (we’re super obsessed with food) but we don’t just want the ice cream sundae. We want one with whipped cream and a cherry on top.

Enter the Give Me Balance Planner. An easy way to prioritise and balance all the different aspects of your life, and focus on activities to improve and grow your business and life.

While a good business coach can really help you perfect your strategy, we like to start with this Give Me Balance Planner and CREEM.

CONNECT – activities where you engage with others or community RELAX – looking after and rewarding yourself and own needs – self-care EVOLVE – things that will improve or grow you, your business or life ENERGISE – things you LOVE doing MAINTAIN – things that HAVE to be done, but you’d like to delegate or get rid of.

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The Give Me Balance Planner helps you identify and categorise activities using CREEM. All the activities in your business, life, or even specific projects can be categorised using CREEM.

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5 Key Steps To get the most out of the Give Me Balance, you’ll follow 5 easy steps: 1. Brain dump – capture all of your activities and initial thoughts in the CREEM swirls 2. Refine it – review everything you captured in the Brain Dump and refine it in line with your overarching goal(s) 3. List it – transfer your refined list of activities to the CREEM table 4. Plan it – prioritise all activities and allocate timeframes 5. Do it! – implement action plan, monitor and update

Sit down with a cuppa (dollop of cream optional) and let’s do thi

1. Brain dump • Decide what type of you activities would like to capture and plan eg.

Personal life or work or both, a specific project, a quarterly business plan.

• Take a look at the CREEM swirls on the next few pages.

• Decide if you want a page for each CREEM category to give you lots of room or if you want to capture your thoughts all on one page – in this case use the one-pager option.

• Print out your preferred CREEM swirls and start capturing the first thing that comes to you head when it comes to activities for each category.

• They can be activities you’re already doing, or activities you may like to/should do. Don’t hold back or overthink it.

• Use the prompt words on the swirls and the SAMPLES at the end of this document for inspiration.

1. Brain dump to plan my personal and work activities “ I liketogether.

This encourages alignment between these parts of my life. I capture them on the same CREEM swirls – often there is overlap.

You could do this or use separate swirls for personal and work and then combine the activities in your overall planner in Steps 2-5 but it’s completely up to you.

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Remember to capture your activities using the CREEM categories: CONNECT – activities where you engage with others or community RELAX – looking after and rewarding yourself and own needs – self-care EVOLVE – things that will improve or grow you, your business or life ENERGISE – things you LOVE doing MAINTAIN – things that HAVE to be done, but you’d like to delegate or get rid of.

1. Brain dump CONNECT

Date / Work Personal Other

/ ☐ ☐

1. Brain dump RELAX

Date / Work Personal Other

/ ☐ ☐

1. Brain dump EVOLVE

Date / Work Personal Other

/ ☐ ☐

1. Brain dump – ENERGISE

Date / Work Personal Other

/ ☐ ☐

3. Brain dump MAINTAIN

Date / Work Personal Other

/ ☐ ☐

1. Brain dump – 1 page option

Date / Work Personal Other

/ ☐ ☐

2. Refine it • Now you need to refine your activities so that you only concentrate on the IMPORTANT ones.

• Review all of the activities you captured in Step 1 – the Brain Dump and circle or highlight only the activities that will help you achieve your overarching goal(s).

• To encourage balance in your life and/or business, make sure you choose some activities from each category.

• In the next step you will be transferring these important activities to a table but first, what about your overall goal?

• In the first step it was important to capture all your thoughts, but not all of them are relevant or will help you achieve your overall goal(s).

• Goals are important as they keep you on track and focused.

• You should have personal and work goals, which should be aligned with each other. SAMPLES can be found at the end of this document.

• Capture your goals on the next page before moving onto Step 3.

2. Refine it My overarching goals which all my activities must be aligned to are:

MY PERSONAL GOAL(S)

TIMEFRAME

DONE

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MY WORK GOAL(S)

TIMEFRAME

DONE

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MY OTHER GOAL(S)

TIMEFRAME

DONE

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3. List it • Now transfer the IMPORTANT items you circled or highlighted in the CREEM swirls and transfer them to the following table.

• List the activity under the relevant category.

• REMEMBER to check that these activities must help you achieve or be aligned with your overall goal(s).

• If you believe an activity is IMPORTANT but doesn’t contribute to your overall goal, then include it, but make a note to yourself that you need to revisit it later – these are often MAINTAIN activities you may try to delegate or get rid of if possible. Alternatively you may need to revisit your overall goals.

Date Work

3. List it

connect

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Personal ☐ Other

relax

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evolve

energise

maintain

ACTIVITIES

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4. Plan it • Now you have a refined list of activities across the different CREEM categories, you need to prioritise them and allocate timeframes.

• Transfer the activities from Step 3 into the Action Plan on the next page. You may need to print out extra copies of the following table to capture your key activities.

• Choose whether you want one action plan for work and one for personal or combined, and choose a time period for the action plan.

• You should also choose one activity from each of the CONNECT, RELAX, EVOLVE and ENERGISE categories, that you would like to focus on for this time period.

• Also identify one activity from the MAINTAIN list that you would like to delegate or get rid of.

• Then specify how you will celebrate or reward yourself after completing each of these focus activities.

• Make sure you give a priority number to each activity, add extra detail where needed and specify a deadline or critical day of the week.

4. Plan it Date Work Personal �

Other

My Action Plan /

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Circle time period for this plan below: This week This month This quarter This year

My number 1 priority activity to CONNECT during this period is:

My number 1 priority activity to RELAX during this period is:

My number 1 priority activity to EVOLVE during this period is:

My number 1 priority activity to ENERGISE during this period is:

My number 1 MAINTAIN activity I will delegate or get rid of (circle 1) is:

I will do it by: / /

I will do it by: / /

I will do it by: / /

I will do it by: / /

I will do it by: / /

I will celebrate this achievement by:

I will celebrate this achievement by:

I will celebrate this achievement by:

I will celebrate this achievement by:

I will celebrate this achievement by:

4. Plan it

My Action Plan

My other priority CONNECT, RELAX, EVOLVE, ENERGISE and MAINTAIN activities for this period are:

PRIORITY #

ACTIVITY

DETAIL/COMMENT

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5. Do it!

• Don’t forget to track your action plan and your progress.

• You can track it in hard copy using your action plan from Step 4.

• You may like to use a daily to do list.

• Alternatively you may like to put reminders in your calendar.

• Do whatever works for you.

• Don’t be afraid to revisit you goals and plans at any time. Think and dream big.

The sky’s the limit! but most of all…

Have fun!

Samples

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