how I create my biz plan for the year, minus the overwhelm
let's make this the year we write our own rules
Hello love,
I know that many people choose to postpone all kinds of planning until spring, rebelling against a fictive calendar that dictates when we should or shouldn’t be productive.
I honour that so much… but this isn’t me.
I’ve always loved new beginnings, and every year I spend considerable time during the winter break to reflect on my life, on my self-healing journey, on my past and future goals. I journal, I connect to my heart, I pay attention to the parts of me that have been hurt, that have been nourished…
I especially pay attention to the feelings of frustration I’ve had over and over as they are usually a hint on what needs to change.
These past two weeks, I wrote several hours per day, every day, and I’ve filled half the pages of my brand new notebook…
I know, I know, that sounds intense. But so cathartic! I left no rock unturned.
And when I started planning my year in business, I knew exactly where to start and what to prioritise: my mental and physical health + my family.
Shocking, right?
But it’s one thing to know mentally that you should prioritise these things, and it’s another to come to the physical, embodied conclusion that there is no other way to go for you at this point.
Anyways, I digress.
This article isn’t about your word of the year, it isn’t about vision boards or new year resolutions. It’s about helping you to come up with a sustainable and joyful business program for the new year. Let’s dive in.
Planning matters. Here’s why.
Maybe you’re the “go-with-the-flow” kind of person, and you’re resisting the idea of planning anything, but if you’re in business and you want to be a tiny bit effective, a little planning you’re going to need.
Nothing overwhelming, I promise. No need to fill half a new notebook except if you really want to.
Planning your year isn’t about strategising and organising every minute of your life, nor about deciding exactly what you’re going to do, how you’re going to do it, on which day, or in order to get a specific result.
I mean, I’m a rising Virgo and that would be a direct flight to burnout city even for me.
Remember that the more control we try to exert on our life, the less in control we feel when things don’t go as planned… which is, like, almost daily?
Yet, making some decisions in advance for your business is going to have the opposite effect: alleviate the stress and the overwhelm, elevate your confidence.
I see it as putting on my business hat, taking into consideration the complaints and the desires of my staff and making sure that the most important things we want to happen in the calendar year are planned in advance.
By doing so, I make sure my worker (aka, my future self) doesn’t have to make crucial decisions on the fly, which is both exhausting on a daily basis + tends to be ineffective. Especially when she has so much to manage already, namely her emotions and trauma-responses as well as the emotions of her menstruating teenage daughter, of her 4-year-old tantrum-throwing son and of her overworked husband.
Even if you live alone, you know how challenging it can be to find the courage to take action daily. Your ego-mind is often trying to negotiate a way out of the scary things, like sending that sales email campaign or contacting previous clients to check if they might want to work with you again.
Making these decisions in advance, it means that you can then have leverage during the conversation with yourself: I know you’re scared, but we’ve already taken that decision, and we know why we took that decision, so that the conversation is off the table. We’re doing this, even though we’re scared. But here’s a cookie.
Mindful Planning
Mindful planning means that you make decisions based on your experience of what has worked and what hasn’t, based on your personality and preferences, and based on your current life circumstances - not the ones you wish you had.
It also means that you focus on the process rather than on the results, knowing fully well that results are never within your control.
If everything was an experiment, what experiments would you like to try this year?
When would that work best in your calendar? Think of how you’ll feel, of how your audience will feel, of what else you have planned.
What can support you to take action and see this experiment through?
What’s key here is finding the sweet spot between challenging yourself gently outside of your zone of comfort and not setting yourself for failure with over-optimistic goals. Keep it low-key, but interesting, and don’t be too specific so you can play with life’s spontaneous energy.
For instance
One of my experiments is to publish two articles on Substack every week.
It works best for me to write early mornings, when everyone is still asleep. I love being alone and sipping on my cup of tea, it makes me feel like a great writer.
What supports me is to have an editorial calendar with ideas for content that are aligned to my message and my planned offers so I don’t have to waste time wondering what to write about. I also need a strong and pleasant night routine that allows me to unwind, have good quality sleep and wake up early the next day. Finally, having removed all social media apps from my phone truly helps me stay focused and calm.
What I didn’t include: the length of the articles, which days they should go out, who should write them (possibility for guest writers!), how many people will read them or how many subscribers I will gain.
Some of my personal life goals follow the same pattern:
Read 20 books, because I read in bed every night and decide to keep Netflix only for the week-end. I sleep better, I feel better, I understand people better and I get smarter. I didn’t say for how long I should read, or which books (although I have a long list to choose from). If you’re a reader too, let’s follow each other on Goodreads.
Paint every weekend so I can have a creative outlet without a financial goal. I didn’t say which day of the weekend, or if I should paint for 15 min or for 5 hours, but my watercolours are on my desk, patiently waiting to be used.
Go on a family holiday this year so we can create memories that last, because life is so so short. I was a bit more specific with this one: I booked a refundable trip in September. It’s my way of manifesting it into our reality. If things don’t align, I’ll cancel and that’s fine.
Having mindful goals that take your life circumstances into consideration means that you’re more likely to reach them, so you’ll be motivated to take the little actions, which in turn will build your mindset momentum, your courage and ultimately your confidence.
Honour your needs, your rhythms and cycles
Even if in essence we are all limitless potential, we live in limited human bodies, and we have limited resources.
This means that even though you may sometimes feel invincible, you do need to take who you are into consideration, you need to take care of yourself, and to respect your energy rhythms as well as your cycles of rest and productivity.
This is where my priority of taking care of my physical and mental health comes from.
I tend to push myself a little too hard, to override my physical needs, even the most basic ones like drinking water and movement, and then I end up with impossible back aches and migraines that incapacitate me for a full day.
Running a business is like climbing Everest. We are athletes, and we need to consider ourselves as such.
That’s why I would advise you to schedule regular time off in your calendar before you plan anything else. Same thing for your daily unwinding time: choose the time you start + the time you are no longer available for business and make it a commitment to honour that time.
Block these times for rest and replenishment, and build your calendar plan around them. That’s a clear statement that you matter more.
I also tend to ignore my adhd symptoms, ignore than homeschooling requires a lot of patience and energy, ignore that I’m not inspired to write every single day…
Make time to really look at your life circumstances and see how you can make your business commitments fit in with them rather than working against them.
Maybe it’s about using a good app for self-management (I use Tiimo)
Or it’s about communicating to people you live with that you do only one thing at a time, or that you’re being in sensory overload right now and you need to be alone, with dim lights and your headphones on for at least 20 minutes before you can come back to the dinner table.
Maybe it’s about limiting the amount of 1:1 work that you do and creating more products or asynchronous offers.
Or it’s about choosing better your working hours to make sure they fit with your life.
Maybe it’s about being held accountable in a community that understands you, or it’s about delegating some of your work to someone you trust, so that you know someone has got your back when your family needs you the most.
These considerations look simple but they really are game-changers, and they can only happen once you accept that even if you’re working on improving your circumstances or flaws, you can make things be ok for you and your business right now, just as things are.
That’s translating into the physical world the belief that you are enough as you are. That things aren’t perfect but they’re ok. That your business can work to support your life and “not the other way round”.
Don’t just say it, make it real.
Define your business vision
Creating aligned goals and directions comes from first bringing awareness to - or reconnecting with - your current most important values. If all the decisions you make reflect your values, you’re likely to feel deeply satisfied with your life.
Sadly, we get distracted, or our fears sometimes derail us from them, which leads us to frustration.
Here’s an example: my current most important values are - in the order of priority: freedom, adventure, growth, fairness and joy.
Following freedom as my first value means that I’m going to give myself enough space for free time and for flexibility, so the way I plan my sales this year must take that into consideration. Plenty of time to plan, write, organise and rest in between launches will help me honour that value. Too tight deadlines would on the contrary create feelings of self-imposed oppression, which would make me deeply unsatisfied with my life.
Make a little list of what you’re going to sell this year.
How can you organise these campaigns / promotions in a way that honours your most important values?
Sales and content go hand in hand
Once you’ve decided on your promotional calendar, it’s time to plan your content.
Again, this is an area where I believe we must find balance between strategy and intuition.
Here are the perks of both approaches:
Strategy
Creating content that supports your offers is a wonderful way to communicate to your audience what you sell without directly selling it to them.
It drives your readers gently into your funnels, meaning that anyone reading your content at any time can find valuable insights that also serve your business long-term.
It helps you know what to write about even when you’re a bit busy and overwhelmed by life.
It focuses your efforts into something that can leverage results.
Intuition
Tuning into the collective energy field to create content is a wonderful way to connect deeply with your audience, sharing with them your reflections at a time that is usually relevant. I find it completely fascinating that every time I do that, several other creators write about similar topics at the same time. Magic!
It gives you the possibility to respond to what life gives you (perfect for generators in human design) and share this response right away.
You can more easily remember that you want to create content from your soul and not from your brain.
The middle ground
I create different types of content at different moments, in different formats, and I don’t plan all of my content in advance.
For each of the offers that I’ll promote this year, I have about 3 to 4 supportive topics I want to write about, so I know I’ll publish them around the time of my campaigns.
Other topics are connected to my brand, my message, things that I really want to share and write about. These are more topics that I can pick “any time”.
About one third of my content calendar is and will stay empty so I can go with the flow and tap into the collective magic I mentioned earlier.
I used to struggle to carve the time to write consistently, and I think that bringing in the strategy + leaving social media is what made the biggest difference for me.
The fact that I have spent time to do my research, to dive deeper into what my audience wants, what I have to share and how that all interconnects with my work, my products, my services, it makes me so much more secure that I rarely stare at a white page anymore.
Most importantly, I know that I’m not spending this precious time and energy in vain.
What I write serves the purpose of connecting with you, my readers, over topics that are actually within my scope of work, so every piece in my business feeds into one another.
Let’s recap
Block out time for holidays and breaks.
Decide on working hours and block out daily and weekly resting time.
Decide on which offers to promote, how and when during the year.
Plan your content around your offers.
Balance strategy and intuition.
Last words from a friend
Here are my last recommendations to avoid feelings of overwhelm:
You don’t have to plan the whole year right away. Just start with the first quarter, the first step, then add the second… Make it fun by selecting a playlist that sets the tone for the kind of year you’d like to experience. This is mine.
Theory and practice is often different, so make sure your plan and goals are realistic. Break it down in smaller steps, give yourself plenty of space and choose how to support yourself on your journey.
You’ll probably change over the year. You’ll have new creative ideas, new inspirations, new insights and perhaps even new needs. That’s why it’s important not to stick too tightly to your plan. This is just a roadmap, not a binding contract.
That said, once you’ve picked a strategy, really try it before declaring it doesn’t work or that you aren’t ready. I’m telling you because I know that impostor syndrome will creep in and whisper in your ear that maybe you shouldn’t send any sales emails this year, or maybe your voice isn’t podcast-ready after all. If you’ve made your plan based on your heart’s desires and your values rather than external pressure and conditionings, you can trust it. And so you must find a way to honour it. To give you a rule of thumbs, any marketing strategy takes at least 3-6 months to show its potential.
Focus on the process. Find ways to soothe your nervous system. Join a community (this really helps!). Get help. And last but not least, let go of wanting to micro-manage life. You have zero control on the outcomes, but full control on your thoughts and actions.
Gentle Invitation to go deeper
If the idea of journaling your heart out on paper is music to your ears, download my free Celebrate Plan Manifest 2025 Journal and find clarity on what truly matters for you and your business this year.
3 magical offers are coming up this January, and I will tell you more about some of them on Substack, but if you want to enjoy juicy deals, come on over to my private newsletter. You’ll also get access to premium content, quick tips to brighten your working days, behind-the-scenes of my business and discounts.
Want some help with your content marketing? I’ve got you covered. Book a free chat with me here and discover my packages.
What about you? Are you a planner or a go-with-the flow spirit? And what are your tips for mindfully planning your business this year?
Power and light,
Jessica