Why January 1st Isn’t a Magic Business Planning Date
Are you feeling rushed to get all your 2025 business plans ready by January 1st? Here’s something that might help you breathe easier: there’s nothing magical about that date.
Let me introduce you to “planuary” – taking the whole month of January to plan your year ahead. And here’s the most important thing to know: You are not behind. Even if January 1st comes and goes without your perfect business plan in place, you’re still right on time.
Think about it – the holiday season is busy enough. Why add extra stress by forcing yourself to have everything figured out while you’re trying to enjoy time with family? Instead, you could:
- Take December to rest and enjoy the holidays
- Use January to think about what worked well last year
- Make plans when your mind is fresh and clear
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- How to take the pressure off yourself during the holiday season
- Why planning your business in January (planuary) might work better for you
- Simple ways to create business plans that match your energy and life
- How to choose a word of the year that actually works for you
Since 2015, I’ve picked one word to guide my year instead of making New Year’s resolutions. But guess what? You don’t need to have your perfect word picked out by January 1st either. You can take your time or even pick a word for just three months.
What matters most is creating a business that fits your life, not the other way around. Maybe you like to plan just three months ahead, or maybe you want to map out the whole year. The key is picking what works for you.
Would You Like Help Picking Your Word of the Year?
Grab the 15-minute Word of the Year Clarity Guide
So here’s your permission slip:
Take time to enjoy the holidays. Rest. When January comes, use it as your planuary. Your business will be better for it, and so will you.
Let’s Connect:
- Instagram: https://Instagram.com/martagoertzen
- Facebook: https://Facebook.com/selahstudiosco
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TRANSCRIPT:
Ready To Do Business Differently In The New Year?
[00:00:00] Marta Goertzen: It’s that time of year again in our businesses where we’re feeling the pressure. We’re hearing the noise coming from our email inboxes, social media, and often inside our own heads telling us that the year is just about done, so keep pushing and finish up strong. Sometimes we end up doing that to the detriment of our business, our health, our family, and our ability to enjoy the end of the year and the holiday season.
[00:00:29] And then, as soon as you catch your breath, you suddenly get the message that it’s time to get your plans ready for 2025. Get your strategic planning in, join this, join that, and start the year out strong. My question is: does it really need to be that way? Is that the best practice for all of us?
[00:00:49] I’d like to explore this idea of getting ready for January 1st and consider that maybe, just maybe, there’s another way for the rest of us.
[00:00:59] Hello and welcome to the Selah Entrepreneur podcast, where we take a look at doing online business for women just a little bit differently. The goal of each episode is to help women like you find the clarity and pace they need to confidently redesign their business so that it aligns with their values and purpose—and hopefully feel a lot less stressed in the process.
[00:01:23] If you’re ready to look at doing business differently in the new year, join me in today’s discussion of what the new year could look like for you and your business.
[00:01:36] Have you ever heard the term “planuary”? This is a word I heard several years ago, and I just grabbed onto it and celebrated it. Planuary means that we actually take the month of January to think, to plan, to analyze the year that happened, and take our time to plan the year ahead.
[00:02:01] This is the perfect time to ask questions like: What do we want our business to be like? What do we need to change after analyzing our business in the past year? And looking ahead into the new year, how do we want to do business differently?
[00:02:18] Because the reality is, if we want to do business differently in the new year, if we’re ready to approach business differently in the new year, we’ve got to think about and do business differently in the new year.
[00:02:36] The thing is, we get so much noise and so many opinions coming at us that we have to do business a certain way, that we have to have things done by a certain time.
[00:02:47] When we look at our businesses and we’re feeling that pressure—sometimes in October and November and definitely in December—I think we need to ask ourselves: is this the way I really want to run my business?
[00:03:01] That’s not the way I want to run mine, and that is a pressure I’ve been fighting against these last few years. I’ve been really feeling it this year. Here’s a message I want to share with you right out of the gate as we dive into this topic:
[00:03:15] You are not behind. In your business right now—at the time of this recording and release in mid-December—you are not behind. If you get to January 1st and you do not have all your goals set, if you do not have your plans for your business set, you are not behind. This is your business and it’s up to you.
[00:03:36] This is your life. This is your energy. This is your health. This is your family. This is your season of life, and you get to pick when you start and finish something. You get to choose when to start pushing the needle forward and say, “Now it’s time to kick it up into a higher gear.”
[00:03:55] You get to decide that. You get to decide that this is your business, and you are not going to let outside pressure push you into something that you’re not ready for or don’t even have the energy for.
[00:04:07] One of the ladies I love to learn from about planning, setting goals, and developing good habits is Lara Casey.
[00:04:19] She is the founder of Cultivate What Matters and the creator of the PowerSheets goal-setting system. For many years on her blog and in her PowerSheets, she has said there’s nothing magical about January 1st. The first time I heard her say that, I thought, “Yes, thank you!” It felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders.
[00:04:43] So planuary is now, to me, the time that I get to set aside to enjoy the holiday season.
[00:04:51] It was like being given that permission slip or having that aha moment: I get to pick the date I choose to plan for my business. I get to choose when I’m going to make those strategic plans. I get to choose what 12 months I’m planning for. I get to choose if I’m going to plan quarterly, for half a year, or for a full year.
[00:05:10] What a gift that was. It helped me think about my business differently, and it helped me coach my clients differently on how to create and design a business that helps them match their energy level, their health levels, and their caregiving expectations.
[00:05:28] They get to choose that and can put aside that outside pressure of having to have it done by a certain date.
[00:05:35] When you hear the word “planuary,” what comes up for you? What do you think? For me, it says I get to enjoy the end of the year.
[00:05:44] It’s almost like you get the ability to reclaim your business so that you’re creating a business that fits you. As we talked about in the intro, you’re ready to design a business that fits you in your current season of life. And for me and a lot of the women I work with, planuary fits our season.
[00:06:04] It fits the kind of business and year that we want to have in our business.
[00:06:11] When you are looking at when you want to start strategic planning for your business, when you want to look at setting those goals, what are some of the things that you would like to accomplish in the new year? This is a time to say, “I’m going to take my time with it.” Because even if I do start on January 1st, there’s nothing that says I have to have it done by January 15th or even January 30th.
[00:06:34] Maybe you right now are not ready to envision out 12 months. Maybe you just want to plan for the next month or the next three months. I happen to like a one-to-three-month plan—that fits my brain and my style of thinking. Maybe you are somebody who really likes to know what’s ahead of you, so you’re going to plan for a full year.
[00:06:56] Again, you are not behind if you don’t have everything ready by the first. You’re not behind if you don’t have everything ready by January 15th, and you’re really not behind if you have nothing planned by January 30th. This is your business. You get to choose. You get to pick your start and end date.
[00:07:15] If, however, you find you’re procrastinating, that’s a whole other situation. That’s a whole other thing. If you need help with that, reach out to me. I’m happy to help you out with that. But if you know that you need to set aside the time of the holiday season being over, you need to give yourself some time for rest and recovery. Celebrate that, honor that, give yourself that space, and then pick up the business again when you’re ready and have a clear head to dive back in and start doing your planning.
[00:07:46] Because this is the fun part. This is the part where we get to dream. This is the part where we say, “This is what I would like my business to be.” This is where we acknowledge what worked really well last year, or take that idea that maybe didn’t work quite well and tweak it a little bit to try it again—try it in a new format.
[00:08:03] Try it with a new name. Try it in a different way of marketing. This is the fun part. This is where we get to say, “This is what I would love to have.” This is where you get to take all these ideas and design a business that fits you in this current season, which is a new year, which is a new quarter, which is a new season for you.
[00:08:24] So planuary is your permission to rest. It’s your permission to say, “I’m going to rest and recover from the holiday season. I’m also going to give myself the time I need to get my creative juices flowing again so that I can look ahead into my business and plan for the coming year.” It’s an exciting time.
[00:08:45] I never want planning for my business—for me, or you planning your business for you—to feel like drudgery and a weight. It’s exciting when you have a business that you can actually sit down and make plans for. That’s pretty cool when you think about it. Not everybody has that opportunity.
[00:09:05] So planuary is your permission to rest. It’s your permission to dream big. And maybe it’s even the permission you need to set some big goals that maybe scare you just a little bit but get you excited and motivated to set that foundation and start going after them.
[00:09:36] Another thing you’re going to hear a lot in the beginning of the year, or especially here at the end of the year, is “What is your word of the year going to be?”
[00:09:56] This is something else that I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to have figured out—to have that figured out before we go into our strategic planning, before we go into our dreaming big. We feel we have to have the perfect word of the year. This is something I have done since about 2015.
[00:10:37] Instead of setting New Year’s resolutions, because I never stick with them, I started picking a word of the year or a theme for the year. While there are some years where that word served me for a little bit and I learned what I needed and let it go, there are other years when I really took my time to pick the word. It went with me throughout the year and became a filter to run my business through: This is what my focus is this year. So is this plan going to work? Is this idea going to fit in? Is this going to help me learn something, or is this going to set me back?
[00:11:02] A word of the year is something I encourage everybody to at least consider. Do you need one? No, absolutely not. A lot of people survive just fine without a word of the year, but I know from personal experience that when I do not pick one, my year is different, and I usually regret not having picked one.
[00:11:21] But again, it doesn’t have to be picked out—it doesn’t have to be one perfect word by January 1st, January 15th, or January 30th. And maybe you can’t settle on just one word, so pick one word for a quarter. Look at the end of the quarter: Did you learn what you needed from that word? Then you move on to the next one.
[00:11:41] I don’t recommend having more than one word. I have tried that, and I’ve talked to other women who have tried it. It doesn’t have the same impact.
[00:12:24] We need to have that singular focus on a topic, an idea, or a theme, and we need to get all we can out of it before moving on. And there’s a lot of times where one word is not going to take you through the whole year. And guess what? That’s okay. Again, this is your business. This is your planning. This is your word. You don’t have to do it the way “they” say you have to do it. It’s up to you.
[00:12:38] Now, if you would like help picking out your word of the year, I have a 15-minute Word of the Year Clarity Guide. Too often, I think we make it a long, drawn-out process to pick the exact—again, quote-unquote—”perfect” word, and I don’t think there usually is one. I think there’s one that fits you, serves you right now, and is something you need right now. When you’re done, it’s time to move on.
[00:12:55] Here we are again at the middle of December, and I had two words I had narrowed down to, and then another word in recent weeks has snuck in and jumped into first place. Going through the guide like this helped me confirm: Yes, that’s what I needed.
[00:13:18] This is the word that I am going to be focusing on for at least the first quarter of 2025 and probably beyond because it is a theme. It is a habit that I want to cultivate in the new year. So if you need help with that, I would love to help you, and you can go to selahstudios.co/wordoftheyear. The link will also be in the show notes of this episode.
[00:13:47] So this is just my encouragement for you: Take the pressure off at the end of the year here and just remember that you are not behind and that it’s important for you to know that you and your business are worth resting for. You and your business are worth taking some time to plan, to pick a word of the year, to set some goals, to dream big.
[00:14:11] You and your business are worth that, and you’re going to have a better year. You’re going to have a different year. You’re going to do business differently when you can learn to work from rest and design a business that fits in this current season of life.
[00:14:36] So if you are looking for your permission slip, here’s your permission slip: Maybe you need to just sit back and enjoy the holiday season and give yourself that breathing room between Christmas and New Year’s, and you take January and turn it into your planuary.
[00:14:55] I’d love to hear from you. Have you ever taken a month or several weeks to do your year-end review? To pull out and really analyze what happened in your year and take the time to dream big?
[00:15:08] Take the time to think about what you want your business to be in the coming year and take off the pressure so that you don’t have to have the exact right plan. You don’t have to have the exact right word. Have you ever taken the time to do that and given yourself permission to take the time to do that?
[00:15:32] Or do you feel that pressure to get it all done and have it done perfectly? And I’d also love to know, have you picked a word of the year and how is that word going to impact your plans for the new year?
[00:15:08] I hope that this podcast has encouraged you today to slow down, find that balance, learning to work from a place of rest so that you can have the business that fits you—that you’re not allowing your business to rule everything and suck the life out of you so that you are having to work your life around your business instead of your business around your life.
[00:15:32] Thank you for joining me today. Let’s keep moving forward and creating a business simply and sustainably so that you can steward your gifts, your calling, and your business well.
Marta Goertzen is a Gentle Business Coach and founder of Selah Studios, host of the Doing Business Gently podcast. She helps Christian women entrepreneurs over 50 rediscover who they’ve become, realign their business to match, and fall in love with their work again, gently, at their pace, without starting over. As an avid photographer and lover of the outdoors, she daily explores the trails and beaches of the South Central Oregon Coast with her dog Mochi in tow. Take the free Business Alignment Audit as your gentle first step, a way to pause, get honest, and see clearly where you and your business are right now: https://SelahStudios.co/alignmentaudit