January 16 - December 31: Paula will begin publishing and continue to do so on a rolling basis throughout the year. It’s not uncommon to need to experiment and try a few iterations of daily planning before we land on the method that actually lead to getting more done. If you’re struggling to select what your Highlight or top priority for the day might be, Knapp and Zeratsky suggest this simple heuristic: Should we focus on existing customers or new ones? Do we want more buying or more buyers? How much do we need to worry about alienating the buyers we have as we try to appeal to new ones? Read: Creative production best practices from Kerry Hoffman at ClassPass Write your next project plan like a pro

How Not to Diet goes beyond food and identifies 21 weight-loss accelerators. Dr. Greger uncovers the latest discoveries in cutting-edge areas like chronobiology to reveal ways to maximize our natural fat-burning capabilities. He builds the ultimate weight-loss strategy from the ground up, taking a timeless, proactive approach that can stand up to any new trend. During your daily planning session, put your “frog” task at the top of your to-do list and assign a time. Then, place your other tasks below.Let’s say you’re the Content Lead for your company, and it’s your responsibility to create and deliver on a content marketing calendar for all the content that will be published next year. You know your first step is to build your work plan. Here’s what it might look like: Goals and success metrics

Everything in our professional world moves so fast that we might now hesitate to publish an authoritative volume on the craft and practice of planning for fear of speedy obsolescence. But despite changing circumstances, there are eternal principles and rules, and ways of approaching problems that remain helpful – and we’re keen to uphold them. We think they will continue to guide planners, strategists, marketers and researchers for many years to come. And it is these principles and ideas that Les and Sarah have used to create this incisive ‘How To’, or rather, ‘How Not To’. Project plan vs. agile project: Agile project management is a framework to help teams break work into iterative, collaborative components. Agile frameworks are often run in conjunction with scrum and sprint methodologies. Like any project, an Agile project team can benefit from having a project plan in place before getting started with their work. This criticism might be fun once a month in a magazine article, but one after another (66 times) in a book gets quite tiresome. Especially, as they tend to blame the tool or channel as useless, rather than the way people use that tool or channel. (there’s plenty of examples of the things they trash, done well for anyone who’s worked in marketing). Project plans set the stage for the entire project. Without one, you’re missing a critical step in the overall project management process. When you launch into a project without defined goals or objectives, it can lead to disorganized work, frustration, and even scope creep. A clear, written project management plan provides a baseline direction to all stakeholders, while also keeping everyone accountable. It confirms that you have the resources you need for the project before it actually begins.Regardless of the tools you use, make extreme prioritization a key part of how you plan your day. Plan your day with a productivity method

The 2016 John Lewis IPA case is a good example of how to set objectives. John Lewis’s ultimate aim is to keep its ‘Partners’ (permanent employees) happy. The paper shows how this informed the company’s plan, from business/commercial objectives through marketing objectives to communications goals. The KPIs by which success would be measured then flowed from the plan. As an industry, we celebrate and share the good stuff. Meanwhile, the ‘less said about that the better’ stuff is swept out of sight… for obvious reasons. But through writing these articles, we came to realise that we perhaps learn more from the myths, misunderstandings and screw-ups than from the successes. And so our articles started to become useful little summaries to answer questions from planners. And planners, in turn, found them good jumping-off points for client discussions on similar real-life issues.So, they trash among other things CRM and loyalty programs, most quantitative and pre-test research, and the bulk of social media and digital marketing. That’s just a random selection. First, a focus on efficiency, not on effectiveness. Big brands with high market share find it hard to increase revenue. So they focus on cost cutting. Our brand was just focused on short-term ROI. Its competitor had the same obsession. But cutting their budgets destroyed the foundations of their success. How Not To Plan is the book I wish I’d had when I started out as a planner. Admittedly life was somewhat simpler then: Just the 4 main media for a start, a lot of quite good quality research to lean on, a far less complicated marketing world to operate in, and by extension a far more limited set of tasks for the aspiring strategist. The demands on today's planners and strategists are infinitely greater and the world is fabulously complex by comparison. And we are all continuously assailed by competing and often entirely fallacious theories about how marketing and advertising work. How to navigate this world effectively? oThreats are also opportunities. If you’re a small brand, don’t box yourself in with ‘niche thinking’. If you’re a big brand, you can grow the category, or extend beyond it. THE IMPORTANCE OF MARKET SHARE FINANCIAL SERVICES BRAND Useful case study oThe threat from competitors is largely a matter of size. Your biggest competitors will be the biggest brands in the market. Even if you think they’re in a different segment.

Since you’ve already defined your goals and stakeholders as part of your project plan, use that information to establish your budget. For example, if this is a cross-functional project involving multiple departments, will the departments be splitting the project cost? If you have a specific goal metric like event attendees or new users, does your proposed budget support that endeavor?A project plan—sometimes called a work plan—is a blueprint of the goals, objectives, and tasks your team needs to accomplish for a specific project. Your project plan should include information about your project schedule, scope, due dates, and deliverables for all phases of the project lifecycle. But not all project planning processes are created equal—which leads some teams to underutilize them or skip over them completely. To write an effective project plan, you need to be methodical (follow a series of steps), specific, and clear when it comes to your ideas and execution strategy. Free cross-functional project template