With the first quarter of the year coming to a close next week I started wondering about all those New Year's resolutions and plans created by companies and founders at the first of the year.
I also happened to be catching up with leadership and productivity consultant Charlie Gilkey, so it seemed like a good time to talk about how people should be thinking about goals now that we are fully into 2023.
Turns out, we are headed into go-time for anyone that still has big projects to move on.
“April is the last full workweek month of the year until September,” he said.
Gilkey, who is co-founder of the firm Productive Flourishing and an author of several books, said it helps to understand the year as macro seasons.
“Typically what we see is you have your New Year’s delusion when you way over-commit. You realize life is slipping back in. February you spend a lot of your time triaging and figuring out which of the new stuff and the old stuff you can actually do and what that looks like. March tends to be getting real about your capacity,” he said.
Then comes April.
“April, maybe early May, that four to six weeks is the last really good push you are going to have for deep conceptual work that you want to get a lot of progress on,” he said. “After that you are going to be in the summer slip and slide.”
So, what should people be doing now as we head out of March? Gilkey has three things to keep in mind:
Pinpoint what few projects and initiatives are going to most move the needle this year and calibrate around those.
Try to front-load as much of the heavy collaboration and conceptual work in April or early May.
If something doesn’t fit into the priorities laid out in item No. 1, bump it to later in the summer. Summer is a good time for open space conversations and strategy conversations.
“April is the tight implementation, get-it-done month,” he said. “I encourage folks to be brutal, or ridiculously intentional. This time at the end of March and early April is time to understand things naturally lay off in the summer and cycle back up in September.”
He adds that this whole cycle tends to hit women in particular since household responsibility, and child care/planning falls disproportionally on them.
“Unfortunately so many entrepreneurs and creative change makers think every month is roughly the same amount as far as capacity and output. And it’s not. What happens if you embrace that seasonality?,” he said.
For his own company, Gilkey doesn’t do resolutions. Instead he creates New Year intentions and creates themes for the year to work toward. Intentions are set in January and then revisited in February.
For instance, this year the company has sales goals it is working toward — including boosting the user base of its productivity app Momentum — as well as pushing Gilkey’s latest book. The book, “Team Habits: How Small Actions Lead to Extraordinary Results,” comes out in August.
The company has big plans for marketing this fall.
