5 Steps To Creating A To-Do List That Actually Grows Your Business

5 Steps To Creating A To-Do List That Actually Grows Your Business

Stop functioning off a list of “should do’s”. 

Do you have moments where you sit down to work on your business, but feel pretty aimless about what you have on deck?

You’re doing things, but you’re not sure that it’s taking you anywhere new.

You’re creating social media posts, writing emails, and pushing things, but it doesn’t feel like a forward-moving agenda.

This is a common feeling when you’re functioning off of a plan that isn’t strategically designed to accomplish a specific goal. Functioning off of a list of “should do’s” isn’t the same as working from an agenda that’ll produce the exact results you’re looking for.

If you’re a new business that’s finding its way and struggling to hit a stride, here’s my 5-step plan to help you build a work plan that’ll strategically stimulate movement for your business.

Hypothesize

When you’re first starting out, rather than using the spray and pray method of trying new things for your business, I want you to instead, create a hypothesis.

This hypothesis will be based off what you understand will and will not work to accomplish the goal at hand.

Your understanding will be formed from either looking at what’s working for your competitors or by working with coaches and learning from other educational resources that inform you of this knowledge.

This is where most entrepreneurs trip up. They think they know what’ll work to accomplish their goal at hand, but they quickly find out that they have no idea after several failed attempts. I recommend taking this step seriously and fessing up if it’s clear that your knowledge to tackle the goal isn’t accurate and needs to be updated with external help.

For example, if this is your first time manufacturing swimwear, you may have a goal of manufacturing your first line within a month.

Using this goal, you’ll create a hypothesis that you can create your first swimwear line with a 4-week turnaround using a manufacturer in Bali. You’ve learned from mentors that Bali is a great place to manufacture swimwear lines with fast turnaround times — with this hypothesis, you are now testing this concept to see if it’s true for your business.

Now that you have your hypothesis on what you’ll be testing, let’s move on to the planning stage.

Create a Plan

Once you’ve created your hypothesis, you should now create a plan. Continuing the swimwear example, let’s take your hypothesis and structure a plan around it in order to help you reach your goal.

In your plan, lay out all the pieces you need to reach your goal. Select the numerous manufacturers you plan on interviewing, create a project management plan, design plan, production schedule, and more.

During this time, you should also determine the milestones and deadlines you’d like to hit so that your plan has measurable results that it can be held accountable to. Maybe you want your manufacturer to deliver samples to you by a certain date and production to be completed before the 4-week mark in order to give you time for quality assurance.

Another example — if you’re creating a plan to execute a sales strategy for your business, your target milestone may be $10,000 in sales and a deadline of 2 months to reach that goal.

This planning stage is where you’ll create the bulk of your work plan. Just like the hypothesis stage, your plan should be based off informed knowledge that you either acquire or already possess. 

Test It

Now that your plan has some details to it, it’s time to execute and test it.

It is important to capture as much data as possible during this phase so that you can analyze the success of your work plan. Leverage automated tracking tools or manually record data if you have to.

Align the data that you track with the goals you’ve set for yourself.

For example, if you set a $10,000 sales goal, you want to make sure that you’re tracking which channels that money is coming from, or if you have a 4-week turnaround deadline, you want to track how much time each phase of your production takes and what contributors created delays.

Analyze Results

This is the most important part of your work plan — analyze your results. What worked and didn’t work in your work plan?

Did you see any improvements or big jumps? What was a total success and what can be dropped for the future?

I recommend reviewing everything you did in your work plan and rating how well your approach or strategy did.

If an approach or strategy didn’t work well, why was that? Was it due to a personal knowledge gap or were there other factors in play that prevented it from succeeding?

Work Plan 2.0

Now that you have an assessment of what worked and didn’t in your work plan, create work plan 2.0 — take the best of what worked in your first try and remove all the things that didn’t work.

You may have noticed during your assessment that you had a knowledge gap or need access to a resource you didn’t have access to before. Make these improvements or changes before putting work plan 2.0 into play.

By continuously using this methodology to shape your work plans, you’ll find that you can be much more productive and purposeful in the work that you do every day.

Rather than creating a to-do list reactively based on what you “should” be doing, you’ll be able to make tangible progress towards your goals with this intentional to-do list approach. 

Need a business plan for your startup’s launch? Grab my free Business Plan Outline to help you map it all out.

Sophia Sunwoo