Planning 2017 with New Apps and Things

Many people who know me will confirm that I like to play with new apps. With so many years under my belt doing this, it is less and less often that something grabs my attention right away.

Meanwhile, back in the nerd cave, I’ve been planning and thinking about 2017.

Now I know that we don’t like to talk about spreadsheets much around here. The reason is, because all too often spreadsheets are misused. We use spreadsheets for time tracking, which at one time was a really efficient way to do things, but those days are long gone. We have time & expense tracking, and billing apps like BillQuick, and BillQuick Online to handle that, with 1,000x greater efficiency and accuracy, so using a spreadsheet to track time is something like a case of lunacy. Can you see what I am saying? Of course you can’t, but I digress.

When it comes to planning a New Year, I do believe that the use of a spreadsheet has merit. Spreadsheets are great tools for laying out some numbers, and seeing what we want to do with our business. We can think in terms of how many clients we have, and how many new clients we want, and what it will take to get them. How much money to we want to gross in 2017?

One thing I’ve noticed, and most people seem to agree on, is that you will see much better growth in your business when you have specific goals right in front of you, to look at every day.

The first thing you will want to do is outline your goals, and ideas. For that, I recently stumbled on an app called Workflowy, and it has quickly gone from getting my attention, to falling in love. I am now actually trying to FIND more uses for this application. Of course you’ll see it demonstrated in the video above. It takes the idea of bulleted lists, and turns them into a robust, but neatly tucked away lists, and pages of the things that matter to you. You can tag, and star things to highlight the things that matter most.

Next we’re going to look at a spreadsheet. We’re going to look at Google Sheets, because we’re moving into the future, and it is my belief that Google Sheets lends itself to better collaboration than Microsoft Excel. For now we’re just going to lay out a simple model, to help us see what our goals for 2017 might look like from the numbers side of things.

Please post your comments, questions, and feedback below.