Many people cringe at the thought of creating a business plan. Most books on business planning are too complicated.

However, you still need a plan in order to know where you are going and how you are going to get there. To say, "I want to make more money" or "I want to grow my business' is not enough.

Your plan has to be specific, targeted, and have a plan of action.

So, how do you start? Where do you start? Here's the first thing I did.

I do not use a fancy, expensive planner that has more than I need. I do print off the monthly calendars from Outlook and put them in a regular 3 ring binder that I keep open on my desk with monthly tab dividers. Then I use my S.M.A.R.T. goals sheet and start planning for the upcoming year.

When you download the S.M.A.R.T. goals report, you'll see a checklist. Print off one that will be your yearly goals as to where you want to be by the end of 2008. Place this sheet in January.

Next, print four checklists and break down your yearly goals into quarterly goals on these sheet and place these sheets at the first month of each quarter, January, April, July, September

Print 12 more checklists and break down your quarterly goals even further to create monthly goals and place one each at the beginning of the 12 month calendars you printed off and placed in your binder.

You know what's next right? Yes, weekly goals. It's great to know what you want to accomplish monthly, but you have to break it down even further to know what you have to do each and every week. Go ahead and print off one checklist per week so that you have enough for the month.

Now, we're really getting into the micro part of your business… daily planning. No, we're not going to print off a daily checklist, but we are going to use a cool little tool to help us stay more productive each day.

It's called, "List of Six" software and I was first introduced to List of Six by Paul Smithson when we were at 5Days in July earlier this past summer.

List of Six software is a very simple desktop tool that allows you to plug in just 6 things you want to accomplish… today. As you complete each task, you mark it "complete" and that's it. The next day, you type in the 6 things you want to accomplish and mark them off when they're done.

The idea behind this is that with only 6 key tasks to complete each day, the risk of becoming overwhelmed is drastically reduced and you stay on track for THAT day. By staying on track just one day at a time, you can stay track for the entire week, which becomes the entire month and so on.

Will life happen and will there be things to distract you? Of course there will, but when you create a solid plan that encompasses your personal life as well as your business, and you use a simple tool such as the List of Six, you will see short term results that term into long term success.

This will help keep you focused and on track so that this time next year, you're not wondering where the year disappeared to.

Here's where you can download the List of Six > > > This is a demo version.

Get the S.M.A.R.T. Goals Checklist Report