Start your yearly planning early with our 2021 Calendar slides, available in light and dark modes, and give your business, professional and personal life the direction and momentum to experience its best year yet. Reflect, let go, schedule, brainstorm, define New Year's resolutions, set goals and upgrade your mindset to match your dreams in 2021.
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Slides, such as this one give you flexibility and functionality of various customizable designs. For instance, you can use them to add brief notes to your plan for a particular month, quarter, week or day.
Use this slide if you need to create a business calendar for a month. For example, monthly calendars are perfect for planning marketing and social media campaigns around trends and holidays.
For your convenience, the dates have been matched correctly to the days of the year 2021. For yearly planning, consider SWOT analysis, a tool to reveal strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
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Planning is essential for any company of any size. But, as Alessandro Di Fiore, the founder and CEO of the European Centre for Strategic Innovation (ECSI) and ECSI Consulting, puts in in his piece for "Harvard Business Review:" "executives are wary of planning because it feels rigid, slow and bureaucratic." The remedy for this issue, Di Fiore says, is agile planning.
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Per Di Fiore, agile planning has a number of characteristics, which include:
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Society for Creative Founders lists these steps for planning a productive and satisfying year:
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To help you plan the upcoming year like a pro, we turned to a study conducted by Harvard University. Researchers tracked the time allocation of 27 CEOs for a full quarter. The companies run by the CEOs surveyed were primarily public and had an average annual revenue of $13.1 billion during the study period.
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Here is what the study found:
Given that work could consume every hour of their lives, CEOs have to set limits so that they can preserve their health and their relationships with family and friends. Most of the CEOs in the study recognized that. They slept, on average, 6.9 hours a night, and many had regular exercise routines, which consumed about 9% of their non-work hours (45 minutes a day).
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The top job in a company involves primarily face-to-face interactions, which took up 61% of the work time of the CEOs we studied. Another 15% was spent on the phone or reading and replying to written correspondence. The final 24% was spent on electronic communications, the researchers found.
In theory, email helps leaders cut down on face-to-face meetings and improve productivity. In reality, many find it ineffective and a dangerous time sink – but one they have trouble avoiding. Email interrupts work, extends the workday, intrudes on time for family and thinking and is not conducive to thoughtful discussions. CEOs are endlessly copied on For Your Information (FYI) emails and feel pressured to respond because ignoring an email seems rude.
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The CEOs invested significant time – 43%, on average – in activities that furthered their agendas. Some were far more disciplined about this than others. In fact, time devoted to the core agenda varied widely, ranging from 14% to 80% of leaders' work hours. Most CEOs the researchers talked with agreed that the more time they spent on their agendas, the better they felt about their use of time.
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The CEOs invested significant time – 43%, on average – in activities that furthered their agendas. Some were far more disciplined The study found that about half (46%) of a CEO's time with internal constituencies was spent with one or more direct reports, and 21% of it was spent only with direct reports. The total time spent with direct reports ranged from a low of 32% of the time with internal constituencies to a high of 67%.
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The most powerful integrating mechanisms include strategy (on which CEOs in the study spent an average of 21% of their work time), functional and business unit reviews (25% of their time), developing people and relationships (25% of their time), matching organizational structure and culture with the needs of the business (16% of their time) and mergers and acquisitions (4% of their time).
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CEOs attend an endless stream of meetings, each of which can be totally different from the one before and the one that follows. Their sheer number and variety is a defining feature of the top job. On average, the leaders in our study had 37 meetings of assorted lengths in any given week and spent 72% of their total work time in meetings.
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While the CEOs the researcher surveyed spent the majority of their time (70%, on average) dealing with internal constituencies, a good chunk (30%, on average) was spent with outsiders: 16% with business partners, such as customers, suppliers, bankers, investors, consultants, lawyers, PR firms and other service providers; 5% with the company's board of directors; and 9% on other outside commitments (service on other boards, industry groups, dealing with the media and the government and community and philanthropic activities).
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