Planning Retreat Series - No. 2 - Prep
Backstep Forward Newsletter
by Kyle Mast
A short, to-the-point, weekly newsletter.
One challenge to take a step back.
One idea to propel you forward.
Continuing in the Planning Retreat series, this week’s focus is how important good preparation is to the success of your retreat. At this point, you should now have your planning retreat location booked for two nights.
Be sure that you are not doing any other work on your retreat. The time should be completely reserved for big-picture thinking and planning, which will require you to get work done ahead of time and push some work off until after the retreat. Do not compromise on this.
A good practice is to block off a “catchup” week before your retreat, where you don’t schedule any meetings or new work. You will use this pre-retreat week to make sure you are as caught up as much as possible. You will also use this week to do important prep for your retreat, which we will dive into in the next post.
Backstep
Look at the week before your 2-night planning retreat. Eliminate, delegate, or defer any meetings or new work that are currently slated for that week. You want to have a very blank week on your calendar to prepare well for your retreat and have the bandwidth to hammer out any last-minute items that come up before the retreat (this will always happen) so you don’t take any extra distractions into your retreat.
Forward
You should have already done this, but make sure you have an easily accessible note on your phone to jot down potential goals, ideas, or thoughts you want to hammer out on your retreat. Do you want to take your family on a month-long getaway? Jot it down. Do you want to buy your first investment property? Jot it down. Do you want to change careers, build a sustainable morning routine, adopt a child, spend more time with your wife? Jot it all down. As you near your retreat, you will have ideas at random times, and you need to get them all down in the moment. Don’t worry how many there are. We will sift through them later.
We often have life-changing thoughts in fleeting moments. The ability to capture them and revisit them later can be the difference between a forgotten insight and a new reality. (Share this on Twitter)
Kyle Mast
Blessed husband, growing father, business founder/owner/seller, real estate investor.
P.S. I was a guest this past week on the #1 Real Estate podcast on the web, the BiggerPockets Real Estate podcast. The topic we covered was The Late Starter’s Guide to Real Estate Investing. If you (or someone you know) are a little later to the real estate investing world, this is an encouraging episode showing that it is not too late!