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AI Project Planning: How to Turn a Brain Dump Into a Real Project Plan in 15 Minutes · Growing a Deeply Rooted Business: Launches, Funnels & Email Marketing with Intention

• 0:00
  Jessica: All right, picture this: It is Thursday and you are finally sitting down to work on that project you have been thinking about executing for three to four weeks.
• 0:08
  Jessica: You open your Notion and voila, your project board is empty.
• 0:13
  Jessica: You've got ideas everywhere.
• 0:14
  Jessica: There's a voice note on your phone, a sticky note on your kitchen table, a couple of Slack messages that your project collaborator sent, and a sentence in your planner that says, "Figure out my next launch."
• 0:27
  Jessica: And because none of it looks like a plan, you just assume that you need a better project management system, maybe a prettier board or new template, or maybe even blocking off a full Saturday to set it all up,
• 0:40
  Jessica: and I promise you, you don't.
• 0:41
  Jessica: You just need 15 minutes and the right order of decisions.
• 0:44
  Jessica: So today, we're gonna be taking you from that hot, jumbled, hot mess of a project in your brain and turning it into a real project plan that actually gets done.
• 0:54
  Jessica: It's not gonna be a list of random tasks.
• 0:56
  Jessica: It's gonna be a clear plan with a goal, a strategy, clear deliverables, production steps, dates, and the whole shebang.
• 1:02
  Jessica: And make sure that you stay with us, because we're gonna be answering some of the questions that we hear constantly, like what are the best project management systems for a solopreneur business or a business that has a tiny
• 1:15
  Jessica: team.
• 1:15
  Jessica: I promise you, it's not another tool you need.
• 1:17
  Rachel: So welcome back to Growing a Deeply Rooted Business, the show for women building businesses that want to support their lives instead of disappearing into the client work and getting burnt out.
• 1:29
  Rachel: I am Rachel, your marketing ecosystem strategist, and I'm here for the message, for the buyer journey, for making sure that all of the pieces actually connect to a real business goal.
• 1:40
  Rachel: And I'm here with Jess, our sustainable systems strategist, our resident plan translator, honestly, my second brain.
• 1:50
  Rachel: And if you give her a chaotic brain dump, she will turn it into a beautiful phased dependency and suspiciously satisfying Notion template, and it's absolutely gorgeous.
• 2:02
  Rachel: So this is part two of our Life First series, where we are naming the invisible labor that you have been carrying as a small team, solopreneur, or just general woman in business.
• 2:14
  Rachel: Today we're taking one very specific piece of that load, which is the project that only exists in your head, and we are giving it someplace else to live
• 2:24
  Jessica: Right.
• 2:24
  Jessica: But before we get into anything, let's do a quick energy check, and I want you to bring to mind that project that is currently taking up the most space in your brain.
• 2:34
  Jessica: Maybe it's something that you set a goal to do in January, and you haven't done it.
• 2:38
  Jessica: Maybe it's a launch.
• 2:39
  Jessica: Maybe it's rebuilding your onboarding or creating that resource that you've been talking about since early February.
• 2:46
  Jessica: Now, picture what happens when you think about it.
• 2:50
  Jessica: Do you feel clear?
• 2:51
  Jessica: Do you feel slightly annoyed?
• 2:53
  Jessica: Are you shaming yourself for not getting it done?
• 2:56
  Jessica: I want you to release all that right now by taking a deep breath in and let it go.
• 3:06
  Jessica: All right.
• 3:07
  Rachel: So we're gonna be walking through three steps.
• 3:10
  Rachel: First, we are going to define the destination.
• 3:13
  Rachel: Second, we're going to choose that route, and then the third is we're gonna turn the route into work that you can actually complete.
• 3:20
  Rachel: And inside of that third step, we're talking about the move from strategy to deliverables, deliverables to tasks, and tasks all the way down to dates and owners.
• 3:30
  Rachel: So we are going to be showing you kinda like the 15-minute version of this.
• 3:35
  Rachel: We know that project planning can be expansive, right?
• 3:38
  Rachel: We're talking about annual planning.
• 3:40
  Rachel: It usually takes us a couple of hours to do, but we're really gonna be driving down into a specific project plan.
• 3:48
  Rachel: And at the end of it, we're gonna be talking about not only the biggest gap, which is my biggest problem here, which is how come my Notion board always ends up empty?
• 3:56
  Rachel: And it's not necessarily because your project system isn't working for you or because, your platform's wrong.
• 4:03
  Rachel: We'll get into that at the end.
• 4:04
  Rachel: So if you have ever built a beautiful project board, used it enthusiastically for three days, and then stopped using it, this is the episode for you.
• 4:15
  Jessica: All right, so let's get into project planning step number one, and this is one that I see usually not fully realized, and I think it's where first people kind of go astray, and that is defining the destination.
• 4:27
  Jessica: Like, taking that vague idea that you have for a project into a specific finish line so you know what belongs in the project plan and what doesn't.
• 4:36
  Jessica: In this step you really wanna define what your goal is of the project, so what business goal is this project supporting, and if it's not supporting a business goal or a current business goal that you have, then you
• 4:48
  Jessica: probably need to put that back into your idea parking lot for another time, and then define the outcome.
• 4:53
  Jessica: Now, these sound like the same things, but really they are different.
• 4:58
  Jessica: Your goal is why the project matters to the business, and your outcome is what will exist or be true once the project is done.
• 5:05
  Jessica: So let me give you a quick example.
• 5:07
  Jessica: Launch my new offer is not a useful outcome.
• 5:11
  Jessica: It is a project label.
• 5:13
  Jessica: A clear goal for that might be enroll 10 founding members into my new quiz funnel service.
• 5:20
  Jessica: The outcome of that project goal would be a complete launch that has run, every buyer is onboarding, and the first delivery date for my quiz funnel is on the calendar.
• 5:30
  Jessica: The goal is gonna give your project a reason or a deeper why, and the outcome is going to give it that finish line that you can cross.
• 5:38
  Jessica: How do you feel about this step, Rachel?
• 5:40
  Rachel: I think this one's important because I always tell everybody that you should always have a reason to do it, and always have that bumpers when you do get off track or when it's sitting in that to-do list of,
• 5:53
  Rachel: "Oh, I haven't touched it in a couple of months," and this and that., If it has a specific business goal, you will have to prioritize it in that order.
• 6:02
  Rachel: And when it doesn't have a goal, it's so much easier to forget about it and not accomplish it.
• 6:07
  Rachel: And so it's one of those things that for me, if you have a specific business goal for your email list as the email person, you're not gonna neglect it as much compared if you're like, "Well, it's just kind
• 6:18
  Rachel: of one of those things that I do."
• 6:20
  Rachel: This is one of my looming tasks that has existed on my project list parking lot is my new website rebuild, which I have the whiteboard already laid out.
• 6:30
  Rachel: I have all of the brands and everything, but I haven't gone through the process of where it prioritizes with that outcome and goal.
• 6:37
  Rachel: So it has just sat there for literally ever.
• 6:42
  Rachel: So it's one of those things that should be able to break this down into one sentence for the business goal and really understand that's your little Post-It note when you come back to it and say, "Oh, why am
• 6:53
  Rachel: I doing this again?
• 6:53
  Rachel: Oh, great.
• 6:54
  Rachel: Yeah, I need new leads for that quiz funnel.
• 6:57
  Rachel: So let's put this back on the top of the list kind of thing."
• 7:00
  Jessica: Okay, so let me tell you what this actually looks like.
• 7:02
  Jessica: This means opening up a Notion project, or I have a project template and saying, "The goal of this project is..."
• 7:08
  Jessica: Or if you're really savvy, connect it to your goals database in Notion and figure that out.
• 7:14
  Jessica: Then defining the project is complete when, and then you're gonna put some specific deliverables that are in part of that project.
• 7:21
  Jessica: And then you wanna define one or two success markers.
• 7:24
  Jessica: These are gonna be KPIs that you can actually observe or measure to show if your project was successful.
• 7:31
  Jessica: And then most importantly, you wanna make sure that you're naming the boundaries of what is not included, and these boundaries might become more apparent as you get into project planning.
• 7:40
  Jessica: We always talk about version 1.0, 2.0, 3.0s of items.
• 7:44
  Jessica: Sometimes you just need to get it launched, but you have ideas that may take more execution or more resources, but you don't want to execute those yet until you have proof or validation that the beginning part of the
• 7:55
  Jessica: project works.
• 7:56
  Jessica: So defining your boundaries are important, and then give your project a working title that reflects the outcome.
• 8:03
  Rachel: Yeah, This isn't even getting into the tasks or anything.
• 8:06
  Rachel: This is literally just setting up the shell so that you can properly put things into place.
• 8:11
  Rachel: And you have to kinda start on the right foundation first before you can even move into the next steps or else it will continue to be chaos.
• 8:20
  Rachel: So step two is choose the route, and I'm gonna let Jess take this 'cause this is her zone of genius.
• 8:26
  Jessica: choosing the route is gonna look a little bit different depending on what type of project you're doing.
• 8:30
  Jessica: If you're doing a marketing campaign, it's gonna look one way.
• 8:33
  Jessica: If you're doing an automation or operation setup, it's gonna look the other way.
• 8:36
  Jessica: But basically, it's going to be all the steps that need to happen, strategy-wise, to get to that outcome that you're trying to.
• 8:45
  Jessica: So in a launch, for me, choosing the route looks like getting out a whimsical board, even Canva has the whiteboards now, and literally mapping out the strategy, the customer journey strategy of where that customer will go through if
• 8:59
  Jessica: I'm doing some sort of launch or marketing campaign.
• 9:02
  Jessica: If I'm doing an operational system setup, that may look like doing all of the different steps of, you know, if we're doing a content repurposing project, what has to happen first, second, third, and then what has to be
• 9:13
  Jessica: built in each of those steps to make sure that it's route.
• 9:17
  Jessica: So basically, you are defining what the project serves, and then just finding the steps that you're gonna need to create between the starting point and the outcome.
• 9:29
  Jessica: I like to break my projects into different phases.
• 9:33
  Jessica: If you've listened to one of our launch episodes, you've usually heard that I usually have a strategy phase, a copy phase, a asset-building phase and then, launch.
• 9:42
  Jessica: But you can also look at it like a marketing campaign, ramp up, invite, deliver, follow up, are good ways that you can kind of take your projects in as well.
• 9:52
  Rachel: Yeah, and I think the most important part here, and this is why we've included this in the Life First Business series, is your capacity.
• 10:03
  Rachel: You wanna keep that as a guiding light here.
• 10:05
  Rachel: Because when you're talking about your capacity in terms of project planning, in the same times that if you've heard us talk about annual planning and you're saying, like, "I can get seven projects done in Q2," when, but when
• 10:17
  Rachel: you go to break that down into tasks, seven projects at 10 tasks minimum can be 70 tasks that you have to do top of client work, on top of kid pickup, on top of life just life-ing.
• 10:29
  Rachel: Your capacity is the thing that you do have to honor, and I will selfishly plug the Life First Business, that when I'm sitting there and I'm talking about one of the skills and saying, like, "I wanna launch this,
• 10:42
  Rachel: I wanna do that," because we've worked into our weekly rhythms and capacities as a very primary important part of building out that strategy, it goes, "Well, maybe it's not really the best idea for you to make these changes,
• 10:57
  Rachel: because you can't really take on more than two strategy intensives a month.
• 11:02
  Rachel: And if you wanna ramp this up, you're blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."
• 11:05
  Rachel: And so understanding that and at least having that as a point in your brain to help you say, "You're right."
• 11:11
  Rachel: Capacity needs to be respected as an important part, so that the rest of the tasks can kind of fall into place there.
• 11:19
  Jessica: Yeah, and I mean, if you don't wanna also think about capacity, and I think as solopreneur or tiny teams, we don't do this because most of us are not operating with a budget because we're bootstrapping our way up
• 11:32
  Jessica: there, right?
• 11:33
  Jessica: But when you're setting your capacity, think about what your budget is.
• 11:36
  Jessica: Like, how many hours times your hourly rate are you willing to put into this to get that outcome?
• 11:43
  Jessica: Because if it's gonna take you 80 hours to get there and you're $100, that's $8,000, but you don't think that this project is gonna result in you bringing in an additional $8,000 in your business, then that project would
• 11:57
  Jessica: get nixed for a bigger company.
• 11:59
  Jessica: And I've seen this.
• 12:00
  Jessica: I'm currently working with two businesses that are moving from solopreneur to full-on team right now, and this is the biggest change that they're having to make is really defining what the project budget is for each thing.
• 12:12
  Jessica: Because if you say, "Hey, Jess, I want you to do a launch," I can build you the most intricate, crazy launch that's gonna take a billion hours to do, or I can build you a smaller, straight to the
• 12:25
  Jessica: point, just email only launch, and both may work and get you to that outcome, but it's just gonna depend on to...
• 12:32
  Jessica: your capacity, your budget to get you there.
• 12:34
  Jessica: So it's really important that you think about this.
• 12:37
  Jessica: Even if you don't have a full team, even if you're doing everything yourself, you still need to be talking about what is your time budget?
• 12:43
  Jessica: What is your revenue budget?
• 12:45
  Jessica: What do you think that this is going to generate in your business?
• 12:48
  Jessica: And then, do a real gut check and if it's yes, this is worth it, then we can move on to step three
• 12:53
  Rachel: So then step three is saying we're gonna take this route and turn it into the actual work.
• 12:59
  Rachel: So in this stage, we are taking all of those kind of deliverables and each turning them into what the tasks and actual hand-to-hand work is going to be, and then even further, we're putting them on our calendars, we're
• 13:12
  Rachel: putting them in our weekly rotations and saying, "This is who is responsible for it."
• 13:17
  Rachel: So essentially, this is the part where we're building the actual plan and then building it in the order that, one, respects your weekly rhythm.
• 13:26
  Rachel: You're not overloading yourself in one week or one particular day, and it gives you that part of saying it's continuous motion, right?
• 13:35
  Rachel: I know as ADHD people, we love that urgency to really help us get that task done.
• 13:40
  Rachel: Trust me, Jess and I are working on something right now, and I'm like, "Hello, we have a lot of deliverables due in the next week or so."
• 13:47
  Rachel: And I understand that from a ADHD, neuro spicy kind of person.
• 13:52
  Rachel: But when you do have an easy way to chip at certain things, it's a lot more manageable to essentially take big projects into tiny digestible bites and knock them out without it feeling crazy overwhelming or anything like that.
• 14:10
  Jessica: Yeah, and I think again, this is where a lot of the solopreneurs, tiny teams may get tripped up a little bit because when you're a solopreneur, you can just say, "Create registration page."
• 14:19
  Jessica: But you're probably getting tripped up because creating a registration page is deliverable, not a production step.
• 14:25
  Jessica: So we take that and break that down, the production step may be draft the positioning and promise, draft the copy, collect the brand assets that you wanna use on the page, build the page, create the form, write the
• 14:39
  Jessica: confirmation message, test the sign-up, approve and test the final version.
• 14:44
  Jessica: Those are all the production steps, and if you're not used to laying those out in an order, you can give yourself lots of quick wins.
• 14:50
  Jessica: I know my dopamine loves it.
• 14:52
  Jessica: But also, if you wanna bring in someone to support you, you can see, okay, maybe I don't wanna have the copy, so I'm gonna draft this copy, but then they need to hand it off to me.
• 15:01
  Jessica: You can kinda see all the steps, that are there and the dependencies.
• 15:05
  Jessica: So what must happen for the next production step to begin, and then you can start to kinda work backwards to when that asset needs to go live, work backwards on, what needs to happen when according to dependencies, and
• 15:19
  Jessica: then assign an owner to every task, even if the owner is you.
• 15:24
  Jessica: And then you can kinda take a look at it and say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, I've got like 55 tasks for this one week.
• 15:29
  Jessica: I need to stretch out this timeline," because we know our project management triangle.
• 15:35
  Jessica: If your scope grows, your timeline or the money you invest to get somebody else in there help you is also gonna have to grow.
• 15:42
  Jessica: So that's really where you can start really analyzing, do a gut check.
• 15:45
  Jessica: "Okay, does this timeline look feasible?
• 15:47
  Jessica: Do I need to remove some things based on my capacity?"
• 15:50
  Jessica: That is really the project planning part of it, and then at the end of it, you may have a project plan that you can run with, or you may have a project plan that you need to just pull
• 15:59
  Jessica: back a couple of things on because you know you're not gonna have the capacity to do it at that level that you wanna do it at.
• 16:05
  Rachel: Yeah, and it's always really fun.
• 16:06
  Rachel: I have this system designed for any time I onboard a new client.
• 16:10
  Rachel: So, when you say, "Okay, build a lead magnet," if you're doing it for yourself, you have the automatic steps in your brain to kind of going through it.
• 16:18
  Rachel: But when we build this out for my clients and stuff, it is broken out, like Jess said, where it's copy or even ideation.
• 16:25
  Rachel: Like what is the title ideation?
• 16:27
  Rachel: What is this step?
• 16:29
  Rachel: What is the ideal client research?
• 16:31
  Rachel: All of those different components.
• 16:32
  Rachel: And so when I'm onboarding and I have to import all of this on top of all of my client work, it's wild to see how sometimes there'll be one week where there's like 25 tasks.
• 16:44
  Rachel: And you have to understand that that is not working with my capacity.
• 16:47
  Rachel: So then that's when you have to take a really honest conversation with yourself and put them into the right buckets while still maintaining your deadline and all of that.
• 16:55
  Rachel: So it really is important to understand that while this isn't necessarily a perfect science, it does become a solid rhythm when you're working with everything on paper versus in your head.
• 17:08
  Rachel: 'Cause when you're working with things in your head, you can't see that there are 15 invisible labor tasks sitting there waiting for you to do them, because in your head you're like, "Oh, I just need to make a
• 17:17
  Rachel: landing page," or, "I just need to make the lead magnet."
• 17:20
  Rachel: So the best part of this stage is that it really does show you the truth of the lift, and it really helps you achieve it a lot faster or at least a more reality way where we're always talking
• 17:33
  Rachel: about being rooted in reality here.
• 17:35
  Rachel: And I think this step is crucial to avoiding that burnout and avoiding missing deadlines and all of that.
• 17:42
  Jessica: Okay, so just to recap all the steps for you, and if you wanted to do this in 15 minutes, I would say define the goal.
• 17:50
  Jessica: What's the outcome?
• 17:51
  Jessica: What's the boundary?
• 17:52
  Jessica: What is the kind of KPIs that you are going to create?
• 17:58
  Jessica: What's the route?
• 17:59
  Jessica: Choose the route.
• 18:00
  Jessica: Name who the project serves, what the project serves, the change you need to create, and identify the phases or the flow that the either customer or the system that you're building is gonna have to flow through.
• 18:15
  Jessica: And then under that, you wanna list the deliverables.
• 18:18
  Jessica: And then I like to, underneath each deliverable, list the production steps that go into those deliverables, and I like to list them in order of dependency because you can't design the page if the copy's not written.
• 18:30
  Jessica: You can't write the copy if you haven't done your research.
• 18:33
  Jessica: So you're just gonna line those up sequentially and then work backwards from their go-live dates and add owners and responsibilities.
• 18:42
  Jessica: That would be super quick to do.
• 18:44
  Jessica: You're gonna work through it really quick.
• 18:46
  Jessica: We're gonna give you a little surprise at the end.
• 18:48
  Jessica: We have something to share with you that might help you do this a little quicker.
• 18:51
  Jessica: But all in all, I just want y'all to know that the best system or the best project management system is not the software you're using, it is this flow that you're using to create all of your projects.
• 19:04
  Jessica: And I promise you, even though when you have a new project you wanna kinda just jump right into it, if you take the time, at least giving yourself 15 minutes, you may not get all the different tasks or
• 19:14
  Jessica: deliverables, you may still miss something, but I think this is gonna set you up for success 'cause you're gonna know what you're going into with it
• 19:21
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 19:22
  Rachel: And I think that this is what's gonna solve a continuous utilization of this decision sequence is what solves you not opening up your project management tool, whatever it may be, and being like, "Oh, there's nothing in here."
• 19:35
  Rachel: 'Cause if you get into the habit of continuously running through this process, you'll see how all your projects can pulse throughout the year versus you sitting down and being in a panic for Q2 and being like, "I need
• 19:48
  Rachel: to make money in Q3.
• 19:50
  Rachel: What do I need to do?"
• 19:51
  Rachel: So this in capacity with your annual plan really just help you not start from a blank page every single time and help you brain dump with structure.
• 20:03
  Rachel: If this episode hit home, share it with a business bestie who has been project living in her head across six different tabs between three different planners.
• 20:14
  Rachel: You do not need a new template, you need to just work in a different decision order.
• 20:19
  Rachel: And if you want to be able to build this plan in that 15-minute window like Jess just broke down, one of the tools that we have built is Paula, our project management planner.
• 20:30
  Rachel: Essentially you give Paula the brain dump, and she helps turn it into that goal, strategy, deliverable, production step, owner, and timeline in just a brain dump transition there.
• 20:41
  Rachel: So we have the link in the show note.
• 20:43
  Rachel: She's $14.
• 20:44
  Rachel: She's amazing.
• 20:45
  Jessica: the great thing about Paula too is she's not only gonna help you create the plan, she's gonna put it into your Notion project management system as well, if you're using Notion.
• 20:52
  Jessica: Now you can connect things like Claude and stuff to Notion or your other project management tools.
• 20:58
  Jessica: I've recently been experimenting with Notion AI and using all of my AI skills right into Notion, which is amazing 'cause it can go throughout your works and grab all the context that it needs.
• 21:09
  Jessica: This is the exact tool that I built for myself to plan the big $3 million launches that have 400 different tasks going into it.
• 21:19
  Jessica: This is how I am able to keep all of that straight and line everything up sequentially so we're not getting to the day before and freaking out because we have amazing things to do.
• 21:29
  Jessica: And I would say one little bonus tip is when you assign your due dates, make sure that you're also blocking that time off on your actual calendar to protect it just like an appointment or a client call or
• 21:41
  Jessica: something like that to actually do the work so that you're not getting behind.
• 21:44
  Rachel: Totally.
• 21:45
  Rachel: So check out Project Planner Paula.
• 21:48
  Rachel: She's amazing, helps me with so many things.
• 21:51
  Rachel: And then in next week's Life First series, we're going to be diving into the client management side of things, so those follow-ups, the decision-makings, the tiny promises that pile up while you're on calls and serving clients, to do
• 22:06
  Rachel: it all while you're running your own business as well as other people's marketings, launches, OBM stuff, and all of that.
• 22:13
  Rachel: So stay tuned, and until next week, we're
• 22:17
  Jessica: Rooting for you.