If you own a business or are in the business of actively managing your career, now is the time to get going on planning for a successful 2025. To help you focus, I’ve brought in CPA-turned-business-coach Sarah Nemecek for tips on designing a year of growth and productivity.
KS: What is your best tip for creating more efficiency in our work going into the new year?
SN: Don’t worry about a specific efficiency or time management technique or tool, and stop beating yourself up for “being behind.”
Instead, simply keep a running list of everything that pops into your head as something you need to do over the course of each day/week (include business and personal items). Write it down to get it out of your head (brains aren’t designed to store data).
Once a week, review that list and put every single thing on your calendar so you can rest easy knowing exactly when you’ll address each item. Feel free to delete or delegate items as you go.
Spend about an hour once a week doing this with your list and your calendar. Evaluate your results at the end of each week, and tweak the following week as needed.
This habit, once adopted to you individually, has been life changing for so many people.
KS: What is a business change or piece of advice that your clients are resistant to, but creates great results?
SN: Constraint may be the hardest change for my clients to embrace. It always feels counterintuitive or counterproductive at first, because so many of us are such overachievers and used to having and doing all things right now.
However, the human brain truly cannot focus on multiple priorities and tasks effectively. That’s why we have the word priority – one thing that is most important right now.
Does your business have 10 priorities? Narrow that down to two things that will have the biggest impact and then choose one to do this month and one next month. Go all in on that thing.
When you have one true priority at a time, all your decisions become simpler. Your life is simpler. Your stress decreases and your sense of fulfillment increases, because you can make real progress on something that actually matters instead of scattering your effort in a dozen different directions all day every day, with no visible progress.
KS: What is an idea or tool that can help people create big goals for the year, but also help break those down into monthly or quarterly action items to keep the momentum going past the first rush of New Year’s Resolutions?
SN: For me, the most important thing in setting and pursuing big goals is to actually set them, and then to focus less on the goal itself and more on the process for achieving it.
Most big goals require you to become a slightly different version of yourself, that’s what makes them feel so big and scary. You’re attempting to do something you haven’t done before – you have no proof that it’s possible for you, and that isn’t generally a comfortable place to be.
The excitement of a new goal and new beginnings is what gets people moving at the beginning of the year. But the people who stick to their plan and keep going are the ones that trust the process and are not attached to immediate, visible results (I know, that’s not easy to do).
Expect and plan for the setbacks and failures that will inevitably happen as you do things you haven’t done before. Nothing has gone wrong. It actually means you’re doing it right, and you’re still on the path moving toward your goal.
KS: Thanks so much to Sarah for lending her time and talent to helping us all set big goals and achieve them in 2025!
Sarah Nemecek, a CPA-turned-business coach, specializes in helping small business owners achieve financial success and personal fulfillment. With extensive experience across various industries as a CPA and the founder of three businesses herself, Sarah combines practical financial expertise with firsthand entrepreneurial insight. Her unique approach equips clients with the tools and confidence to thrive in both business and life, making her guidance not only strategic but deeply relatable to real-world challenges.
In her free time, Sarah dives into DIY home projects, knits, bakes, and homeschools her son.
Website:www.sarahnemecek.com
Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-nemecek
