As you build your Reiki practice, you may develop projects outside of your general client work to help general additional income. You may also undertake projects that help you run your Reiki practice efficiently. This might include your administrative tasks, as well as managing your online presence and marketing your Reiki practice.

You may also want to develop projects such as workshops, ecourses, and ebooks.

Many of these projects involve numerous steps to ensure you cover all the required tasks. To ensure you effectively undertake all of these tasks, it can be helpful to introduce some planning into your project.

There are a number of benefits that planning can bring to the successful completion of your project, including:

• Helps provide a structure to follow for the entire project
• Provides a detailed task list of the project
• Helps provide a path towards meeting deadlines
• Manages risks associated with potential problems
• Manages resources for effective coordination

The type of project that you are undertaking will affect the depth of planning that your project requires. For example, it is much simpler to plan for writing a blog post, then it is to plan for writing an ebook. Planning allows you the flexibility of making your project as simplified or as complex as you require.

As a Reiki practitioner running a small business, your projects should be simple enough to ensure that you keep moving forward, however, also allow you the space to be as detailed as possible about your tasks to ensure that you have covered all necessary parts of the project.

There are 3 important concepts to keep in mind when planning your project:

1. What is my goal for this project?
2. What is the timeline of this project?
3. What resources do I need to complete this project?

Once you’ve defined these concepts, you can then move forward to the more in-depth process of detailing each step of your project.

Planning a project requires a level of visualization as you visualize the chapters in a book or the progression through an in-person workshop. The very initial stages of your planning process should involve visualising how you foresee your project to be carried out.

Use this visualization process to roughly sketch out a diagram or flow chart on a blank piece of paper. This sketch should be used as a very high level and generalized view of your project so that you have a way forward to explore the details of your project.

To show you how to plan a project, we’ve included an example below. You will be able to download the FREE planning template that is used in the planning example.

In the FREE template download, you will find all of the same sample information so that you can use it as a guide to developing your own project.

The FREE template is an Excel spreadsheet. A significant benefit of using excel is you can access a large database of free templates to download and use. You can view some of the FREE templates here: https://templates.office.com/en-us/Planners-and-Trackers

Some examples of the templates that are available include:

• Expense tracking
• Trip planner
• Idea planners
• Timesheets
• Calendars
• Lesson plans

You can download 2 FREE templates we’ve created that will assist in your planning. You can find the tools available in these blog posts below:

Productivity Tools: Stay Focusd vs Rescue Time



Create an Annual Social Media Plan in 1 Hour



For the purposes of this example, we’re using a project planner we’ve created in Excel.

The template includes:

• Instructions
• A blank planner template
• A planner template filled with sample data.

  

In this example, the project that is being completed is a blog post. If we use the 3 planning steps previously mentioned, our project would look like this:

• What is my goal for this project? – To write a blog post about the benefits of Reiki. Minimum 500 words.
• What is the timeline of this project? – 1 week
• What resources do I need to complete this project? – writing software, access to research, image creation software, social media

The example above is a detailed goal of one blog post. You could also scale the size of your goal to be: write 10 blog posts for my website and then use your planning template to plan out the entire 10 blog posts.

In the example using only one blog post, each column was completed as below:



If you’ve written blog posts before, you can enter your start and end dates based on your past experience. Writing blog posts requires some practice. Initially, you may find it difficult to get started with writing about your topic, however, over time you will begin to become more knowledgeable about creating effective titles, researching useful information, and writing in a way that feels natural and helpful for your readers.

Start out giving yourself plenty of time to write your first blog post. Write your blog post knowing that your first post won’t be written in the most efficient way, but you will learn from your attempt and improve your writing process over time. Once you’ve written a few blog posts you will begin to develop a pattern of time that it takes to complete your tasks which you can use as a guideline for setting deadlines in your future planning process.

The status column will help keep you on track. It provides a snapshot of the status of each task so that you know what has been completed and what tasks remain. Seeing tasks become completed can often be a motivating factor in maintaining momentum on your project.

Having all of your tasks allocated with a status will help you easily identify the progress of a project so that you can plan your week without wasting time on determining where you last left your project.

You can use this Excel planning spreadsheet to enter in your tasks and deadlines or you choose to print out a blank template and handwrite your tasks and deadlines instead.