Planning

How can you achieve your goals without a plan? Most people know what they want but have no plan to achieve it except by sheer hard work.

Your yearly plan should be reviewed daily and reset as your achievements are met. Successful people make lists constantly. It enables them to stay on top of priorities and enable them to remain flexible to changing priorities. This should be done for both personal and business goals.

Now that you have decided what you need to do, you need to think about when you are going to work on each project.

Planning is important because it increases your productivity and helps you work more effectively.

If all you ever had to do each day was work on a single project from start to finish, planning would be easy. You would just start with the most important task, work on it until it was done and then move to the next task.

For most of us, the world just does not work this way! We must deal with several different projects, long-term initiatives and an assortment of smaller tasks during each day. All of this while juggling meetings and other appointments.

Effective time managers have discovered that combining weekly and daily planning is far more effective than daily planning alone.

The week is a natural time for effective short-term planning, because it is short enough to make meaningful plans based on your top priorities and it is long enough to allow you to balance urgent tasks with important long-term projects and initiatives.

Always define your objectives as clearly as possible.

Analyse Your Use of Time

Are you spending enough time on the projects which although may not be urgent now are the things you need to do to develop yourself or your career? If you are constantly asking yourself "What is the most important use of my time, right now?" it will help you to focus on 'important tasks' and stop reacting to tasks which seem urgent (or pleasant to do) but carry no importance towards your goals.

Action Plan Analysis

Problems will always occur; the value of a good plan is to identify them early and seek out solutions. Good time management enables you to measure the progress towards your goals because "What you can measure, you can control." Always try to be proactive.

Adjusting Your Plans

One of the reasons that weekly planning helps you work effectively is that you can pick the best times to work on your different projects. For example, you can choose your peak energy times for difficult or complex projects and leave more routine work for your low-energy periods.

Even with the best-laid plans you may sometimes find yourself in a low-energy state or struggling to make progress on a project.

In these situations your best option may be to adjust your plans by switching project blocks around. Pick a project that you would feel comfortable working on and switch it with your current block.

Remember, the plan is not in control, you are. The plan is just a guide to help you make the best use of your time. Learn from these experiences and adjust your planning for future weeks accordingly.

Our goals in live are different, we spend time on different activities to achieve our goals, click here to view a video on how we use our time differently to achieve our goals.