3 Tips To Becoming A Rockstar Planner
“Am I planning too much? Not enough?”
“Are there best practices when it comes to planning?”
“What is the right amount of planning?”
These are some of the fundamental questions we ask ourselves (some more than others) when it comes to planning.
Too much planning and there won’t be much room for the creative or spontaneous aspects of your execution. Too little planning, and you get full on chaos and frustration. I think, unfortunately or fortunately, when it comes to planning, each person thrives with their own “formula” or “secret sauce”.
I hope I can lay out a few tidbits here that you can put to use immediately!
Truthfully, I think Ben Franklin said it best,
“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
1. Translate your plan into the best medium for you.
For some, that might mean writing down a list. For others that might mean using your phone to record voice memos that you can reference over and over. It might even mean getting out your selfie camera on your phone and recording yourself!
For me I’m a visual learner, so naturally I try to write my plans down. This can be either in a notebook I take with me on a daily basis or on Google® Docs so I can reference it anywhere.
Whatever it may be, do what suits you and your learning style best.
2. Keep your plan clear, concise, and measurable.
Start your plan first with the overall goal you are trying to accomplish. From there, you can further break it down into milestones to help you accomplish that goal. Finally, you can breakdown those milestones into metric based action items.
A simplified example, might look something like this:
Goal: Wake up an hour earlier than my current average wake-up time.
Milestones: Wake up at least 30 minutes earlier on average for 2 months. Wake up at least an hour earlier on average for 2 months.
Action items: For the next 30 days, I’m going to set my alarm 10 minutes earlier than normal. For the next 30 days after that I’m going to set my alarm 20 minutes earlier than normal… and so on.
Be sure to have your plan completed before you start executing. Changing a plan mid-execution is OK, but it’s imperative to start off on the right path. Be sure to not beat yourself up if a few of the action items in the plan don’t go exactly right.
That being said, it might be time to re-evaluate your plan if milestones are missed or many action items aren’t being completed.
3. For plans that are complex - try utilizing the Triage method.
The triage method is a great way to prioritize or determine prioritization of your action items within your plan. For plans that are simple and straightforward, this method is less important.
You can first start with defining the value of each of your action items. Be sure to take into account how long that action will take, how dependent or independent that task is compared to others (i.e. does this need to happen before that?).
In action it would look something like this:
Goal: Start a freelance business
Milestones: Find solution to a real business pain point, get first client, form business as LLC, setup business bank account…
Action items:
- Interview friends, family, and acquaintances that are business owners or individuals that understand a department of the business they work for really well.
- Ask questions and find their pain points as an individual in their business or pain points of a department in their business.
- Compare and see if any of your skills line up with any of their pain points. If so, GREAT you have a business. If not, learn a skill that lines up with a pain point and then GREAT you have a business.
- Prepare state and federal papers to form your LLC
- File state and federal papers
- Evaluate banks that have the best options for a newly formed small businesses
.…etc.
Make sense? It’s really hard to have a business without creating real value. In this case, it’s imperative to find if there’s value in what you can offer as a freelancer. There are some mission critical steps that should be taken before a freelancing business should be formed.
Don’t fret about the things that will work themselves out whether you do anything or not[i.e. coming up with a “creative” business name], as well as those things that cannot be resolved [i.e. focusing on learning skills that don’t have much value to a business].
Stay focused and good luck my friends. Until next time, I bid you farewell.
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With that, I hope you learned something and had a take-away or two that you can share to your network. I would be overjoyed if you had any feedback from the good, to the bad, to the ugly.
