Plan the Day and Week!

The value of plan­ning can­not be under­es­ti­mated.  Every­day, we are immersed doing some form of task or the other.   We need to work effec­tively and pro­duce out­put on time.  Daily and weekly plan­ning are essen­tial to cre­ate enough time for us to man­age our time at work and at home.  Plan­ning include time for work, busi­ness, fam­ily and health con­cerns.  Plan­ning allows us to have a clear path for our­selves that main­tains a bal­ance of work and play.

Why is plan­ning essential?

• Plan­ning reduces your stress level. How?  Proper plan­ning gives you the peace of mind that you have for­mu­lated appro­pri­ate mea­sures (and plan­ning) for achiev­ing your goals.
• Plan­ning pre­pares you for obsta­cle. Risk plan­ning we term it.  Con­tin­gency mea­sures are put into place for your activ­i­ties so when­ever there are unforseen issues, you are always ready for it.  Of course, we are unable to plan for all risks or sit­u­a­tions.  But at least, we can cover most of it and be pre­pared for the problems.
• Plan­ning allows us to eval­u­ate our progress. Through plan­ning you are able to know how effi­cient you really are and if tar­gets are met.  If not, you might want to adjust your tim­ings or set the right expectations.

What are the strate­gies we can use in plan­ning to achieve our goals?

• Define your goals. That is the very first step to plan­ning.  Take a few min­utes in the day to write the goals.  You need to start some­where before you can plan for it, right?
• Brain­storm the tasks required to achieve the goal. Write down all the tasks that is required first.  Order them in log­i­cal steps.  Assign an esti­mated time to com­plete each task.  This will give you a rough gauge of the total time required to achieve the goal.  Also, it gives you clear steps of what to per­form at that point of time.
• Define the roles that you will take in achiev­ing the goal. This is help­ful where you put your­self “in” the task.  You won’t get con­fused of what you are sup­posed to do or why you are sup­posed to do.  Also, this allows you to pre­vent redun­dancy of who is doing what.
• Sched­ule the tasks. Now put all the tasks into a sched­ule.  It can be a day or it can be a week.  You need to know what you have to do at a given time.  That’s for the daily sched­ule which also helps you track your progress and deter­mine if you are on time a not.  While the weekly sched­ule (or maybe the monthly sched­ule) is impor­tant for the over­all suc­cess of the project.
• Eval­u­ate your per­for­mance. As the project pro­gresses, eval­u­ate your per­for­mance con­tin­u­ously to deter­mine if you are on track or need to adjust the sched­ule.  Always take a few min­utes of the day and review your sched­ule and make changes accord­ingly.  The key thing is be flex­i­ble with your schedule.
• Fine tune plan­ning process. Some­times it’s not pos­si­ble to fol­low tightly to the planned sched­ule.  After each com­pleted goals, do a review if the planned and exe­cuted dates were in line.  If it did, good for you.  If there are improve­ments or things didn’t work out as per planned, fine-tune it!

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