1. Communication

One of the most important skills in any business (where everyone is talking about) is effective communication.  It’s not just sales talk or negotiation.  It’s about communicating and understood by the other party.  Communicate clearly with your co-workers and clients, make sure all instructions and information are understood the way you want it to be.  Repeat and re-emphasize when you need to.  It doesn’t mean that you talk well is equivalent to being a good communicator.

By speaking clearly, concisely and checking back with that other party has understood what you have said, you can save a great deal of precious time

2. Planning

You can’t start without proper planning.  Be it a long term project or a short term ones, or a recurring one.  You need to plan.  You have to plan for the day, the week and the month.  Planning is essential to maximize your available time for the tasks you put forth and also for achieving your goals.

3. Prioritizing

Planning allows to list out all the things that needs to be done.  But we only got a certain amount of time that we have in our life.  We need to prioritize what is important to us.  Look at your To-do lists everyday.  Which one is more important and needs your attention first?

4. Procrastination

One of the biggest problems we humans encountered is procrastination.  The key thing is to admit that you are procrastination then identify the tasks that you put off the longest. Once you know which things you are likely to procrastinate about, find out the reason why you are not doing it.  By identifying the reasoning behind your procrastination issues, you can find solutions.  They can be breaking into smaller pieces, or plan the task as priority or find the best working time that you find most efficient at. Eliminate procrastination from your life and you see how much you can achieve everyday.

5. Delegation

Remember again, we have limited amount of time in a day.  You need leverage to do more tasks than what you can do alone.  Delegation comes in.  Delegate some of your routine tasks which you can quickly instruct someone else to take responsibility of.   Some of us may not like delegation as they find it a hassle to “prepare” the person for the task.  But before you think of that, give yourself the doubt that through proper communication, you will be able to automate some of the routine tasks, thus allowing you to work on the more important ones to you.

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!