The Ageless Benefits Of Planning
As any successful business person knows, you can kill yourself trying to grow your business. You devote your time and money into your business and throw yourself into it almost without direction until you’ve stretched yourself so thin that you’re no longer productive in any aspect of your work.
“If only I’d planned my time better…!”
By forecasting an orderly work schedule, you’ll preserve both your valuable time and your sanity. Unfortunately, most people start each day off in a fury of tasks and deadlines – without a plan on how to get things done efficiently.
It’s a known fact that you can wear yourself out mentally and physically by tending to the daily tasks your business demands. On the other hand, you can learn how to plan for tomorrow and achieve even greater success – which you can enjoy as it happens.
When people don’t plan, they react to their circumstances – usually in a negative way. How many times have you gone into the office and felt irritated about something someone else has done – or not done and knowing that you’ve got caught up in the here and now – again when you really wanted to work on a fresh initiative?
Do you believe in productivity?
Productivity requires a positive attitude. If you’re always reacting to deadlines, tasks you hadn’t planned on popping up, or other people’s intrusions on your time, then you’ll be too hindered in the hassle of it all to make formidable decisions that will help drive your profits upward.
There has to be a fine balance between planning your day and being flexible enough to handle the unexpected. After all it would terrible to have every minute of your day scheduled and then find that something has thrown it off balance.
Planning shouldn’t paralyse activity but serve as a guide – a path - to help you get from point A to point B.
And planning doesn’t require a lot of time either. You simply have to plan the time to think. This means planning how you spend your time in advance. So planning should take place the day, week, month and quarter before in line with your annual plan. In this way you’ll be better able to schedule your time when you’re more aware of your company’s immediate needs.
Make a comprehensive to-do list. That doesn’t mean every single thing will get done the next day, but you want to have it on paper so that you’ll be able to give it attention at some point.
The vital importance of the “Top Three”
A vital practice is the Top Three. In other words of all the things on your list to do, what are the three you have to do to-day. Twenty priorities mean no priorities. If you want to achieve focus and concentrate your energy and effort then the Top Three is a very, very valuable practice.
Make a quick estimate of how much time each task in a plan of action will take – to give yourself an idea of how long it will take you to complete that single item on your to-do list.
The reason for this is when you fail to meet your self-imposed deadlines; it can create even more stress than if you had simply worked without a plan in place. While you might want to be Superman for a day, it won’t always happen – things are bound to present themselves as obstacles to your success.
If there are more people connected to the company – from employees to contracted labor – define their roles within the company structure so that some of the tasks can be designated for them to handle. This whole subject of delegation is something special – and we’ll look at that another time.
Putting a value on time
But here’s the rub; as you create each task, determine what it would cost for you to complete it. For instance, if your time is worth £100/hour, and you’re wasting an hour filling out forms that someone else could do for £8/hour, then you’re losing £92 an hour in profit.
Your time needs to be planned out so that you are maximizing your talents but also doing tasks that will have the highest return for your investment of each and every hour. Adding to the above example, your hour could have been used to develop an ad campaign that results in a high conversion rate of traffic to your website.
Don’t forget to add personal goals and time to your schedule. You want it to be flexible enough so that if there’s a family emergency, or if you simply need a break from it all, you won’t throw the entire business into a tailspin just because you’re not physically or mentally involved with the business 24-hours a day.
What would you do with £100,000?
Time is an irreplaceable asset. Yet we tend to spend it wildly – and, as I once did, making most of my decisions on the hoof. An advantage of planning is that we do get to choose what we do with our time. Imagine winning £100,000 and thinking about what you would want to do with it. You’d actually spend some time thinking that through, wouldn’t you? It’s the same with planning. It’s important to take some time out to plan where we investment our money, time and effort.
