Organize Your Day & Stop Wasting Time: A Proven Plan

In this short article, I am going to share with you four functions of planning that are going to set the stage for your day so that you can almost, without effort, force yourself to do the things that matter to you the most FIRST.

Why this is Important?

Well, as you probably know, when doing the small things first, they tend to multiply.

For example, if we check the email early in the morning, that seems to be a small activity that usually may take 2-3 minutes, but it turns out that we stay longer, checking out stuff which other people send to us (videos, articles, news, TV shows, politics … ). This is quite frustrating, because as you check your email first, as you wake up in the morning, you are simply going to be consumed by it. That’s why doing the things that are important to you FIRST is of a major necessity. And obviously, email checking is not, unless you get paid for checking your email :-]

You are going to accomplish tremendously, if you are doing the important things first. And planning itself is going to help you find and execute those important areas, in fact, this structure of planning itself is going to MOTIVATE you to do the significant stuff first.

The process is quite simple. And I’ve learned this from Brian Tracy and Wyatt Woodsmall – the two most influential time management experts on me.

The system goes like this:

1. Establish Your Goals and Objectives – The more clear you are about them, the better.
2. Formulate a Strategy – What’s the process of reaching those objectives and goals? Step by step process that’s specific enough to outline the action steps that have to be taken to make it happen.
3. Implement the Plan – Simply you take action toward the process you have outlined previously
4. Evaluate the Success of the Plan – Adjustments are always needed, when it comes to planning. That’s because no plan is perfect, unless it is proven to work.

I’d like to give you more guidance and details on how to use these four aspects of planning. But before that, I’d like to tell you more about different ways that you can use this aspect of planning, because planning itself IS NOT a system. And that’s the biggest misconception out there.

The system is simply PROVEN PLAN that WORKS.

As you create a plan that has a particular outcome, there’s no way of knowing if that’s going to work. Even if you borrow a “proven strategy” that worked for somebody else. Well, this does not mean, it is going to work for you, because your situation may be different, and what works for somebody else, may not work for you.

You do not want to make things perfect, when it comes to planning, because that’s just the theory. I used to do this mistake so many times that wasted a lot of time along the way.

The best way is to approach your plan with “whatever” mindset. If the plan does not work, who cares. All plans I’ve personally formulated FAILED. But this did not stop me, and it actually allowed me to create even better plans as a result of that.

Planning is a LEARNING PROCESS, rather than a strict “to do list” to follow.

So, you do not want to waste time on making a “perfect plan,” because there’s no such thing, since the plan is just a theory, not an application.

However, planning is going to determine the direction you want to move through, and re-adjust that path as you revise your plan. It is the direction of which you are going to do the important things first, rather than the smaller insignificant stuff.

Planning does not work for those, who want to make the plan perfect. Instead, trying to make the plan work over and over again, by revising it often, and eventually we want to create a SYSTEM from it.