In this post I want to touch on a very important topic, planning. Planning is important not only in business but in everyone’s everyday life. A good plan can lead to an efficient realization of your goals. Just a few years ago I didn’t pay much attention to the importance of planning. However, my own experiences of unsuccessful attempts at achieving my goals persuaded me that planning is one of the keys to success.

A plan is the connection between reality and a goal. A plan also is a set of actions that will lead to the realization of that goal. Without such connections it is very difficult to achieve a goal. Therefore, everyone who wants to achieve a goal NEEDS to plan in advance.

I can divide everybody into three groups according to their planning habits:

1. People who don’t plan enough. This is probably the majority of people in the world and I have been one of them. People who frequently don’t know what to do in different predictable situations are likely to fall into this group.
2. People who plan too much. These people spend too much time on planning. They have plans so detailed that they have to plan the planning process. Be careful to not enter this group!
3. People who plan as much as necessary. This is the group I want to be in! I’m not very organized, so sometimes I fall out of this group :). Meanwhile, everyone has to try to enter and stay in this group. Why? Let me explain what a good plan can do for you:

A plan shows the steps you have to do.
The main purpose of a plan is to show all of the steps or tasks that would lead you to realizing this goal. For example you are a university graduate and want to find a job in finances. So you create a plan of how to find a job. Such plan can include a list of interviews you must go to, people related to finances you must talk to, financial companies you have to gather information about, etc…

A plan helps to organize.
Having a list of interviews, people and companies you can set everything in order and make a calendar of tasks to do.

A plan can show the most efficient steps you have to do.
If you take time to make a quality plan it is likely that you will be able to identify the most efficient tasks that can lead you to your goal in the most fast, efficient way. This will let you focus on what is important and eliminate tasks that may not be as useful. For example, some of interviews might be useless, so it is good idea to spend less time on them and concentrate more on interviews that are likely to lead to success.

A plan can show the likelihood of success.
Sometimes a plan can show the likelihood of success not only to you but also to others. The very best example of this is a business plan. A business plan is a plan for a company or enterprise. It is one of the most important elements that influences the decision of an investor or bank of whether to invest/lend money to a company or not.

A plan helps to measure the requirements to achieve a goal.
As T! wrote in his article “What Gets Measured Gets Managed”, “Once we have good measurements and people are forced to evaluate and track the progress of these metrics it is amazing how fast you can go from being out of control to on track and then to exceeding expectations”. Even though T! was writing about performance, it works the same with planning. With a plan you can measure what you actually need to achieve your plan. For the business plan example it will be “how much money does the company need?”, “what will be return on investments?”, “what are the risks?”, etc…

To wrap up I want to share two planning tips that I personally use

1. Plan when you feel that you have nothing to do. If you are in this situation it means that you didn’t plan enough at first, so now you are wasting your time. Planning when you have nothing to do can be very efficient. Do it!
2. Plan when you are overwhelmed with work. Yes, that is right! Plan when you have too much work to do. A good plan in such a situation can help you organize your time to do tasks more efficiently.

I hope after reading this article you are now convinced too that planning is really important!

-O.

One of the biggest benefits a plan gives me is it makes me do the things I need to do but don’t want to do. Typically when I get tasks I’m not particularly excited about doing I put them off in place of one of the many other tasks that I have to do. This is not good because these other tasks aren’t always the most important or efficient use of my time and even more importantly they may not be helping me get closer to my goal. When I have a plan I can identify what is important and an efficient use of my time and force myself to do it because I can see the rewards and benefits of doing it.

I also wanted to make a side comment about the business plan example in regards to raising capital. I think here O. is mainly concerned with the start up of a company. In my experience a bank has never asked for a business plan, only financial information. However before you have this financial history, being able to show an investor or bank that you’ve put some thought into how you will be using their money will go a long way.

-T!