It is said that proper prior planning prevents poor performance. These six Ps reminds us that planning before embarking on a task, project, or your day, will help stop the failures that we see so often around us.
Failures, are of course not all bad, for it is failures that lead us to success. They can be minimised though, and that is through the appropriate level of planning.
A few minutes of planning before you start your trip can save you a wrong turn, or going back and forth unnecessarily if you need to make a number of stop overs while driving. Like wise, planning before starting a project can help set the momentum in the right direction with an increasing pace, rather than heading in to regular road blocks that may slow and even demotivate the team.
Once you have written out your three Ds, now is the time to start planning. This will take shape in different forms, a short-term plan for your day, medium for the week and month, and long term plan for the years to come. What milestones should you reach in and by when? What assistance will you need to achieve the milestones? What tools or skills, funds etc do you need for each of the milestones? Review on a regular basis and adjust the plan to ensure a successful outcome. Resist the temptation to start on the first item you write on the list – rather, spend the time to ensure you complete the list as thoroughly as possible.
Working of a list of tasks to do will help you achieve not only the steps required to reach milestones, and ultimately your goal, but also set of dopamine hits in your brain as you tick off each task as “done”. There is a kind of pleasure that one feels once you mark a task off as having been achieved. It is that which motivates you to keep going, go faster, and achieve what possibly was once an impossible dream.
This is the same principle used by tech giants and game makers to keep you on their platform, without naming any! They use these endorphin hits and the increased levels of dopamine in the mind to ensure that the user stays on, for ever increasing periods of time. This is because the mind needs more and more dopamine hits in order to feel the same sense of satisfaction.
Now imagine this when it comes to your life goals. Imagine that the mind switches from hours on end scrolling through pictures and posts that lead to nothing but wastage of time and useless information (or disinformation!!), to being focused on the tasks at hand that need to be achieved in order to reach life goals before deadlines – and feeling great about it!
Using a tasks list – you can have that sense of pleasure and satisfaction all the while working away at what really matters.
Invest in some time to plan your day. Consider it a time investment in which you reap a huge reward. For every 10 minutes invested, expect a 10 time return on your investment. In other words, 10 minutes of planning should save you 100 minutes of time otherwise wasted. Who wouldn’t want to make such an investment?
Financially, if your time is worth $100 an hour, 10 minutes would cost you $16.67. That investment should return $1,666.67, Or 100 minutes in which you can perform other work, tasks, and complete other projects.
Start planning today, you really cannot afford not to.
Soon, we will discuss how to prioritise the tasks on the list to further maximise your efficiency and effectiveness.
(Last Updated on September 1, 2022)