Timely Tips for Your Daily Planning
June 4, 2008
Timely Tips for Your Daily Planning
By Gene Swindell
The Voice of Change™
In my office is a paperweight made of marble with these words engraved on one side: The hurrieder I go, the behinder I get. Playing “catch-up” each day is largely due to not planning. Those words are a constant reminder to plan, plan, plan.
Here’s five principles to help you maximize your daily planning:
1. Do your planning the night before. Set aside time at the end of each day to plan your next day. The major benefit is there is a plan of action completed and you leave your job with a sense of certainty and control about the next day and with a sense of anticipation you would not ordinarily have.
2. Put your plan into writing. When you apply pen to paper, there is an indelible imprint on your brain. There is extraordinary power in the writing your plan. When we try to keep track of everything in our heads, things tend to slip through the cracks.
3. “Have to’s” and “Want to’s”. Good planning involves more than just
properly administering the “Have To’s”. We should better handle our “Have To’s”, but we also need to do a good job taking care of our “Want To’s”. Plan out not only the things you “have to” do, but, more importantly, the things you “want to” do.
4. Over plan your day. “If you want to get something done, give it to a busy person.” The more you plan to do, the more you can get done because you take advantage of Parkinson’s Law which says, in part, that a project tends to expand with the time allocated for it. If you have one thing to do for the day, it will take all day. If you have three things to do for the day, you’ll get all three done. If you have twelve things to get done for the day, you might not get all twelve done, but probably will get nine completed. Having a lot to do creates a healthy sense
of pressure on us and we almost automatically become better time managers.
5. Prioritize your list. Your list will almost always include “urgent” as well as “important but not urgent” items. Some items are more urgent, others less so. Without some direction, we tend to gravitate towards the “not urgent” items because they are typically easier to do, take less time, and may even be more fun than many of our “urgent” items. A simple numerical listing will work: Put a “1” next the most important item, then place a “2” next to the second most important item, continuing the process until all the items on your list are
prioritized in order of their importance.
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Gene Swindell is an internationally-acclaimed speaker/trainer/business consultant specializing in leadership, team building, communication and customer service. Contact him at gene@geneswindell.com or call 770-926-1395.
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