Are You Using Your Planning Time in the Most Effective Way?
Do you allow other tasks or more tangible activities to invade your time for planning? Have you ever felt that planning time is a luxury that you cannot work into your schedule? Those are common thoughts which prevent many leaders from maximizing their potential because they overlook the importance of having a system for planning effectively. Planning takes discipline, but there are some things you can do to help ‘build muscles’ for effectively looking forward and developing your plans.
Here are four things you can do to make your planning a value-added activity.
Schedule Time
Block a specific, uninterrupted time for planning throughout the week. This is not free time. Treat this time as if it is an important meeting that you would not miss aside from an extreme emergency. Make this time that you will be fully present, your mind awake and energetic. Try to keep this time consistent from week to week so you know when it will be and can work towards having this time.
Capture Ideas to Work on During Your Planning Time
Throughout the day or week, capture ideas that you want to come back to for planning. Developing a system that works for you to capture thoughts in the moment and come back to during your planning time will free you to work on current projects, while knowing that you have recorded the idea that needs further review. It is important that you write those ideas down, whether in an app on your phone or on paper. Part of capturing must be to write it down somewhere.
Build an Agenda for Your Planning Time
This may sound odd, but you need a plan for your planning session to maximize the time. Take the ideas you have captured since your previous planning session and lay out what you want to accomplish during your time. Having this ahead of the planning session (perhaps the night before) will allow you to begin thinking about those items before your planning session. If that is not possible, begin every planning session reviewing your ideas and notes to determine what you will use the rest of your session to work on. It is important to not allow this to become the planning session. Once you have your agenda, then you can get to work on those items.
Write Your Action Steps Down
The last step in helping you establish a productive planning session is having a way to capture what you will do coming out of the session. This will jumpstart you into accomplishing your plans. Take the last five to ten minutes of your planning time to capture the specific next steps. Having these action steps always helps me feel as though I have really moved myself forward. It illustrates how important the time was and it seems to lift a weight off my shoulders.
These four steps can ensure a productive use of time and make planning more tangible for you. You will have a system to capture ideas, specific time to review and build on those ideas, and walk away with action steps to realize the benefits of your ideas. Build a routine around your planning time and watch your productivity and effectiveness improve exponentially.
What steps will your take to make your planning time for effective for you?
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