Daily success occurs by design. It doesn’t happen accidentally. It’s the result of solid preparation; and preparation depends first and foremost on good planning.

In order to plan, you have to know where you want to go. The more specific your goal is, the more precise your planning can be. In fact, you could argue that you need to plan in order to plan.

Suppose you want to create a new product.

You start by deciding what problem your customers have that you need to solve. It could be that you don’t know, or that you only have the vaguest notion. What do you do? You create a plan to find out. You evaluate a number of possible methods for gathering the information you need and for analysing it.

Academics do this routinely for every study they do.

That’s because it’s all too easy to contaminate the information, and bad information yields inaccurate results. Now anytime you think about how to have a successful day, you do exactly the same thing. Perhaps you’ve been doing for so long that it’s second nature. And if that’s the case, then you’ll want to pay close attention to what follows.

Set aside time to plan

The first thing is that you have to set aside the time to plan. The more complex the problem, the more time you’ll need, especially the first few occasions that you go through this process. You should figure on spending at least 20 minutes on planning alone. It’s that important.

Some people don’t plan. Instead, they decide on each step as they do the previous one. You can waste a lot of time and resources doing it this way. That’s because you’re likely to do a bit of running hither and thither.

Remember the tortoise and the hare?

The hare took a lot more steps than the tortoise to reach his destination. Why that was the case doesn’t really matter.  The fact is that he ignored the shortest distance between two points. And if nothing else, that proves that motion is not equal to progress.

You need a routine

The most successful people all do. The routines (some call them rituals) are all different, but they still have them. That’s because you can accomplish a lot more by following a plan you created earlier than by drifting from one thing to the next or worse: Trying to do many things at once.

So, you need to plan your routine.

How do you do that? By, as Stephen Covey has suggested, in his book The Seven Habits, beginning with the end in mind.

Larks

For example, are you one of the fortunate few who awakes at 5.30 am and without coffee is ready to discuss complex topics?

If you are, then you need to work on those things that demand the greatest amount of concentration as early in the day as possible? You might start your day with some meditation, to help you get back to your centre. Then you’d probably have a high protein breakfast. And then you’d hunker down and focus on your best work for the day. After a couple two or three hours, you’d probably be ready for a break.

Everyone’s different.

It could be ten minutes or more depending on whether you were going to go back to what you were doing or starting something else. If you’re a lark, then you have to finish whatever work you do that requires all the brain-power you can muster by lunchtime because after that you won’t have the mental energy to concentrate to the extent that you need to. And so after lunch would be a good time to update yourself on email.

Thing is that many larks lose their most productive time by checking and reacting to what’s in their inboxes first thing in the morning. If you’re like most people, however, then you’re not an early-bird.

Everyone else

Maybe you’re among those who need a few cuppas just to find your keys. It may be mid-morning before you’re ready to tackle anything resembling concentration.

Or perhaps you’re a night-owl.

It must be said that not many people really are. Instead, they’ve gotten into the habit of staying up late.

If they started going to bed a few minutes earlier each night and getting up a little earlier every morning, then after a few months their schedules would be in synch with the rest of the world.

The point is that you have to know when you’re at your best and then plan to do the most demanding work in your day at that time. Is this what you do? If it is, then pat yourself on the back. You are among the few that do. If not, then undoubtedly it’s because you’ve failed to plan for things to be otherwise.

How do you want your day to turn out?

In order to plan for success, you have to decide what your preferred outcome is. Then you can design your activities and schedule according to that.

80/20 - again

You may recall The 80/20 Principle from earlier posts here, or in other articles. According to the 80/20 Principle, you’ll accomplish 80% of your results from 20% of your effort. This is a law.

You can’t change it, so you might as well plan your activities so that you can take advantage of it. When you evaluate the things you need to do, then do so according to that which will give you the greatest return for the time and / or resources expended. It’s possible that these tasks will be the easiest to complete, but don’t bank on it.

In any case, that shouldn’t even enter the picture. The standard of measurement is the results that come from the effort; not the difficulty of that effort. As you get better at this process, you may find that you are thinking about your goals and tasks at the same time as how you’re going to accomplish them. You must resist this because with that will come the desire to look for what’s easiest.

The task that will give you the greatest return should be the first one that you work on.

The second task should be the one that gives you the greatest return after that. Then the third and the fourth in the same way. Even though 80% of your outcomes will come from 20% of your effort, the results will be skewed.

For example, What if less than 1% of what you do will give more than half of your total results?  You would want to find out what that 1% is and do it until you’re finished. Then apply 80/20 again and look for that 1% that will give you more than half of what remains. What if one task on your list gives you half your total results? It probably does…

The Minimum Effective Dose

One principle which Tim Ferriss, bestselling author of The Four-Hour-Work-Week, adheres to is what he calls the Minimum Effective Dose. It’s the minimum that’s required to get the job done.

If you apply this principal in the other parts of your life, and not just in how to be productive at work, you’ll be amazed at how much more you can accomplish. Think about it. Why would you spend two hours doing something if 30 minutes was effective?

Yet there are people who do this every time they go to the gym. The “reasoning” is that if 30 minutes of exercise is all you need, then just think how effective two hours would be? Except that it doesn’t work like that, any more than taking eight aspirin is four times as effective as two.

What is essential?

When you assess what is essential, you’re also asking what can be left out. That’s because you can’t do everything.  You have to decide what must be done; what task or activity would cause you to be unsuccessful if it didn’t happen; and what things could you omit and get the results that you want. If you equate busy-ness with productivity, then you’re thinking like the hare. If you equate doing the minimum that gets the job done with productivity, then you’ll be successful just as the tortoise was.

If you eliminate the things that prevent you from succeeding, then you’ll increase your chances of success. And that’s the goal; right?

Planning to fail

It has been said that if you fail to plan, then you plan to fail.

You have to decide what you want, consider the options available to you to achieve it, choose the ones which collectively will give you the greatest return for the least effort, and then put your plan into practice. The easiest way to do that is to create a routine that you can follow, and then to implement it over and over again. If you do that, then success is almost inevitable.

Anything less than that will result in an unnecessary expenditure of time, money, and other resources in the pursuit of results that you hadn’t planned to get.

And those results are likely to be much less than what you wanted in the first place.

If you want to be more effective at daily planning – contact me here