Setting clear and achievable goals is vital to success, whether in a business or personal context. After all, how else would you know in which direction you’re heading? However, if you don’t put in place specific plans for how you will go about achieving these goals, chances are you may never reach them. Or, even if you do, it may take a lot more time, resources and effort than it should have done.
Planning is indispensable to success
Before we delve into the practicalities of how to plan effectively, let’s take a brief look at the key benefits of planning:
- It provides direction: Planning forces you to define your goals and objectives in detail, including things such as timelines, available resources and gaps or limits. This acts as a compass for your decisions and actions, ensuring that they are aligned with and supportive of your goals.
- It enables you to optimise your resources: We all have certain resources such as time, money, skills and authority at our disposal that we can use to achieve our goals. While some have more than others, everyone’s resources are inherently finite. Planning ensures that you make the best possible use of your available resources to support your goals, instead of wasting resources by misallocating or under-utilisation.
- It helps you avoid or manage risks: Effective planning includes identifying potential challenges and, importantly, outlining specific contingency measures for avoiding these pitfalls or minimising their impact.
- It keeps you motivated: When you have a plan, it’s easy to track your progress. Seeing how far you’ve come can motivate you to keep going, even if you haven’t achieved your ultimate goal yet. This is especially relevant for long-term goals that take months or even years to accomplish.
Practical tips for effective planning
To reap these benefits, you have to approach your planning in a certain way. Here are practical tips on how to create a plan that is bound to become a tool of success.
- Refine your goals
Before you craft your plan, it’s crucial to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve. Have a look at the goals you’ve set and check that they are as specific as possible (e.g. by what date you want to achieve them), measurable (include specific metrics such as the amount to save or the percentage of business leads to convert) and achievable (setting unrealistic goals is setting yourself up for failure). If your goals do not meet these requirements, make the necessary adjustments. - Do a SWOT analysis
A comprehensive analysis of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) – both internal and external – is invaluable to how you will go about achieving your goals. Incorporating these into your plan (with mitigating actions where necessary) can save a lot of time and frustration in unnecessarily having to adjust your plan or even your goals later on. - Break it down
Significant and/or long-term goals can seem overwhelming when you first start out. Breaking these down into smaller, interim goals with actionable steps for each of these goals is a crucial step in the planning process and will make a vast difference to your chances of success and your level of motivation. - Use available tech and tools
There are various planning and project management tools available that can help you streamline and optimise the planning process, especially if you are doing planning for your business. These tools vary in pricing, available features and complexity, so make sure you choose the option that is suitable for your specific needs. - Be flexible
As the saying goes, change is the only constant. These inevitable changes – whether internal or external, planned or unexpected – can affect your planning. It’s therefore important to regularly review your plan and adjust it as necessary. Agility and flexibility are critical to your success.
