Vision, when engaged properly, is the ignition switch and power source of high performance. It is the all-important ‘why’ behind the things you do. When viewed in this light, a vision has the power to enable one to confront and conquer fears, take bold consistent action, and live a life of significance.
The world is noisy, the unexpected happens, distractions arise, our innate desire for comfort tugs at us, and we lose focus on the things that we know we should do. That’s why to increase your odds of success, one of the most powerful things you can do is to create, and work from, a written weekly plan.
In 168 hours, there is easily time to sleep 8 hours a night (56 hours per week) and work 50 hours a week, if you desire. That adds up to 106 hours, leaving 62 hours per week for other things.
This is what happens when you treat your week as a blank slate. This is what happens when you fill them up only with things that deserve to be there. You build a life where you really can have it all.
Now it’s time to write your first-week plan. The plan is the roadmap needed to reach your goals. The best plans are focused on one or two things in each area that you want to make progress. The fewer goals and weekly actions there are, the easier the plan will be to execute. As George Patton once said, “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.” Don’t overanalyze the content of your plan. Don’t be concerned that your plan isn’t perfect— there are no perfect plans. Once you have a good plan, your execution of the tactics will help you to learn what works best so you can refine your plan from there.
Planning enables you to allocate your time and resources to your highest-value opportunities, it increases your odds of successfully hitting your goals, it helps you to coordinate your team, and it creates a competitive advantage.
In spite of the proven benefits of working from a plan, not everyone does so. One reason for this is that many people have a bias for taking action. While an action bias can be a good thing, it can also get in the way of effective execution. We can get impatient, and want to get on with things too quickly. An effective plan takes time to create, and it requires some hard work. It may seem counterintuitive, but by taking time to plan up front, the overall time and effort to complete a task can be significantly reduced.
Another reason that many people don’t work from a plan is that they have a belief that goes something like, “I already know what I need to do, so I don’t need a plan to get it done.” On the surface, this may seem reasonable, but unfortunately, there is almost always a gap between what people know and what they do. For example, many people want to get into better physical shape, and virtually all of them know that it takes a healthy diet and exercise, but, sadly, most people don’t ever become more fit. That’s because simply knowing what to do just isn’t enough.
Living your life in the moment, however, can be done in two very different ways— either reactively or proactively. If you are reactive in the moment, you risk taking suboptimal actions because the primary drivers of your actions are input triggers— the phone rings, the email dings, a new task appears, someone knocks on your door, and off you go. It is difficult in the moment to know what your highest value activities are because you are typically not choosing between good activity and bad activity; you are choosing between a higher value and a lower value activity and that ranking often isn’t clear in the moment.
That’s why week planning is so beneficial. With an action-based plan, you don’t have to rely on input triggers to initiate your actions; instead, your plan triggers your actions. Your action choices are made proactively at the beginning of the week when you create your plan. In short, a week plan helps you to get more of the right things done each day, and ultimately it helps you reach your goals faster and with greater impact.
Another benefit of week planning is a fiercely consistent focus on the few vital actions that drive your results. You can’t effectively pursue a large number of different things in a Week because there simply isn’t enough time to get everything done.
In a week, you only focus on the minimum number of actions that are most important to hit your goal. You also benefit from week planning because of the short time horizon. Uncertainty is reduced due to the shortened time frame, and as a result, you can plan effectively at the action level.
Have your weekly plan in place and experience how much more you start completing from the very first week.
– Article by Hashim Q Adil