You can't follow through on plans you don't have!
Plans are important. You need to make plans to achieve your goals.
You can’t follow through on plans you don’t have. Neither can anyone else on your behalf.
What are you doing to achieve your goals?
This is what I have on the wall in front of my desk.
And as plans have been on my mind a lot recently I wanted to share it with you.
Because plans are important. You need to make plans to achieve your goals, otherwise you can do a lot of work and be really busy being busy, but actually you don’t really achieve what you set out to do.
But then there’s sticking to your plans.
Just because you make a plan doesn’t mean you’ll do it.
And that’s in your personal life as well as your business – you know, all those diets and exercise plans you just didn’t stick to!
If you’ve read James Clear’s book ‘Atomic habits’, you’ll already know what akrasia is. The state of acting against your better judgment. Like procrastination or no will-power. Akrasia stops you from doing what you set out to do.
We make plans for the future. For our future selves. But we (or our brains) like immediate rewards more.
So when we’re working towards our future goals and we get distracted by something new and shiny (or a chocolate brownie), it’s our brains just thinking about the now and our present self.
There are things that you can do to stop that happening
One of those is scheduling in your tasks. You know, those tasks you created as part of the plan you made.
Actually putting aside a date, time and place to get things done makes you more likely to do it. In fact, James Clear says 2x to 3x more likely.
You’ve made your plan, you’ve broken it down into tasks, you’ve scheduled them it and you’re on track.
Fantastic.
Can you think of any other reasons why plans will help you get things done?
Because you can share them.
If you work with a partner, a VA, or a team, once you have a plan you can share it and work on it together.
Should something happen everyone knows what you want to happen, what they should be doing, what needs picking up.
End result – you still hit your goals.
Why have I been thinking about plans a lot recently?
There are all sorts of plans in our lives. The ones that helps us achieve our business goals. The ones that help us achieve our personal goals.
They help us stay out of overwhelm. Approach each day knowing that what we’re setting out to do is achievable.
They help us make progress.
That’s one of the things we help business owners with – creating plans to improve their customer experience after we’ve mapped their customer journey with them and identified lots of areas that need to change. You can never do everything all at once. You need to start somewhere and work steadily towards your goals.
Then there are plans that we make for when we’re not around
We recently lost a member of our family. She lived her whole life in the pursuit of her dream. And she succeeded. But it was her dream. Her life’s ambition. Not one that anyone else really shared – and I don’t mean within her family, but in her professional life. It was a passion, saving something historic, of cultural significance. It’s not commercially viable. There are no plans to safeguard her life’s work.
You can’t follow through on plans you don’t have. Neither can anyone else on your behalf.