Planning is one of the most important project management and time management techniques. Planning is preparing a sequence of action steps to achieve some specific goal. If you do it effectively, you can reduce much the necessary time and effort of achieving the goal.

A plan is like a map. When following a plan, you can always see how much you have progressed towards your project goal and how far you are from your destination. Knowing where you are is essential for making good decisions on where to go or what to do next.

One more reason why you need planning is again the 80/20 Rule. It is well established that for unstructured activities 80 percent of the effort give less than 20 percent of the valuable outcome. You either spend much time on deciding what to do next, or you are taking many unnecessary, unfocused, and inefficient steps.

Planning is also crucial for meeting your needs during each action step with your time, money, or other resources. With careful planning you often can see if at some point you are likely to face a problem. It is much easier to adjust your plan to avoid or smoothen a coming crisis, rather than to deal with the crisis when it comes unexpected.

To understand better how personal goal setting works, it is good to have a simple picture of how your mind is functioning. You can think of your mind being built of two parts: conscious and subconscious minds. Conscious mind is responsible for your current awareness and decision making. It is only around 12 % of your mind. The other 88 % is your subconscious mind.
Subconscious mind is where you have your personality, where all your feelings and thoughts come from. Your memory, with all your personal values, beliefs, and habits , is also there.

You have quite good and direct control over your conscious mind. It takes more effort and sophistication to direct and reprogram your subconscious mind, and this is where smart personal goal setting techniques and guidelines are particularly helpful.

 

A written to do list is a simple technique that can increase your productivity by 20 percent or more, if you don't use it already. It also has extra benefits of clearing your mind and saving you energy and stress.
Try to spend 5-10 minutes each day on planning your activities with a daily to do list. Start your day with it. Even better, every evening write a plan for the next day, listing your daily things to do. It is important that you actually write your tasks.

Some people are more comfortable doing it on paper, while others prefer using a computer. Try and see what works better for you.

After you've listed all your tasks, review your to do list and decide on the priority of each task. Give higher priority to the tasks that get you closer to your goals.

A proven simple technique is an ABC rating of your priorities. Mark the tasks on your to do list with "A's" if they are critical for your goals and simply must be be done that day (or else you face serious consequences).

"B's" are less urgent but still important tasks that you should start right after you are done with "A's". "C's" are "nice to do" things that you could do if you have any time left after "A's" and "C's". Those tasks can be safely moved to another day.

One important tip to keep in mind. If during a day some new unplanned task comes up, don't do anything until you put that new task on your list and rate it by priority. See it written among the other tasks and put it in perspective. The more you let go off the urge to skip that simple step, the more productive and satisfied you become.

When making a to do list, break down your complex tasks into smaller manageable pieces, and focus on one at a time.

Finally, after completion of a task take a moment to look at the result and feel the satisfaction of the progress.

 

When writing an action plan to achieve a particular goal or outcome, you can get much help from the following steps.

Clarify your goal: Can you get a visual picture of the expected outcome? How can you see if you have reached your destination? What does make your goal measurable? What constraints do you have, like the limits on time, money, or other resources.

Write a list of actions: Write down all actions you may need to take to achieve your goal. At this step focus on generating and writing as many different options and ideas as possible. Take a sheet of paper and write more and more ideas, just as they come to your mind. While you are doing this, try not to judge or analyze.

Analyze, prioritize, and prune: Look at your list of actions. What are the absolutely necessary and effective steps to achieve your goal? Mark them somehow. After that, what action items can be dropped from in the plan without significant consequences for the outcome. Cross them out.

Organize your list into a plan: Decide on the order of your action steps. Start from looking at your marked key actions. For each action, what other steps should be completed before that action? Rearrange your actions and ideas into a sequence of ordered action steps. Finally, look at your plan once again. Are there any ways to simplify it even more?

Monitor the execution of your plan and review the plan regularly: How much have you progressed towards your goal by now? What new information you have got? Use this information to further adjust and optimize your plan.