Creating a plan can be time consuming, frustrating and even a bit boring. However, a good plan greatly increases your odds of success. So if you find yourself asking “why should I plan?”, here are 5 reasons that it’s worthwhile:
It helps you refine your goal
Vague plans are pretty worthless and if you’re not specific about what you want, it’s hard to know when you’ve achieved it. The act of creating a plan and documenting the steps and timing to get there can help you to clarify what exactly you want. Ideally, you will know before you start planning, but often, you find that your goal changes during the planning process.
Milestones keep you on track
Creating a plan gives you checkpoints (such as to-do list items) to will show you’re heading in the right direction. By having little celebrations at appropriate milestones you’ll maintain your enthusiasm. You will also be more likely to notice if you’ve gotten off track and haven’t been able to tick anything off for some time.
No delays due to missing resources
Creating a plan can help you identify any resources you’ll need ahead of time. Then you can allocate spending, or even purchase resources ahead of time. Then once you’re on a roll, you don’t need to delay progress while you wait for resources to arrive. Even worse, you will be less likely to have to abandon a goal partway through due to lack of finance.
Timelines keep you focused
Having a timeline keeps you on track and stops you from getting distracted. Whether it’s a full-on schedule or just a vague idea of when you’d like to do something, a timeline helps keep you moving forward. A timeline will also make it easier to notice if things start to go wrong. Then you can look at your plan and your goals and refine where necessary. Otherwise you might find you’ve wasted weeks, months or years without progress towards what you really want.
You can reuse it next time
One of the best things about creating a plan is that they can be reused. Generally, there will need to be a few tweaks, but modifying a plan is far easier than starting from scratch. For example, I have a blog plan spreadsheet to make the blogging process easy for me. Each month has 4 topics that I blog on, so over a year I will do 12 posts on each topic. Then each month has a theme (this month is Planning). Every year, I copy the previous years worksheet, delete all the data, change the dates and boom – I have a blog plan ready to go. I also find it useful to be able to look back at previous years to see what I’ve already done. I’ve been using the current plan, with multiple tweaks, since 2012!
That’s 5 reason why it’s worth taking the time to plan. Don’t keep asking yourself “why should I plan?”. If you want to make changes this year, or to get more organised, it’s time to create a plan.
