How to Plan Your Life



How to Plan Your Life

By C. Paul Morrey

The Importance of Planning

Great people put themselves on the path of opportunity on purpose. Effective planning will give you opportunities in life to do what you think is important. The clock ticks at the same rate for all of us, those who accomplish more of what they want to do it by controlling what they do and when they do it—by planning.

Priorities

Priorities are what you consider important. Your priorities may be relationships, such as family and friends; activities, such as service, self-improvement, or pleasure-seeking; or things, such as a house, business, or work of art. People tend to organize priorities in order of importance and act to meet the needs of the most important priorities first.

The importance of each of your priorities is constantly changing because once you have met the immediate needs of one priority it will decrease in importance. Due to the dynamic nature of priorities, any ordered list is only a static “snapshot” of your priorities at a given time.

Although the order of importance of priorities changes frequently, your actual list of priorities probably changes very infrequently. It is common for people to maintain a constant set of priorities for several years. Throughout your life your list of priorities will change—many things that seem important to a youth are not important to a senior—and your activities will change correspondingly.

Your priorities can usually be described in one or two words: health, family, career, community service, etc.

Goals

Goals are measurable indicators of how well you are meeting your priorities. Reaching a goal indicates that you are successfully meeting the needs of the priority from which the goal is derived.

Each of your goals should be described in a single sentence or phrase from which the status of your goal can be determined. For example, “Own my own house” is a simple goal. The implied question, “Do you own your own house?” answers whether or not the goal has been reached.

How well your goals result in your priorities being met depends on your ability to set good goals. Your goals should be reviewed and revised occasionally to verify that they are correctly and accurately related to your priorities.

Determining how close you are to achieving your goal is determined by a review of the objectives related to the goal.

Objectives

Objectives are the milestones that signal progress towards your goal. Objectives are specific and progressively measurable—meaning that the amount of the objective that you have completed (and consequently, the amount that remains to be completed) can be determined.

For example, your progress on the objective, “Save $20,000 for a down payment on a new house” can be determined easily by answering the question, “How much do you have saved now?”

Objectives may progress in parallel or in series. Although your objectives may differ in amount of effort to complete, time to complete, or complexity; completing all of the objectives of a goal means that your goal is reached. Frequent revision of objectives is important to ensure that your objectives accurately represent milestones towards your goals.

Tasks

Tasks describe the actions that you will perform in order to meet your objectives. Performing any task requires time. Specifying the time component required by your task is the key to effective planning. The order in which tasks are performed another important part of planning.

A task is described in a sentence or phrase and always followed with a description of the time component required by the task. For example, “Save $1,000 for the down payment in the month of May.”

The two methods of specifying the time of a task are using deadlines or amounts. Deadlines describe a point in time at which you will judge the task to be either complete or incomplete. Continuing the previous example, “At the end of May do I have $1,000 saved?” Assigning an amount of time to a task means that you will allow yourself to work on the task up to the amount before you review the task. For example, “Read the real estate listings looking for possible houses to buy for 1 hour.” The amount of time spent on the task does not need to be consecutive. You might read for half an hour on the train going to work and another half an hour on the train returning from work. When either the amount of time you spend working on the task is reached or you complete the task then you can review the task, any related tasks, and the objective that is related to the task for further refinement. Assigning amounts of time to your tasks is useful in cases where your schedule is not too strict or offers opportunities to “squeeze in” work on tasks.

Like objectives, tasks may be planned in parallel if they do not depend on other tasks. However, tasks require time, and time comes to you serially—not in parallel. You should determine dependencies among your tasks to determine a required order. In tasks that do not have dependencies use the following criteria to determine order:

1. Payoff

2. Complexity

3. Difficulty

4. Fun

The payoff of a task is the ratio of the effort required and the benefit derived (the cost/benefit ratio). Sometimes a task can give you a large benefit from a small amount of effort. These tasks should be done first. The reason is that they will often teach you more about what you are doing and thereby improve your performance on the tasks that require more work and offer lower benefit. This practice can improve your overall efficiency.

Complex and difficult tasks are given a high priority in task ordering for the same reason. Often called “front-end loading”, this practice helps you to be aware of problems with a task early enough in the time allotment of the task to resolve them within the time allotted.

Tasks that you consider fun activities should be used as rewards for yourself. Looking forward to the fun task that is coming up will help maintain your motivation for your current “not so fun” task. Some people perform better by evenly distributing fun tasks. Others prefer that each successive task be more fun than the last. You can find your own style—but avoid doing the fun tasks first. That is a sure way to get bogged down in the later tasks.

Relating What You Do to Your Priorities

Your actions are tasks. When you plan you are able to trace a path from each of your actions to its corresponding objective, from each objective to its corresponding goal, and from each goal to its corresponding priority. If you cannot determine the path from task to priority then you probably don’t need to be doing that task.

Identify your current priorities using a bottom-up approach. Keep track of the tasks you perform. Use this task history to trace a path to the priority of the task. Once you have a list of priorities you can decide if any are missing and add them to your list.

Determine how well you are satisfying each priority and start your detailed planning on the priorities that are under satisfied. You will probably not be able to plan your whole life in one planning session but try to plan for a complete priority. Some priorities require very little planning, simply being mindful of them is sufficient for you to take advantage of chances you have to meet their needs. Other priorities will require you to carefully list each goal, objective, and task. Many of your priorities can fall somewhere between these extremes.

Over time you will develop a talent for recognizing how a task relates to a priority. Depending on the current level of importance of the related priority you will be able to organize your tasks so that you are accomplishing what you really want—your priorities. Unimportant tasks will be winnowed out of your schedule and you will find that you are doing what is really important to you.

Frequency and Scope of Planning Sessions

Plan as often as you need to. Plan for the time until the next time you plan. For example, in your daily planning you will plan for the day. In your weekly planning you will plan for the week. In your monthly planning you will plan for the month; et cetera.

Create a planning book. The first page contains your list of priorities. Then include a page for each priority. On the top of each page, write the priority. Then write the goals for that priority. Under each goal write the objectives of the goal. Under each objective write the tasks of the objective. Then add each task to your calendar.

Start each planning session with a review of your priorities. Identify any priorities that are not being adequately satisfied. Review your calendar and update your task list—marking those that have been completed. Mark the objectives and goals that have been met. Review your goals and objectives, modifying them and their related tasks where necessary. Review your calendar and add the tasks first that are related to the under satisfied priorities, then add tasks that are related to other priorities.

Limit your planning scope to a time frame that only slightly exceeds the amount of time until your next planning session. For example, during a weekly planning session limit yourself to the tasks that will be on your calendar over the next two weeks. Save the tasks that are scheduled for next month for your monthly planning session. Be sure to schedule planning sessions on your calendar to avoid entering time for which you have not planned. This is not to say that you do not put something new on your calendar or list as it comes up, just focus your planning session on activities that will occur before your next planning session.

Planning for longer time periods tends to focus more on goals and objectives while planning for shorter time periods focuses on tasks. You should plan each day, week, month, and year. While these planning sessions need to be complete, they should not be a burden. If you cannot see the benefit from your planning sessions then it may be that your sessions are either too detailed or too frequent.

Planning Skills

Issues to Consider

Feasibility: Estimation, Scheduling, Planning Skills

Planning Isn’t Doing

Examples:

Course (for a student)

Health and Exercise

Family vacation

Planning Tools

Planning Book

Calendar

“To Do” List

Software

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