Hi, and welcome to day 4 of the Top 10 Laws of Productivity and Effectiveness. Today’s law is to plan out your work. When working with a plan you are able to get much more done in a less stressful and more organized manner.
By developing a plan to get your daily taks taken care of, you will more easily be able to cut out distractions. The first step of course, is to know your objective.
If you just begin working on your objective with no real plan in place, you will end up wasting a lot of time bouncing back and forth on random tasks rather than giving any focused effort. Also, chances are you will leave something out or end up with a less than complete result.
Creating a plan can be simple or overwhelming depending on the circumstances and complexity of what you are trying to accomplish. I like to use a technique which I call “divide and conquer.”
Divide and Conquer
With the divide and conquer method, you will be able to draw out which portions of your projects are relevant to the current time frame that you are working under. It makes the process of planning much easier.
The idea is to take the overall objective, and divide it into steps of completion over and over until you have reached bite size portions of work that can be completed roughly within 2 hours or less.
In case you are not 100% sure of each and every detail, do not be too anal about it. The idea is to get it down to the most easily managable portion as possible. Begin brainstorming and listing out any potential tasks that would need to be carried out in order to complete the task within that particular context. For example, if your goal was to develop a new website for a client, your list would look like this:
Create Website for client
— Divide –
1. Draft up website design
2. Secure domain name and hosting
3. Code design and upload to server
4. Create and add content
5. SEO, Marketing, and maintenance
Okay so now we have 5 distinct areas which must be completed. We will focus on conquering the first step, which we will further divide.
Draft up website design
— Divide –
1. Search for design inspirations.
2. Contact client and bounce ideas around.
3. Choose color scheme.
4. Draft up 2-3 designs.
5. If design fits with needs of website and client is happy, move to next step.
As you can see, we have broken down the steps to more manageable chunks. Most likely if I were going to break anything down further, it would be step 4. You can continue breaking down these steps depending on how complex they are, however I will stop there for this example.
Celebrate marking off each step as a victory. The more victories you have the more you will be motivated to continue working hard. Be sure when working on each step, you use the law of setting limits. This will cause you to work much more efficiently.
Do not just read this and say to yourself, “oh, cool idea” and then not do anything. Go ahead and put it to work right now. What projects can you plan out and begin working on today? Leave a comment and discuss your experience!
