Making Your Weekly/Daily Plan

The next step is probably to most important step you can take in reducing stress in your life. What we want to do next is to move those items that we have identified for each of our roles, as the most important items in our lives, to our daily task lists. How does this reduce your stress? Our minds are very powerful and if we have a single list of things that we have to get done or accomplish, our minds are going to try and work on all the items on that list all at once. We might not be thinking about all of them conciously, but in our subconcious, are minds are wearing themselves out trying to deal with all these items once.

Take the list of items that you identified, and assign them to a particular day. Make your self say "I am going to take care of this item on Tuesday.", or "This item can wait until Thursday, but I need it for the meeting on Friday," By placing the items into a daily plan you are allowing your subcouncious to say, "Alright, I do not have to worry about this item until Wednesday. " You are now able to focus on today's tasks more effectively and allow your full power to be focused on what is important today. You can relax because you know that on Wednesday, your planning tool will remind you that you need to take care of this other important item.

You can even go a step further. You can assign a particular task to an exact time in your calendar. For example let's say that you have an important proposal due later this week and you want to get the draft completed a few days early so you have plenty of time to review it. Make an appointment with your self to work on that task. Thats right, actually put it on your calendar as an appointment. If someone tries to schedule something at that time, you have the ability to say "I sorry that time will not work for me, I have an appointment. Can we find a time that will work for both of us." You have now protected the time that you are going to dedicate to that project.

There is an old saying that I say all the time, "How do you eat and elephant? One bite at a time." By breaking down your roles into tasks and planning those tasks into your day you are breaking the larger project into achievable action items and planning your time to get the most important items done first so that you will have Peak Achievement Today.

Can you take action on your "To Do List"

After yesterdays post about planning and the types of planing I received an email about an important part of any of these four planning steps from Sue. Sue is a very well organized, get it done lady who manages a very bust schedule. It does not surprise me at all that Sue is a planner and that she prescribes to the habit when planning.

Most people (myself included) have a tendency of making "to do lists" that are not lists of action items, but are really lists of small projects. For instance, "Steve's birthday" is not an action item. "Buy gift for Steve, bake cake, pick up card, and invite .... for dinner on Steve's birthday" are action items. When making lists of things I want to accomplish this month, (your grid of 4) I list projects. Then, for my weekly and daily lists, I make sure the items are individual action items and NOT projects. Projects- even if they are very small with only a couple of action items, (like the birthday) are much easier to skip on a daily basis because they cannot be acted upon without further breaking down."

Determining an actionable next step is vital to having a plan that will work for you, and this was going to be the subject for one of my posts. So lets tackle it now.

The key words here are actionable next step. An actionable next step is the task that can stand alone and has it's own start and finish. It is something that you can go out, get done and mark it off your list. Sue gives a great example of this in her email, but lets look at another example.

In the Boy Scouts we want to make sure that every kid has the opportunity to join a quality Scouting program, so we are frequently working on starting new units. Many times I will see the following action item on a weekly or daily plan:

Start new unit at Franklin Elementary School

This is important but it is not the actionable next step. By having this on the weekly or daily plan it does not provide specific direction to what exactly needs to happen. This item probably has 30 or more actionable next steps that need to happen. So the challenge is this - drill down into non-actionable items on your task list, to find your real tasks that need to be done. By identifying the specific actionable next steps, you can plan an appropriate number of these steps in a logical order into your plan. You will be taking the right action each day that will lead to the completion of the larger project, and you will have a lot more fun marking off each item that you have completed towards the larger goal.

What are some actionable next steps for starting this unit? If this were going to be on my to do list I would start with some of these.

• Set appointment to meet with school principal
• Meet with school principal to discuss Scouting
• Select date for recruiting night
• Order flyers and invitations for recruiting night
• Deliver flyers and invitations for recruiting night to school
• Make arrangements for in-school presentation to kids
• Order in-school stickers.
• Hang posters at school
  

This is just a start but it gives you the idea. Remember that you do not have to get all these items done today or even this week. Just make sure that you have captured the actionable steps that need to be taken and begin working them into your schedule.

Too many times we do not break the item down far enough for us to take action, the result is inaction and nothing gets done. Why is this? I think that this happens in part because we do not want our to do list to "get to big". We feel that if we write down everything that we have to do, the list will be overwhelming, not to mention that it will take us a lot longer to write all that down.

I encourage everyone to think about what is the actionable next step I can take as you are doing your planning. Take joy in knowing that you have the plan in place. Take joy in marking off each item as you complete it. Most importantly, take joy that you are reaching your Peak Achievement through strong planning.