A Goal Without a Plan is Just a Wish
While riding a Matt Wilpers Power Zone ride, Matt said “a goal without a plan is a wish” a quote from Le Petit Prince, a book I somehow read in French in high school even though I could only say l’ordinateur and mon chat. I struck Project Manager gold hearing these words and spent time sitting with them untangle their meaning.
When I hear a realistic wish, I immediately want to turn that wish into a goal with a plan. If you say “it would be so cool if we could get a celebrity speaker for the event” - I am going to send you a list of agencies that book speakers, throw some budget ranges at you and start peppering you with questions on what type of celebrity you are looking for. If you say “I wish we could stay in Australia just one more day” - I might start looking up flight change fees. If you say “ I wish I could retire now and live a life of leisure…” well, that might be a wish that stays in dreamland.
For wishes that we really do hope come true, the blocker is often the planning. Not everyone is a planner, right? I would argue that everyone is a planner - just not necessarily a good planner. What every planner faces is the challenge of the first steps of the plan. What do you do first? Either you have no idea what to do first or you have several ideas of what you could do first but don’t know where to begin.
Here are some tips for non-planners to start planning!
Make the Biggest To-Do List Ever
Grab that google document or adorable notebook and do a brain dump of every single thing you could possible have to do this month. Even I, Asana enthusiast and ultimate planner, started today with a brain dump because my mind was overwhelmed!
While making your list, be SUPER specific and HYPER granular. Turn "buy spring clothes" into "buy 2 skirts, 3 shirts, and more Keds chillax sneakers." Turn "plan spring campaign" into "set up kickoff meeting, research out of home placements, and find designer and copywriter."
By having a visual of all of your potential to-dos, you are taking the first steps to building a plan.
Group Together Like Items
Start grouping together similar items on your to-do list. Do you have a lot of bullets related to taxes, investments, and budgeting? Looks like you have a finance category! Is your spring shopping next to your spring cleaning, next to your need to research kids camps for the summer? Looks like you have a seasonal prep category!
By grouping together like items, you are taking that biggest to-do list ever and adding a little bit more organization.
Define Your Priorities
The challenge with finding a place to start is that we have so much on our plates! We bounce from one to-do to another without even taking the time to decide if there is anything we shouldn't do at all.
Look at your groupings of like items. What buckets of work can you tackle in the next quarter, and what buckets are most important to tackle? These become your priorities. Everything else should be delegated or deferred.
Build Out Your Plans
Now that you have your top priority buckets of work, you've made a ton of progress in figuring out where to begin. You've pushed off lower priority projects and made space for what you want to work on now.
I could give a day long workshop on how to build out a project plan, with due dates, dependencies, stakeholder matrixes and gantt charts galore! But planning doesn't always have to be so complicated.
You have your top priorities with a list of action times underneath each one. Now, take that list of action items and put them in some sort of order, your best guess at what should be done earlier on, towards the middle, and at the end.
Let's say you are planning a vacation for the summer. Your list might look like:
Figure out when to go
Find a place to go
Book hotel
Book flights
Research activities
Make dinner reservations
Get dog sitter
Pack
This list is a great start! Bravo. Now, you might be struggling with the first two bullets - do you figure out when, and then look at places, or do you pick a place and figure out the best time to go to that place? The answer - it doesn't matter. You can do these two tasks simultaneously. Think of a few places you might want to go, like Mexico City, Hawaii, Seattle, or Iceland. Now narrow down when you think might go, like the 2nd week of July or the last week of August. Great - now match up the places you want to go with the times you want to go - any weather or pricing callouts?
To Begin, Begin
The struggle of the non-planner is often in the beginning, the what, when, where and how to begin any new stream of work. By spending some time to understand the buffet of work you need to do, you can decide what goes on your plate, what goes in tupperware and what you would prefer never to touch. Now, it is time to start eating!
