From Episodes 87 and 88 of The Complete Leader Podcast
Setting a goal can be inspirational and motivational all on its own, but if you do not convert that goal into an organized plan with detail, it might as well just be wishful thinking.
However, planning and organizing around your goals and priorities does not come easily for everyone—I have personally been working on developing this competency little by little for decades. It’s all about giving detail and specificity to what you are going to do and creating a blueprint to help you increase the likelihood of success.
By slowing down and recognizing how planning and organizing will specifically benefit you, you’ll soon find you can easily utilize this crucial leadership skill in many aspects of your work and life.
Start by taking the time to think about what you want to do, the steps to achieve that goal and how to organize those steps in a way that will most likely lead you to success. In slowing down, you’ll have more clarity to see the best path forward. It may even help to begin one day at a time. At the end of each day, consider what you can do tomorrow to move closer to your goal.
This activity will also help you prioritize what’s most important. You can easily get overwhelmed when you see a long list of things to do each day. Instead, write down only the five most important things to do. As your abilities grow, you can begin to connect the five things you need to do tomorrow to the five most important things to do next week, next month and next quarter.
Another way to consider prioritizing and organizing your goals is to group them by the different roles in your life—leader, author, coach, partner, parent, sibling, etc. This exercise will help you expand your thinking and determine how to use planning and organizing around your different roles and priorities.
As you slow down and prioritize around your goals and projects, you’ll realize there are several distinct benefits of utilizing this skill:
- The quality of what you do—how you create value—will increase. As a leader, those who you lead are like your customers. So, as you grow your planning and organizing skills, you’ll be able to create more and better value for them.
- You will better deliver that value at the right time. Delivering value too soon or too late significantly decreases its impact.
- You’ll become more efficient in creating and delivering value. You’ll be able to use the right amount of resources to achieve what you hope to without wasting time, energy, focus or funding.
- You will elevate the results of your learning. If you have a strategic learning plan, or an intentional and detailed idea of what you want to learn, how often you will spend on it and what you are going to read, watch or listen to, the results of your learning will grow exponentially.
- Each of your relationships—with colleagues, family members, peers, romantic partners or otherwise—will become richer and more productive. With planning and organizing, you can be more intentional as your relationships change over the years.
- You will more easily be able to filter out the noise and focus on your priorities. Planning and organizing helps you become more intentional and purposeful in the way that you expend your energy and focus.
In a way, you can say planning and organizing is all about slowing down so that you can speed up. You’ll actually get where you want to go faster because you have a plan. And, for those who struggle with planning and organizing, it is important to remember to bring in other successful planners and organizers and to create the building blocks to help you get just a bit better each time you exercise this skill.
Remember, becoming better at planning and organizing is a journey, not a destination. Simply see how you can improve slightly each time you work on this ability and do not worry about being perfect. Even a 10% improvement will exercise this skill and get you closer to reaching your goals.
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