Planning: The Keys To Achieving Your Goals

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A clear plan of action with effective implementation takes us from an idea to a completed project. Planning assures that each part of a project receives proper attention.

• Understand your project thoroughly
• Know your resources, both human and material
• Be flexible in order to make changes
• Be proactive
• Schedule based on the needs of the project and your own abilities

Time management

Time management is critical to the achievement of any/all goals. Actually, if you can’t master this, you absolutely won’t be as successful as you could be, no matter how good you are at anything else. Time management should be done every day with your focus on taking care of your important and urgent tasks and minimizing or delegating time-sapping tasks.

An excellent management tool for time management is to create a daily action plan where you write down all of your objectives for each day, in order of priority.

Here are some time-saving tips to help you work more efficiently and effectively:

• Take on less
• Learn to say “no”
• Delegate
• Eliminate unnecessary meetings
• Don’t take on issues others should be doing
• Don’t get bogged down with details except when it’s necessary to do so
• Make and meet deadlines
• Tackle tasks as soon as you can and when you are most alert
• Make deadlines for others who tend to procrastinate
• Keep communications short and to the point
• Make phone calls when they will save time
• Make a plan and stick to it
• Be realistic
• Plan anything that will take some time: phone calls, written communication, meetings
• Take breaks as they revive you
• Set priorities
• Finish what you start each day

Effective delegation

If your goals are business in nature, you must learn how to effectively delegate certain tasks so that you don’t become a bottleneck for growth. The thing you must decide first is which things to delegate and which things to keep for yourself. To answer that question, you must thoroughly understand the project and its demands.

To help you do this:

• Set the objectives for the task
• Decide on the standards you require
• Determine the best people for the tasks and how much training they will need
• Establish realistic deadlines
• Set up review points to analyze the progress.

The best things to delegate include routine matters and tasks requiring special knowledge you don’t have. While it’s best do things that you need to do personally, things that are considered emergency tasks, tasks that may have serious repercussions when not executed properly and those that are exceptions to the normal method of doing things.

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Handling stress

We all have stress, and if we’re not careful, it can kill us. More and more studies are showing that stress is a component in many major diseases. If we don’t handle our stress, it can also cause problems in our business.

Stress comes from four sources called stressors:

• Situational stressors come from our situation, our environment, and our culture. Work would be one of these, as well as unexpected situations, bad news, change, and noise.
• Major life events such as marriage, death, divorce, birth, ill health, or financial problems.
• Other people can be stressors if they have unreal demands or expectations.
• Internal stressors like perfectionism, feelings of inadequacy, or unmet needs can be the biggest stressors of the four.

Learning to handle stress can make you healthier and happier, and it can certainly help you to run your business more efficiently. The first step is identifying when you are feeling stressed. Here are the questions to ask yourself at that time:

• What’s causing this stress?
• When does it happen?
• What exactly am I feeling now?
• Why am I reacting this way?
• What can I do to reduce my feelings of stress in this particular situation?

Here are some coping behaviors to help you handle stress:

• Accept your stressful feelings. They are valuable because they tell you that something is wrong that you need to pay attention to.
• Practice coping skills like saying “no”, taking initiative, developing a sense of personal power, and taking responsibility.
• Establish a supportive network of people who are interested in your well-being.
• Build a healthy lifestyle which combines good nutrition, exercise, relaxation, non-smoking, and moderate alcohol and caffeine.
• Realize that there are some things that you can’t control and let them go.

Maintaining high self-esteem

Self-esteem is essential to resilience. It allows us to believe we can withstand all the problems of life. It definitely assists us in running our business efficiently. There are two types of self-esteem: internal and external. Internal comes from inside you: it’s what you think of yourself. External comes from what others think of you. It’s not very reliable since what others think of you can change.

As your efficiency in all areas of your life grows, so will your self-esteem. In addition, there are strategies to help you increase your internal self-esteem:

• Take initiative
• Develop motivation and willpower
• Take risks
• Give yourself “me” time
• Challenge your negative thoughts
• Be assertive
• Celebrate your improvements