Why It’s Necessary To Have A Plan & Stick To It

Why Planning is Important?

Running around aimlessly and getting pulled in different directions isn’t the way to run a business. Trust me, I tried.

I had about 1,007 ideas and I wanted to do all of them. The main issue I had was they were all vastly different and would take a lot of time and commitment. Cue idea overload, never knowing where to start or what direction to run in and basically getting nowhere.

I finally decided that if I wanted to be successful (which I do) and I want to live a fulfilled life (heck yeah!), then I had to make a plan.

Are you working a 9-5?

I’m guessing at some point you have. And I’m sure your employer had set goals for you to reach, projects for you to complete and called you in their office every once in a while to chat about how you were doing. Since they were giving you a nice paycheck each week, you worked your bootay off to reach those goals.

So tell me, if you’re so willing to sit down and make a plan to reach goals for someone else’s business and follow someone else’s plan, why wouldn’t you do that for your own business?

I had a little truth with myself and realized this:

I was afraid to fail at my day job.

I wanted the approval of my boss and wanted him to know how hard I worked. I wanted to excel because it paid payed my bills, it was a stable position and no one ever wants to go in their boss’ office and say “nope I didn’t do what I was supposed to”.

Read – Project management

Being an entrepreneur is tough. The only person you have to report back to is yourself. You aren’t going to fire yourself for missing your last 3 deadlines or not starting your latest course that you had planned to launch like, yesterday. But when your job and income is at stake, you make sure you schedule time to work on each task and make every deadline.

If you want your business to be everything you dream it could be, you need to run it like a business. You need to have a plan.

Make goals.

Set deadlines.

Write it down.

Have a brainstorming session with you and your team, if you have one, and set goals for your business. What do you want to accomplish in the next month? the next quarter? the next year? Write it all down.

Get all of your ideas on paper so you have the whole picture in front of you. This will help you figure out the best order to accomplish each task, when products should launch and what you need to do leading up to your deadlines.

I personally struggled with having big goals but never setting a deadline. So I’d push it off. And off. Until finally it’s a few months down the road and I have a word doc with a few sentences on it. No bueno.

Look at your goals, start thinking of how you can accomplish them. Then write it down on your calendar. If one of your goals is to increase traffic to your website by producing weekly content, write down each week when that content is going to be posted and set aside time in your calendar to make sure you aren’t trying to bang out a post at 11am on Monday when you told your subscribers to expect it by noon.
I want you to listen really closely to what I’m about to say. No, I’m serious:

Write it down!

It’s not much of a secret but you’d be surprised how effective it can be. Writing your deadlines down and scheduling time to reach your goals will keep you on track.