March Or Die!!

A few days ago I referred to ‘some Englishman’ and the long and winding road. Which got me thinking about “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans”, a notion I’ve become hatefully familiar with as time’s gone by. But I still think making plans is worthwhile. How would you know when they’ve gone wrong if you’d never made them in the first place!?!

So, here’s a look at making plans…

Start by setting long, mid and short range goals (in that order) for whatever it is you want to do, based on how long you expect it to take and what’s involved. Make sure they’re written out and as detailed as they need to be where the steps are concerned.

You might want to allow for the likelihood that everything will take twice as long and cost twice as much as you ‘expected’, but I don’t want to burst your bubble if you haven’t experienced that yet.

Next, get a day planner and write down everything you have to do through a given phase of your project, let’s say one week at a time. Then, make note of each thing you DO get done throughout that week…cross it off, put a star beside it, whatever.

I’m bad at this, never owned one in my life. But everybody says you should, so… there you go. I prefer the ‘sheet of paper on the coffee table’ technique myself. Just make sure you keep track of what you’re doing.

Include anything you have to buy in here too; supplies, how-to books/audios/videos, classes, software… whatever. Make note of what it is, what it costs and when you can buy it and then STICK to that. You don’t want to have to postpone a step because you blew your budget on unnecessary stuff. Trust me on that one!!

The most important thing you’ll need to do is learn to avoid distractions, and in some cases how to say no to them. Ya, it sucks doing serious stuff when your friends are off having fun, but it’ll be worth it when they’re riding in the back of your new car!

Remember to reward yourself as you go, enjoy the learning process and know (waaay deep down) that you WILL get it done.

This entry was posted on November 18, 2008 at 4:55 pm and is filed under Your Daily Life with tags making plans, setting goals, success. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.