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The Art Of Planning: Making Before Taking The Plunge

Planning

In a time where most things are becoming quicker to do, to achieve and to receive, many people feel that the internet holds all the answers and can help take your life from the dark ages into a new age of instant gratification.

If you think that what I just said does not hold true, do a quick search for “make quick money” on our favourite search engine and take a quick peak at those 60 million results.

As you can see, some false hope has been sprayed around and people are beginning to think that the internet is the next gateway to 24 hour riches.

Whilst the aim of this post isn’t to slander every single Get Rich Quick Scheme out there, I wanted to focus on a method that could actually help you to develop not only income, but success, branding, marketing, content creation much more quickly than before (but still not overnight either).

And I think you’ve heard this buzzword before. The name of the game is planning.

What Are The Benefits Of Planning?

Some talented individuals always make plans before starting anything new including a new website or internet business or before doing something as simple (or not) as a WordPress upgrade. These people make sure they know every single step in detail before actually undertaking the project, even though this might cost them 5-10 minutes of their time.

For those skeptics who never plan, here’s a few reasons why you should:

  • The human memory isn’t bulletproof. I often forget things half-way through a task and try and rack my brains to search for the thing I was thinking about. By writing or typing a plan, you make sure that you don’t leave out an important part of the procedure, which could end up costing you more time in the longrun.
  • Allow ideas to brew. This point is especially useful in content creation. By jotting down a plan of your next blog post, you can let your ideas brew, and don’t have the pressure of trying to write a post on the spur of the moment, something that guarantees a lack of quality.
  • Be more productive. Whilst planning takes up some of the precious “action time”, in the longrun, it can actually help you to organize your activities and to make sure you perform the most useful activites whilst you’re in the groove. Leo Babauta always mentions making a plan before undertaking any task, so you should too.

How Do I Make My Plan?

Once you’ve decided that planning really is necessary before you take the plunge, then the next step would be to decide how you are going to make that plan. In the world today, there are 2 places where you can write down pre-thoughts; on a screen or on a piece of paper.

It’s up to you which one you use, I myself personally prefer jotting things down in my roughbook (which you’ll be able to see below). The advantages of doing this, is that you get to step away from the screen a bit (which in turn uses less power), but at the same time, you’re using paper. So from an environmental perspective, you’re doomed both ways. Find out whichever one works for you – experiment a little.

Make A Plan

Once you’ve decided upon the medium, it’s time to decide upon the method. Here are a few methods that I’ve used in the past:

  • 1. Spider Diagrams – the picture you can see above is of a plan for an upcoming guest post on a Top 10 blog. This method was great, as it allowed me to link factors together, to continually add on top of the ideas I had already formed for the post, and it inevitably led me to realize that I could put together a great series, instead of a single post.
  • 2. The Simple List – ideal for planning events or continuous steps (again great for WordPress Upgrades). Planning this will help you get rid of uncertainty and will make sure you carry out the task in the quickest time possible. This technique is great also for creating social media linkbait.
  • 3. Flowcharts – again a flowchart can be awesome for planning an event or for detailing your workday. These can also be more visually attractive, helping to detract from that boring, planning experience.

Again, I’ve only detailed a few pieces of opinion here, but the key here is to continually trial and improve upon your planning techniques.

Once you’ve mastered the art of planning, not only will your productivity shoot up, but you’ll be left with more time to focus on aspects of your website, blog or company that are lagging behind and which are causing you to lose potential gains. Patching up these leaks will guide you to success; sooner rather than later.

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