Principal #2 Create an Action Plan
It's Day 2 of Principles of Personal Achievement and we have arrived at creating an action plan.
If you haven't seen principal #1 yet make sure to check that out first here before reading this post!
Very important ;)
#2 Create Action Plan
You have so many things you need to do every day. Life is busy. Life is fast. I know.
We know about a lot of what we have to do each day before the day starts. There’s also a lot that we don’t know has to be done. And, wedon’t know what hurdles are going to pop up each day.
Hurdles are prevalent in everyone’s life, but they’re especially prevalentfor people that are chasing their dreams or working to achieve big goals.
Things happen. Life isn’t particularly easy.
While you can’t plan for anything you don’t know and it would behard to plan for everything you do know, it’s still possible to do a lot ofplanning. I recommend that you plan well.
Quick question for you... Can you execute a plan without a plan?
If you answered yes, I’m sorry to tell you, but you’re wrong. The answer is no.
You can’t execute a plan without a plan. To your credit, you might have thought that was a trick question. Fair.
But, it’s pretty straight forward...you can’t execute a plan if you don’thave a plan to execute. The good news is that if you have a plan, you can execute that plan.
You can get lucky and achieve some success without a plan. Many people have done so before.
In all reality though, your chances of achieving success without a plan are much smaller than your chances of achieving success with a plan.
By having a plan, you have a road map showing you and reminding you of what exactly you need to do to achieve your goals.
You can refer back to that plan every month, every week, every day or even every hour.
I recommend that you create several action plans. To put it simply, you should have a big picture action plan and many smaller action plans.
The big picture action plan is your plan that outlines the main tasks you need to complete in order to achieve your ultimate goals.
The smaller action plans are the plans that outline all the broken down tasks you need to complete in order to achieve your goals.
Let me give you an example so that you better understand what I mean by a “big picture action plan” and the “smaller action plans”.
Let’s say that the current goal you have is to graduate college.
Your big picture plan would look something like this...
Freshman Year Semester 1 - Pass all of my classes.
Freshman Year Semester 2 - Pass all of my classes.
Sophomore Year Semester 1 - Pass all of my classes.
Sophomore Year Semester 2 - Pass all of my classes.
Junior Year Semester 1 - Pass all of my classes.
Junior Year Semester 2 - Pass all of my classes.
Senior Year Semester 1 - Pass all of my classes.
Senior Year Semester 2 - Pass all of my classes.
GRADUATION
That’s just one way it could look. You could put more details than that and it would still be a “big picture action plan”, but essentially the bigpicture action plan is to write down the general things you need to do in order to get to reach your ultimate goal.
Your smaller action plans would look something like this...
Month (April) History Class - Get a ‘C+’ or higher on 2 tests and 1 quiz.
Science Class - Get a ‘C+’ or higher on 1 test and 2 projects.
Math Class - Get a ‘C+’ or higher on 2 tests and 4 quizzes.
You see how the action plan is more detailed?
Then, you could make even smaller action plans, like the following.
History Class - 2 tests and 1 quiz
Test #1 - Study Monday, Wednesday and Thursday.
Test #2 - Study at least 5 days over the next week and a half. Quiz #1 - Study next Tuesday and Wednesday.
Then you could break down the ‘Science Class’ and ‘Math Class’. Andyou could break those down even further all the way down the hour or even the minute as to all the things you would need to do broken down in detail with info on when you need tasks completed.
Tomorrow we'll be exploring #3 principal of personal achievement
Finding Your Fellow Mastermind.
Stay tuned ! :)
Recent Comments
1
I plan to eventually have a plan! I tend to take one day at a time and try to live it to the fullest! A great post, nonetheless!
Jeff