One of the most successful investors of our time, Ray Dalio, once said, recognize that it doesn’t take a lot of time to design a good plan.
Way too often we’re just winging it out there and that kills our productivity and, as importantly, it wastes our time. You need a personal plan, a business plan, a day plan, a trip plan. It takes just 10 minutes in some cases to build a plan. All you’ve got to do is write down some bullet points of what you’ve got to do or what you’re going to do or need to do to get something accomplished. I wrote a whole book on how to write a business plan in 11 slides. Now, that’s not going to take you 10 minutes, but the tagline of that book is, so easy you can do it on a flight from San Francisco to New York.
Imagine that.
You could write a business plan that could make you millions of dollars on a single flight. You can buy the book, check it out. I’ll put the information in the show notes. This isn’t a promotion for my book, but it goes to show you that it doesn’t take a super long time to write a good plan. Back in episode 14, we talked about the peanut butter and jelly lesson that I learned in third grade. I encourage you to go back and check that episode.
Cliff notes to it is, if you don’t write the plan, you’re probably not going to make a good peanut butter and jelly sandwich because you’re going to miss a step. there’s a ton of things on the internet that will tell you, Oh, you’ve got to have this day plan.
And turns out that I tried all that.
I spent more time planning than I did working. So now what I do is I just quickly jot down on my reminders app on my Apple phone, which then syncs with my computer. Or sometimes I’ll just write down notes in my good notes app on my iPad. I’ll jot down just three things and then I’ll just put some bullet points underneath that of what my plan is to accomplish that.
Now you’re going to run into situations where you don’t even think you need a plan. Take this podcast as an example. I’ve done hundreds, probably if not a few thousand episodes of podcasts. In my mind, I believe that I know each and every step. But going back to that peanut butter and jelly sandwich lesson that I learned in third grade, I know that that’s not true in my mind, probably going to trick me.
So I have a plan in the form of a checklist that has every single step that it takes for me to come up with an episode, record the episode, edit the episode, post-process the episode, get it uploaded, get all the show notes, and a whole bunch of other steps, which I’m probably forgetting because I’m not reading from the checklist, which is the plan, make sure that I’m going to have a successful episode every time I put one out. And look, don’t take my word for it. A meta-analysis on project planning and success rates done by researchers at Northwestern University found, I quote, the literature points to a strong link between planning and project success. A summary of the available studies shows unexpectedly consistent empirical results for the correlation of planning quality and success.
So there you have it. Do a little bit of planning even if it’s short and bullet pointed and just some short phrases to document each step of what you need to do and you’re going to find yourself more successful which is going to make you more productive.
Your move.
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