Plan To Reach Your Goals
 

By Saleem Rana

Why plan when you can skip it and immediately get going on the first thing that comes to mind?  Then when you're done, just choose the next thing that needs to get done.

The only flaw with this way of handling life is that when you look back on what you did, you find that you spent a lot of time making unimportant things important and that you did almost everything with the maximum inefficiency.  Not only did it take much longer, but it also cost almost twice as much.

The best way to fail to get much of anything done is to just leap into action without a plan.

A plan has one major benefit to it:  it will get you to your goal.  You will start attaining life goals, fitness goals, and professional goals.  Even family goals and social goals have a way of coming together with just a little planning.

Short-term plans have a way of organizing priorities and arranging the best use of your time.

Of course, if the plan is long-range, you will find that you probably did very little of what you had scheduled in for yourself.  Still, you will have reached your goal, discovering along the way new methods of arriving at your destination, methods you did not know about when you first made your plan.

Plans move you in the direction that you want to go.  And without them, you travel in almost every direction except the one that you want to reach.

How do you plan?  You choose your goal and divide it into sub-goals.  You, then, break the sub-goals into time slots.

Your chances of completing any given goal or task increases tremendously with planning.

Plans offer us structure, give us direction, and help us budget our time and effort.  They introduce all possible variables and allow us to adjust to new information as it comes in.

Things do happen without a plan, but not very well, and often enough they fall apart because of lack of forethought.

A plan also offers another benefit: it allows you to get better at making plans.  You learn from your experiences. 

Planning is a little like cooking a meal.  Yes, you can throw a meal together quickly, but if you really want it to be truly excellent, it pays to read through a recipe and get everything together before you start.  Not only is the whole process smoother, but you will end up with a better meal.