Rise and Shine

Rate your planning, organising skill

Some people say that the world belongs to those that are organised and plan well their time.

Are you one of them? If you are one of them, then this article will help you benchmark yourself against some of the best practices in planning and organising your time and work.

If you are not, then this article is a good starting point that can have a lasting change on the fortunes of your life going forward. You will be surprised to see yourself as successful as those people you used to admire and you estimated as much better than you when in fact, they are not.

They are simply better and planning and organising their time and work—a skill that you can easily learn even by teaching yourself and observing those that are good at this game.

I have spent a lot of time since I was a teenager or even younger, trying to understand how I can perfect my time management, planning and organising my work and time. Over the time, I have usually seen increasing ability at controlling this area with occasional lapses sometimes. Even during the periods when my organising and planning skills were not up to scratch, I could feel a big dip in my output and the amount of impact I had in my life and on people around me.

Working from first principles, we need to recognise that time is a none-renewable resource. Once time has lapsed, you will not bring it back. You may swap it with time that was meant for something else, but you will not recreate the lost time.

Time is one of the free gifts that God gave us all. You may argue that some have more and others less time. But from the starting position, we do not know who will have more time or not. We basically have to make the best of the available time at all times.

It is only by being good at planning and organising your time and work that you can optimally use the time God gave you. When you become good at planning and organising your time and work, you will do far more than you did in the past.

In fact, you will be able to cover far more ground than your peers. This means that in business, you will be ahead of your competitors. At the work place too, this means that you will likely be the first one to be promoted and you are likely to enjoy a far rising career, all other factors equal.

And that is why the starting point is to rate your skill level in the area of planning and organising your time and work. The basics of this are very simple. At the start of the year, do you plan the big things that you want to achieve in that year?

At the start of every month, do you have an idea of the major actions you will push on a daily basis in that month? At the start of the week, do you plan your actions for the week ahead? What about at the start or close of the day, do you make and review your plan for the day?

If most of your answers to the above questions are yes, then you are on a good footing for planning your time and work. If you had several answers as ‘no’—then clearly you have a problem that you need to solve now so that you can truly unleash your potential.

Planning and organising your time and work go hand in hand. How do you organise your work? Do you just do actions as they come to your mind? The better organised people are those that methodically choose the things that they want to do first. This depends on sequencing but also the expected impact and likelihood of success arising from those actions.

Basically, we all need to start with actions that cannot wait. Secondly, we need to implement the actions that with little effort have huge positive impact and so on. All the best as you reflect on how good you are with planning and organising your time and work!

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