The importance of HAVING A PLAN for each and every day you own a business

Ben Franklin once said… “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”.

If you give it some thought for just a moment you’ll realize just how much sense it makes.

Not having a plan leads to failure, that sure makes sense to me. Anyway… you could interpret that in a million different ways. For today’s purposes we will talk about “waking up with a plan for the day”. I’ve talked about this before, and I thought revisiting the topic is a good idea.

Studies have shown that having some type of list of what needs to be done in a given day make a person more productive. Now you could argue that productive people tend to be prone to creating some plan for the next day, and that may be true, but I can tell you from my experience that having a written plan for the next day has helped me out in a huge way.

For the vast majority of my life I’ve flown by the seat of my pants. I scribble notes from time to time but most of my to-do list was always stored in my head. Everything pretty much always got done, but I wasn’t always the most efficient at it. I usually pinned the blamed for this problem on my DNA, and figured there wasn’t much I could do about it.

But when my cleaning business started to take off, my “fly by the seats of my pants attitude” began to bite me in butt. This was because it was just too much information for me to process. While I love the challenge of getting everything done, I was falling behind.

This falling behind lead to mistakes. And mistakes to me were always the enemy. I like to be the guy who plays it smart and wins in the end, but when my mistakes were piling up this became harder to accomplish. I would forget meetings, what supplies needed to be purchased, promises I had made among other key details.

It was about that time I decided to start making a list of what I needed to do the next day THE NIGHT BEFORE. That last part is KEY… “the night before”. The rule was I could not go to bed UNTIL I had a rough outline of how my day would unfold.

I was very committed to this, mainly because I knew my success was riding on it. I knew that if I didn’t change my behavior, growing the business any larger would amount to a pipe dream. If I could barely keep my head above water now, how could I possibly grow the business and my bank account. There was no way.

To make a long story short, once I started PLANNING MY DAY the impact was immediate. I was suddenly much more productive. The hidden benefit I never counted on was the fact that I was less stressed out. I was getting more done, in less time PLUS I was ridding myself of the stress buildup that was occurring in my life.

You may know what I’m talking about here, but back then I always had the feeling that something wasn’t getting done. It would just bother me as I wondered if I missed something. I don’t have that anymore, and I’m very happy as a result. I’ll wrap this up by making mention once more that my goal for you is to work at improving your planning skills.

If you stink, follow my lead. If you are already good, work at making them better. I know someone who actually has his ENTIRE DAY laid out in 15 minutes intervals, even his days off. It goes without saying that this person is one of the most productive people I’ve ever known, and one of the most successful to boot.