Make A Personal Action Plan And Become Well Organized
To become one hundred percent in control of your life, you must become well organized. Perhaps you are familiar with the idea of ‘to-do lists’. Perhaps you have tried to make some yourself, but without having success with it. I am going to add some knowledge to the thought of ‘to-do lists’ and you will become the master in your life by becoming more organized.
First of all – not a bad word about ‘to-do lists’. The idea of having a list with all the activities you have to in a day is perfectly fine. Now, the problem with most is that they are told to make a list and the information ends here. What most of us is doing wrong is that our lists are not planned and focused action lists. Instead of a ‘to-do list’ you have to create a personal action plan, which I will get more into in this article.
What is important is that you are specific. Remember that! An item on your list should not be “get started with cleaning the house”. In this sentence there is no specific action. In this case you must go down in details and you should write something like “clean all the windows” or “wash the floors in the bathroom, the hall and the children’s rooms”. See the different? You are now being more specific and there is actually some real action attached to the item on the list.
What is important to see is that, if you have lots of small, specific and quickly done items on your list, you will fail to make any progress in your big items, such as painting your house, making a beautiful garden or running a marathon. You have to have a personal action plan to have any chance of ever getting them done. E.g. when you want to run a marathon you must make a training plan, where you specifically write down what you must do to get there. How many times a week are you going to train? How hard and how long? Get the picture?
So, what I am saying is, turn your ‘to-do list’ into a personal action plan. Below here is a list of what to do in order to become well organized.
1. Write everything down. Your personal action plan must include everything that you must or want to do at some time or another – not just the things that are urgent. Everything! Many things might not even seem that important and some things might seem too small. You have to write everything down; whether it is personal or professional. Everything that needs action from you in order to be completed must be on your personal action plan.
2. Now you must take a good look at all the items on your list, one at a time. Ask yourself whether you should take action with every single item. Does it really have any relevance to you? The things that you can answer ‘no’ to must be deleted from your personal action plan.
3. Now the organization comes into the picture. You have to prioritize every item on your list. The way to this is to first put every item into smaller groups. The names of groups could be “At work”, “Physical training”, “Home improvements” etc. After having done this you need to take a look at each item’s importance, and categorize them A, B, C, D, E, F… A being the most important.
To support this personal action plan you must add time frames, and be careful! These time frames must be realistic. We tend to set unrealistic time frames that we cannot live up to, and this causes to failure. But if you are realistic and you turn your ‘to-do list’ into a personal action plan you will experience big improvements in several parts of your life, such as your health, your house, work or other categories in your life that you wish to improve. Just remember that all it takes is action, and the moment you have become well organized and created your personal action plan, I promise you that you will be more in control of your life.
Filed under: Time Management
