The Impact of Planning Each Day

Posted on February 02, 2023 by Braden Ross, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.

NOTE: This is an except from my eBook, “Seven Steps to Dominate Every Day,” that will be available later this year. I hope you enjoy reading, and I will let you know when the full book is ready!

It’s hard to remember what life was like before GPS. Most of us have Google or Apple Maps on our smartphones, which makes it easy to navigate from place to place even when we’re in a new city. When I was a kid, my parents would print out directions from MapQuest or Yahoo Maps before road trips. They didn’t want to get lost along the way, so they made sure they had step-by-step plans to get where they wanted to go.

Most of us understand the importance of having a plan for how we will travel to a new location, but we often underestimate the importance of approaching each day with a well-thought-out plan. We may have some idea of where we want to end up, but we don’t think about the steps that it will take to get there. This is like running a race without a finish line. You don’t know where you’re trying to end up, so you simply run until you get tired or bored.

Planning your day helps you identify what your most important tasks should be. Once you get clear on what you need to do, you’re one step closer to doing it. In “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” Stephen Covey writes about the importance of beginning with the end in mind. This allows each person to determine what success looks like and identify what checkpoints or goals they hope to achieve before the day is over.

Brene Brown’s “painting done” concept has been incredibly helpful for me in this regard. She explains this idea in greater detail in her book “Atlas of the Heart.” Brown talks about how she and her team have instituted a process of “painting a task done” before beginning the work. If she asks a team member to compile a report for her, the team member will respond by asking for more details on what the completed task should look like. This helps them understand what boxes the finished product needs to check.

This is an incredibly helpful tool to implement into everyday life. We all have expectations – whether we acknowledge them or not. Part of setting yourself on track to accomplish your most important tasks every day is naming your expectations so that you recognize that they exist. Our strongest expectations are often the ones that are so deeply embedded that we don’t even recognize that they exist. When you implement this concept into the planning of each day, you can identify your expectations for what the day will look like while planning out where you want to put your focus and how you want to spend your time.

Every day I set three goals for myself. I write them down in my notebook and I track how many of my daily goals I meet each day. These three goals represent the most important tasks or accomplishments I hope to complete before the day ends. I think to myself, if I could only finish three things tomorrow, what three things would I choose? Some days the three goals are obvious. Some days I have five or six things that I need to work on, but I still limit myself to three goals. Everything else goes onto a to-do list. I like to keep things lean so I’m not tempted to focus on too many things at one time.

The ideal system may be different for you. Maybe three goals is too many, and you choose to focus on just one. Perhaps the thought of only doing three things daily is too limiting or restrictive. The exact number doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you’re thinking critically about what you want to accomplish each day and how you plan to spend your time.

Will every day be perfect? Absolutely not. Sometimes you’ll have to abandon your plans or postpone your goals because you have a sick child who needs to go to the doctor. This doesn’t mean that you will never get it done. It only means you’ll have to get back to work once you take care of the more urgent matter.

You have some flexibility in terms of when you choose your goals. I like to make my daily goals the night before so that I can wake up and hit the ground running. Sometimes my daily goals involve my morning workout, and I’m often tempted to avoid those goals if I set them first thing in the morning. It’s easier to lock in future action if I set the goal the night before. That’s another thing I love about setting daily goals. They are a commitment device that helps me lock in hard tasks that I don’t always want to do.

The ideal plan will be different for each person, but everyone can benefit from developing a plan and putting it into action. Creating plans ahead of time will help you maximize your time by determining the steps you must take to be successful. You’ll also eliminate any obstacles to putting your plan in motion, which increases the likelihood that you’ll see the results that you desire.

Application Questions

1. How do you decide how to spend your time each day?

2. How would a daily plan benefit you?

3. What will you do this week to plan better and prepare for each day?