Focused Business Action

Here’s an effective process when you are struggling with a large project (it’ll work with small ones, too). It will help you to create a plan with milestones that are steps towards achieving your goal. What’s different about this process is that you start off picturing yourself having already achieved your goal and work backwards to identify each step you need to take along the way.

To prepare, get a piece of paper, draw a table with 3 columns and label the columns date, steps, and notes.

Now, sit back, close your eyes and picture yourself on your target date having achieved your goal. Give yourself some time with this, at least 5-10 minutes. The more time you spend here, the more details will pop out that you can add to your plan.

When you have a thorough picture, on the top line write down the target date by which you want to achieve your goal (open your eyes first). Then, write in your goal. Use the Notes column to remember related items that come to you.

Next, work backwards in time to determine what actions need to happen in the preceding months in order for you to achieve your goal. If it helps, you can choose monthly, quarterly or other appropriate milestones. Put everything down that comes to you. Do this until you get back to the present or until you can’t think of anything else. The example here would actually include many more steps.

Now that you have the whole plan written out, it’s time to look at the next 90 days. Begin the same table on another piece of paper and break your action plan down even further, working backwards and focusing only on the next 90 days. What actions will you take in the next 90 days to achieve your goal? These might be some of the items on your current plan or sub-steps of those milestones. Again, if it helps, you can choose monthly, weekly or other appropriate milestones. Write down everything you want to do in the next 90 days in order to achieve your goal.

Use the same process to look at the steps that you want to accomplish in the next month. Beak these down, if necessary.

Lastly, transfer the action steps for the next week onto your Daily To Do list.

Actually, the last thing I should tell you to do is GO DO IT.

One thing to note: you will most likely end up revising your plan over time as new steps come to light. Think of this as a first draft that you can change if you find you need to as you work your plan.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 by Scott Lewis and is filed under FBA Program, Internal Action. You can follow the comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment or trackback from your own site.